A Legend of Chief Jim Charles

A Legend of

 CHIEF JIM CHARLES

as told by

DR. WILL R. BIRD

This extract from the book

OFF TRAIL IN NOVA SCOTIA

 1956

KED-GE LODGE Kedgemakooge, Nova Scotia

Kedge Lodge was owned by my grandfather, Horton Phinney and others, previous to those lands becoming a National Park. The image of Jim Charles came from my digital collection/drf

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, August 2017.

From Milford there was a long stretch of empty road and then we were at Maitland Bridge, a scattered little community where women were working in gardens and few men were in sight. Then we saw a sign pointing to a lesser road on the right leading to Ked-ge. We drove into the forest primeval, then suddenly were at a clearing where cars were parked side by side and a lake shimmered into the distance. Not a sign of life was around except a blue jay that inspected us slyly from a spruce top. We got out and saw a wooden box attached to a post. A telephone was inside and printed instructions said to give three twirls of the handle and the Lodge would answer. We tried the trick and were told that a motor launch would be at the Landing in a short time.

When it came we put our bags on the boat and were happy that the man who came for us was a guide. He slowed his speed and we coasted in near a shore where beavers were at work. One big fellow was getting mud with which to patch his dam and he waddled along on his hind feet, holding the mud against his chest, balanced by his tail. He was so droll that we sat and watched for some time and neither he nor his busy wife paid us the slightest attention. The guide said that usually the beavers only worked after dusk but had become indifferent to visitors and, very likely, had established a new forty-four hour week.

We landed at a small wharf and saw paths leading to the main dining-hall and to various cottages. We were soon at home in one and a squirrel promptly appeared on the doorstep. “This is his cottage”, said the guide. “Each cottage is owned by a squirrel that is on the watch for candy and nuts and if you are kind to them they will eat out of your hand. But you’ll hear fighting for they get in a rage if one happens to step over the line into another’s territory.”

Ked-ge puts a spell over you before the first hour has ended. There is the sheer beauty of the place, the lake like a mirror, the trees, the birds, and the forest stillness. You are away from everything and so cunningly are the cottages sit­uated that each one is quite apart yet within easy reach. Ked-ge is five miles long and four miles wide, contains more than two hundred islands, has four rivers to maintain its water level, and the actual domain of the Lodge comprises more than three hundred acres of a peninsula thrust into the lake. We went out with our guide after lunch and learned that we were in the very heart of the ancient Micmac country, the most storied region in Nova Scotia, near the scene of the great battle with the Mohawks.

Malti Lou was the Micmac chief when there came an exhausted runner to the camp to report that fifty Mohawks were coming by way of Lake Rossignol wearing red and black war paint. The only thing to do, said Malti Lou, was to send the women and children by a back route to a hiding place while the braves led a false trail that would lead to the fort where the soldiers would assist them. The Micmac chief was a great boaster but a coward at heart. Young Jim Charles heard him with scorn and declared he would not run but would go to meet the Mohawks and keep them from sacred Micmac territory. Only eleven of the braves had heart enough to join him in his mad venture and one was Jim’s cousin, Steve, a very strong and brave Indian. They started quickly and found the Mohawks at dark on the banks of Eel Weir, in brush camps with no guard set, so great was the Mohawk contempt for the Micmacs. Jim placed nine of his warriors with muskets primed and ready a short distance from the centre of the camps while he and Steve crept in with knives to attack those in the first shelter.

They got in noiselessly and killed several as they slept then Steve stepped on a dry stick and the others awoke. One fired blindly and shot Steve through the heart but Jim brained two with his tomahawk and escaped as the other Micmacs poured musket fire into the Mohawks who jumped from their shelters to learn what was happening. When the muskets were emptied the Micmacs did not reload but unslung their bows and sent volleys of flint-tipped arrows into the enemy, and the Mohawks fearful of unseen numbers, fled across the river. In the morning twenty other Micmacs who had repented their decision joined Jim, and were accompanied by two white trappers who were friends of the Indians. They crossed the river a distance from the camp and got around far enough to attack the Mohawks from the rear, killing more than half of them and completely routing the rest. Jim killed the Mohawk chief and hung his scalp from his wigwam pole. Three days later the tribe made Jim their chief and he married a pretty girl of the camp.

Some time later a white man came to the Micmacs to sell them rum. Jim ordered him away and during the quarrel the white man struck him. That was insult and Jim killed him as he would a wolf, was outlawed and had a price set on his head. Several tried to collect the money and were always outwitted, then one of the white men who had helped against the Mohawks got him pardoned and Jim outlived three wives. In his later days he discovered gold in his hunting area, told no one of the spot and took out a backload in a caribou skin. With the proceeds he purchased a horse and buggy, a silk hat, long coat, three watches, six clocks and all sorts of finery for his wife, Molly, who had been the waif of a logger and still loved and talked too much. Jim loved to smoke his pipe in his house and hear all six clocks striking the hour. A white man visited the spot and was a guest of the chief until it was found that he was making love with the chief’s daughter. As a punishment, and to warn any future visitors, the chief had the white man’s heel tendons cut and made him virtually a prisoner in a rude camp constructed at Slapfoot Beach. Here the poor fellow spent the rest of his years slapping up and down the beach with his feet out of control, living on fish and scraps the redmen allowed him.

The guide told us that the Slapfoot Trail had been worn so deeply by moccasined feet we would have no trouble following it the four miles along the shore of the lake and through some of the forest. So off we went watching for stakes that mark the route. The first was at Bull Cove, so named because bull moose went there to drink and to battle in the autumn. We found it taken over by a family of beavers who were busy getting a food supply. The next stake was at Honeymoon Cove, a beautiful spot where the Micmacs had a wigwam for honeymooners. A main attraction was a number of sun turtles in many sizes sitting on derelict logs, languid and careless in the warmth. Another stake was at Slapfoot Point where heavy grass and weeds cover the site of the unfortunate white man’s lodge. Another stake marked Old Meadow Road, a haunt of deer and bear. Sure enough, as we walked quietly through a tunnel-like passage under the trees we saw a doe and fawn sauntering across a glade as if they had no thought of danger. Stake 7 was beside the river and we saw a grand spot for trout as well as many deer trails showing where the animals came to drink. Then we were at Mother Cary’s Orchard Indian Burying Grounds, and we learned later that the district was used as a burying ground for centuries, that the Micmacs told first white settlers fearsome stories of pixies and mysterious beings that ruled the region, so it was named Fairy Lake. The stories were told to keep the white man away. Stake 11 was at the Indians Fern Garden. Ferns stood thickly three feet and more in height in masses and we were told that the redmen used them for many purposes.

We got back to our cottage and had a refreshing bath. It’s a sort of Ripley believe-it-or-not to find bathrooms and electricity in that remote forest stillness. Then something tapped at the door. My wife, Ethel, exclaimed in delight and I looked to see a beautiful speckled fawn peering in. It retreated as Ethel went out but she followed it up the path and a cook came from the kitchen and said the animal was probably looking for milk as it had been pampered a few times. So Ethel took a bottle and soon was holding it while the fawn drank earnestly and I got a fine snapshot of the performance. As evening came on the moon was a great yellow lamp among the trees, rising slowly, and then loons began their weird calls. Long after dinner we sat on the cottage verandah listening to the loons and then I heard a faint chanting in odd melody. A woman came along the path from another cottage and I asked her if she heard the music, if someone near us had a radio.

She came up our path. “Don’t ask about it”, she said quietly. “Some evenings it’s so lovely I can hardly bear it, but if you mention it no one will believe you. And no one has a radio on.”

She talked long enough for me to realize she thought the music we heard was a ghostly melody, the chantings of some tribe of centuries before, so I said “How long have you been here?” “Since the Lodge opened this spring”, she said. “Your first trip?” “I’ve been coming here seventeen years”, she said. “I work the rest of the year so I can vacation here. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in this world.”

In the morning the guide took us by boat to inspect Indian pictographs on smooth ledges of rock slightly above water level. I was amazed to find they extended over a radius of seven miles, and were from two inches to over two feet to size.—First settlers told about the drawings made with sharp pieces of quartz or beaver teeth and many persons came to view them. The October issue of DOMINION ILLUSTRATED of 1888 had an article dealing with them. A party worked five weeks at the Lake and made four copies of each drawing, divided into groups such as religious drawings, hunting, fishing, ships, etc. The Micmac missionary, Rev. Silas Rand, interested the Smithsonian Institute in the field, and many parties have come during the past eighty years to trace and copy the symbolic and ornamental and decorative draw­ings of ships and canoes and reptiles and birds and animals and humans, in the fabulous, in war scenes and hunting trails. The artistry is now under water to some extent but enough remains to prove the Micmacs had seen Norse ships in the 11th century.

After we had pondered for hours over the drawings the guide took us to a grove where a tall stone shaft stood under the trees and there were innumerable mounds in all directions. The inscription on the stone said: “Respect the Bones of Micmacs Buried Here—Who Knew These Woods and Waters Long Ago.” How many graves were there? No one knows, said the guide, hundreds at least, maybe more. Did anyone ever uncover any to find weapons, etc? “A few tried it”, said the guide, “but broken legs, unexplained accidents with shovels and boats, soon stopped them. No one ever got below the sod and there hasn’t been anyone tried it in thirty years.”

We left Ked-ge reluctantly with the fawn watching us wistfully, our squirrel scolding and the beaver working hard as ever by his dam. When we were back in the car on the gravel road and passing through a small settlement, Kempt, we looked at each other and asked if we had been dreaming or had Ked-ge been real. For it is surely something most unusual.