We stayed close to shore. This vast lake was clearly no place to be caught out upon by one of the country’s instant gales. An hour’s easy paddle brought us to the mouth of a deep bay on whose eastern shore we came upon a sandy beach dominated by three tall wooden columns standing like bizarre sentries. We landed beneath a trio of roughhewn pillars. Each was about a foot square, ten or twelve feet tall, with a prominent V-shaped notch cut across its top.
I turned to Ohoto for an explanation, but he had nothing to offer, apart from assuring us the columns were not his people’s work. We were all puzzled. These wardens of the beach looked like nothing we were familiar with except for a loose resemblance to uncarved Pacific coast totem poles.
They were guarding the mouth of a valley behind the beach. We ventured into it along an overgrown trail that led us to the largest trees any of us had ever encountered in the Barren Lands – some of them forty or fifty feet tall and two feet in diameter. We found a number of stumps, but of the felled trees there was no sign until we emerged into a cleared area of high ground and were faced by six even more imposing columns.
These towered twenty or more feet high and must have extended another three or four feet into the sandy soil of the ancient esker. They had been roughly squared with an axe and, like the smaller ones on the beach, each had a deep V-shaped notch cut across its top. Four of these massive pillars stood as corner posts of a rectangular space enclosing a ruined structure that looked to me like some kind of habitation, but which Ohoto feared was a grave.
The remaining two columns were sited in front of the enclosure. Inside were the remains of a log cabin whose walls and roof had collapsed to form a dense layer of broken scantlings, rotted sphagnum moss, and the hair and fragments of skin from uncured deer hides.
Ohoto watched nervously from a safe distance as Andy and I poked about in the debris. We identified the remains of a pole bed, a rough-hewn plank table, a broken chair contrived from caribou antlers, a rusty sheet-iron stove, and a battered trunk. Weather and wolverines seemed to have destroyed almost everything else except a few tins containing remnants of flour, rice, and tea. The trunk was broken, and its contents had been reduced to a jumble of water-soaked and mouse-ravelled cloth and paper. Nearby we found a glass Mason jar still firmly sealed and half full of white powder.
Andy cautiously tasted the contents – spat vigorously – and announced it was arsenic, the mainstay of Barren Lands white trappers.
Our interest in rooting about in the debris cooled when we turned up a well-chewed long bone that might have come from a caribou but which bore an ominous similarity to a human tibia. Memories of the Kinetuamiut cemeteries at Angikuni flooded back upon me and by unspoken agreement we withdrew from the wreckage of what had apparently been one man’s transient, but maybe final, home.
An ominous haze in the western sky and the first skirl of wind gave notice that a storm was brewing. Turning our backs on the inscrutable sentries, we launched the canoe and hurried to regain the security of our camp before the storm could break.
My first real lead to a solution of this mystery surfaced forty-five years later when I heard that Charles Schweder, my companion and mentor in 1947 during my first major venture into the Barren Lands, had died, and shortly afterwards one of his relatives sent me several little black notebooks in which Charles had kept a perfunctory record of his life.
Leafing through these I came across the following entry for January 16, 1946.
Been gone from home [Windy Cabin] ten days and come to end of my trapline. Got 32 foxes so far two eat by Wolverine. Short of dog feed so have to turn back. Wish I could go on because pretty near the place Eskimo Charley supposed to hide hisself away. Sure would like to seen it and what its like.
Reading this, I recalled that somewhere in my files I had a sketch map of Charles Schweder’s trapline. On a hunch I dug it out. Beginning at Windy Camp, a dotted line meandered northward to an unnamed lake forty miles south of the cryptic wooden pillars Andy, Ohoto, and I had come upon on the shore of Kamilikuak.
Forty miles was an easy day’s sled travel. Could Eskimo Charley – a legendary Barren Lands trapper about whom I had heard many strange stories – have been responsible for the strange structures we had found?
The search for an answer to this question would involve me in a ten-year quest that ranged from central Europe, west and north to Alaska, then east across the top of the world to the Keewatin Barren Lands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, north again up the Atlantic coast to Montreal, and finally back to the Barrens.
I was able to discover little enough about the early part of Eskimo Charley’s story. The bare bones seemed to be that, about 1885, a boy by the name of Janez Planinshek was born on a farm in Slovenia. While still in his teens, he set out to make his fortune in the New World. Arriving in New York in classic immigrant fashion without money, friends, or prospects, he worked his way across the United States to San Francisco. Then, following the lure of gold, he went north to Alaska, where he was charged with being an accomplice in a murder.
He fled across the unmarked border to Herschel Island in the Canadian Arctic, where he signed on as a deckhand aboard a Yankee whaler. The old wooden vessel carried him a thousand perilous miles eastward in arctic waters until it drove ashore and was wrecked near the mouth of the Back River.
Most of the crew apparently made their way back to Herschel in the ship’s frail whaleboats but Charley (as Janez now called himself) chose to remain behind (or perhaps was left behind) in the territory of the Back River Inuit, where he was the sole intruder from the white man’s world.
Slightly built, Charley’s narrow face was dominated by his fierce black eyes. In the words of an old fellow Keewatin trapper, ”he was a queer-looking bird. Make your flesh creep if you looked at him too long. Tough as a wolf trap and just as touchy! Nobody couldn’t get close to him. Not that many wanted to.”
Charley Planinshek seemed to make a point of avoiding human beings – unless he could impose his will upon them, something he was more successful in doing with native people than with his own kind. Charley spent about a year imposing upon the Utkuhikilingmiut (Soapstone People) of the Back River. When his welcome there began to grow perilously thin, he commandeered a dog team and drove two hundred miles south and west to try his luck among the Thelon River Inuit, who were neighbours and relatives of the Kazan River Ihalmiut.
Here Charley struck gold – white gold, in the form of pelts from arctic foxes – and became a Barren Lands trapper. He took to his new trade with enthusiasm, helping himself to foxes caught in traps set by the Inuit and on occasion taking over their entire traplines by threatening to loose evil spirits on the owners and their families.
He next appeared in the taiga/tundra border country, which constituted a kind of no man’s land between the Ihalmiut and the northern Idthen Eldeli. Charley built a cabin in the thinly forested country, near a smaller lake that still bears his name, between Kasba and Ennadai. Here he set about making himself something of a middleman between the outer world and the Ihalmiut and Idthen Eldeli.
He succeeded in doing this through threats, bribery, and violence – including shooting the natives’ dogs so the people could not transport their furs to distant trading posts and by shooting at least one Ihalmio who refused to let Charley do his trading for him.
Charley ”bought” pelts for whatever value he chose to put upon them and sold them to legitimate trading companies farther south for whatever the traffic would bear. An astute businessman, he also ran his own extensive traplines. He seldom set steel traps, preferring to use strychnine and arsenic, which killed anything and everything that took the bait, including ravens, eagles, wolves, foxes, dogs belonging to the natives, and, on occasion, starving human beings. He was not at all perturbed by the fact that, before succumbing, his victims were often able to drag themselves so far away from the bait stations that they were lost to him. In those times fur-bearers were still so abundant that such losses did not signify.
Charley did very well until the collapse of fur prices during the Great War reduced white gold to dross. By then Eskimo Charley, as he had now become known to his own kind, had done so well he could afford to take a prolonged holiday in the forested country of the Cree peoples some three hundred miles to the south of Charley’s Lake.
Here he found himself a young Cree woman and here he encountered and established a wary relationship with Fred Schweder, father of my friend Charles Schweder.
Engaging in a variety of shadowy, not to say shady, enterprises, Eskimo Charley stayed ”down south” until the Great War came to an end and the value of white fox pelts began to recover. Then he went back to the ”real north” and openly set himself up as a free-trader in opposition to such long-established firms as the Hudson’s Bay Company. He did this to such effect that the HBC, the greatest commercial power in the Canadian North, proscribed him, and Charley found himself blacklisted at most legitimate trading posts in Keewatin Territory and the adjacent northern regions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Although the mercenary details of the struggle were of little interest to me, I was fascinated by the rumours and legends that swirled around Eskimo Charley as, during the 1920s, he abandoned all pretence of living within the law – within any law except his own – and tried to turn the world of the Ihalmiut into what amounted to his own personal fiefdom.
By the middle of the decade he was such a scourge to the remaining People of the Deer (Ihalmiut and Idthen Eldeli), taking from them whatever he wanted, including fur, food, and women, that it had become only a question of when and how they would rid themselves of him. They tried setting fire to his outpost cabins. When this failed, he and his dog team were lured onto dangerous ice in a narrows of the Kazan River from which he made a hair’s-breadth escape that was taken as indisputable evidence he really did possess occult powers. Finally Ooliebuk, an Ihalmio whose wife and daughter Charley had sexually abused, took a shot at him. The bullet missed.
Not long afterwards the bodies of Ooliebuk and one of his cousins were found on the shore of Ennadai Lake. Both had been shot.
Charley withdrew into the Cree country south of Reindeer Lake, where he spent the next several years sustaining himself and his several children (whose mother had died) ”by hook and by crook” while gestating the most grandiose enterprise of his entire life.
Eskimo Charley was ready to set out on a journey he believed would win him immortal fame, and a fortune. Together with Frank O’Grady, a recently arrived, impressionable, young Irish immigrant, Charley proposed to make a canoe-and-dog-sled journey south from the Arctic Circle to Cuba and the Tropic of Capricorn.
The Expedition from Arctic to Tropic, as Charley called it, was to include two of his two children – eight-year-old Inez and six-year-old Tony – together with four Eskimo sled dogs. Transport was to consist of an eighteen-foot canoe and a fifteen-foot dog sled, either of which could carry the other.
In March of 1929, the expedition left Chesterfield Inlet on the frozen shore of Hudson Bay with the canoe lashed on top of the sled to serve as a carriage for the children, luggage, and supplies. The two men took turns breaking trail for the dogs or, when the going was good, walked or ran behind the sled.
It was late June before the ice melted sufficiently to let them launch the canoe. Loading the sled and dogs aboard they paddled south and east to Lake Winnipeg and up the Red River to its headwaters where the dogs again came into play, hauling the canoe over land on a sled temporarily fitted with old bicycle wheels, to the Mississippi, down which they paddled to New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico.
They followed the Gulf coast east to Florida but, concluding it would be pushing their luck to attempt a canoe crossing to Cuba, went to the Bahamas, landing at Nassau to complete an outward voyage of some eight thousand miles.
En route they had staged shows in church halls, schools, small theatres, barns, anywhere a paying audience could be assembled – shows that included performances by Two Eskimo Children in Full Native Costume and Four Huge Arctic Wolf-Dogs. The star was That Renowned Northern Explorer, Baron Charles Planinshek, whom O’Grady always introduced as ”The Master of the Barren Lands.”
However, despite their best efforts, recognition and rewards resolutely eluded them. When they reached Nassau (after a harrowing crossing from Miami), they found themselves regarded as drifters and pariahs.
The Great Expedition had failed utterly to catch the world’s eye. Now it began to dissolve. One of the dogs was traded for a keg of rum, and when Charley announced that they would now return to Canada O’Grady jumped ship and disappeared.
The Master of the Barren Lands and the two children persevered, paddling laboriously north along the Atlantic seaboard of the continent through terrible winter weather until one spring day in 1932 they came ashore in Montreal.
The great voyage was finished, and the man who had been introduced to more than 150 audiences as ”King of forty thousand Eskimos” was nearly finished too. He was admitted to a Montreal hospital as a welfare patient while his children and two remaining dogs were adopted by local families. They were now and forever out of Eskimo Charley’s life.
When summer came and he was discharged from hospital, he drifted west to the long-abandoned cabin near Pelican Narrows. The place was in ruins; when Charley set to work to clean it up and uncovered the skeleton of its last occupant spread-eagled on a collapsed bunk bed he moved on, making his way to Reindeer Lake; along the Cochrane River; down the Kasmere to Nueltin Lake, to eventually reach his long-derelict cabin at Charley Lake.
The king had returned but the few remaining Ihalmiut would have no part of him nor would the Idthen Eldeli. The few white men in the country gave him a wide berth. His only sustaining contacts with living beings seem to have been with his dogs and occasional brief visits to the Schweders, who were then managing a small outpost of the HBC at Windy Lake.
Charles Schweder told me his namesake was convinced that ”all the natives was out to murder him.”
Believing himself to be in deadly peril, Eskimo Charley took protective measures. He trained his dogs to attack all strangers, but generally kept them with him inside his cabin, where they could not be poisoned by skulking enemies.
He always carried a cocked .30-30 rifle in the crook of his arm when he went outside and did not hesitate to snap off a shot in the direction of any untoward sight or sound.
”Father told me,” Charles remembered, ”never you go near to that man’s place ’less you lets him know you is comin’, from a good ways off.”
His most bizarre guardians were the dead. He systematically robbed native graves; especially Inuit graves, which were always built above-ground and so were easily located and readily accessible. Charley took only skulls, favouring those of relatively recent dead to which scalps and hanks of long black hair still adhered.
He brought the skulls to one or other of his lairs (he maintained several widely dispersed cabins, but never stayed long in any one of them) and affixed them to the tops of stout poles so that they formed a perimeter of grisly guards around each cabin. When he moved from one cabin to another, the skulls went with him.
”They was a sure-fire Keep Out sign. When them skulls was up, nothin’ would go anywheres near Charley’s place … not even a wolverine!”
According to Charles Schweder: ”He’d kill anything that walked, flew or swam ’round his cabins. He had poison and traps and snares scattered every which way. Seems like he had a special hate for wolfs. Never bothered skinning them – said he hated their stink. But he sure like to kill ’em – any time, any place. He used to smash up old bottles and stuff deer guts with the pieces and scatter them any place he see wolf tracks around.
”Told my father he cut up old clock springs into pieces, sharpened the ends of the pieces, coiled them up tight and fastened them with deer sinew. Then he freeze them inside chunks of meat and leave the chunks where wolfs could find them. They melted inside the wolfs and the spring opened out and t
ore the hell out of the wolf’s gut. Charley claimed that trick never failed.
”He was pretty near as hard on the deer. Joe Highway from Brochet used to trap up our way sometimes. Told me he come on a deer-crossing place on the Putahow River where Charley had shot off a case of .30-30into one of the big fall herds. Joe said you could smell rotten meat a couple miles away. Charley never had no need to do that.”
In mid-summer of 1941, Fred and Charles Schweder arrived by canoe with their winter’s fur at the HBC post on Reindeer Lake. They brought word that Eskimo Charley had not been seen for almost two years. This news filtered out to the RCMP detachment at The Pas and during the winter of 1942–43 a constable and a ”native special” went north by dog team to investigate. They were directed by an Idthen Eldeli (who refused to accompany the patrol himself) to the southernmost of Charley’s several cabins. The searchers concluded it belonged to Eskimo Charley even though the tall poles surrounding it were not crowned with skulls. They banged on the door and, when nobody answered, broke it down. According to Charles Schweder, who had the story from the native special constable:
”They got one hell of a surprise when they seen what was inside. Bones all over the place. Looked to them fellows like Charley must’ve died in there and there being nobody to feed the dogs was in there with him, I guess they ate him. Some people thought the dogs killed him … because of the kind of a man he was.”
That would have been wishful thinking. When the patrol searched the cabin they found this note:
April. I guess it is the twelfth.
For four days I am feeling rotten. I can neither eat or sleep. I have paines in my chest. For four days I havent been able to pass water or bowel. I have no laxitive. I had some epsom salt but I cannot find it. Last night I passed out for some time. I guess this is the end….
Charles told me something more – something that does not appear in the police report.
”There was a bunch of people skulls in there. One was pretty well chewed up but most was in one piece. The Indian was there said they took all them bones, dogs and all, and buried them all together to save trying to figure out who in hell any of ’em was. Figured it would just have been a waste of time.