Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929
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Manitoba History: “When the Caribou Failed”: Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929 Manitoba Historical Society Keeping history alive for over 141 years About Us Programs Prairie History MHS Resources Contact Us Manitoba History: “When the Caribou Failed”: Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929 by Graham A. MacDonald Calgary, Alberta Number 45, Spring/Summer 2003 Prairie History No. 1 This article was published originally in Manitoba History by the Manitoba Historical Society on the above date. We make it available here as a free, public service. Please direct all inquiries to [email protected]. Manitoba ‘Nobody knows the way of the wind and the caribou.’ Photographers Old Chipewyan Proverb List Free Press Manitoba 150 MHS YouTube Channel Endangered Top 10 http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/45/tolstoy.shtml[4/21/2020 11:27:26 AM] Manitoba History: “When the Caribou Failed”: Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929 2019 Field Trip: Churchill 2020 Ilia Tolstoy (centre) from How the Silent Enemy was Made, 1930. Few pockets of the Canadian landscape have resisted attempts at familiarization as much as the great swath of land north of the Churchill River, composing parts of Manitoba and the old District of Keewatin. Until World War II it remained largely terra incognita to all except those born to the land: the Chipewyan and the so-called “Caribou Eskimos.” Despite the relative proximity of this landscape to Churchill, one of War the oldest fur trade centres of the north, this harsh territory was one of the last and most frustrating to Memorials be organized for purposes of trade, and it was not really opened up in any regular way until the later in Manitoba nineteenth century with the establishment of a post at Brochet in 1859. By 1945 the region still sustained but a small number of trappers and establishments and these only on a sporadic basis. [1] The shifting tree-line traverses this territory on a northwest course from Churchill defining “the land of little sticks” and helps mark the territorial divide between the traditional lands of the Chipewyan, more MHS properly called the Etheneldile-dene (the ‘caribou-eating people’), and the lands of the Inuit to the north. Fundraising [2] There are but few accounts of this border territory in the early centuries of European contact. Most Dinner famous are Heame’s relations of travel, made between 1769 and 1772, from Prince of Wales Fort at 2020 Churchill. He trekked a number of routes across the barrens, reaching as far as the Coronation Gulf on the Arctic coast. [3] A much more fragmentary, but nevertheless fascinating episode, dates from the journey http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/45/tolstoy.shtml[4/21/2020 11:27:26 AM] Manitoba History: “When the Caribou Failed”: Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929 made in 1714-16 by the spirited Chipewyan Woman, Thanadelthur. Under the sponsorship of HBC trader James Knight at York Factory, her trek was made in the cause of fostering domestic peace and commercial relations between the Cree and Chipewyan, and it took her far west past Nueltin Lake into the country north of Lake Athabasca. [4] This Old Elevator As competition for the furs of this “captivating Athabasca” unfolded after 1785, the tree-line country remained on the margins. David Thompson, still with The Hudson’s Bay Company, established Bedford House on the southern tip of Reindeer Lake in 1796. In 1809, Richard Sutherland was sent to winter at the north end of the lake, initiating the first elementary trading contact with the Lac Du Brochet area. [5] The main movement of the fur trade frontier in those years was towards the northwest rather than north however, and it was not until 1859 that the Hudson’s Bay Company established a permanent post at Brochet. In this case, the HBC did not live up to its normal reputation of having been “Here Before Christ” Abandoned for the Oblates had already established a mission there in 1856. [6] J. A. Rogers observed that Brochet Manitoba “was at that time one of the few posts established in caribou country. The Chipewyans in those days were sufficient unto themselves, with little or no interest in trading furs for white man’s goods.” [7] Few others left any record of the country along the tree-line until the later nineteenth century when the Tyrrell Brothers made a number of appraisals for the Geological Survey of Canada. [8] In 1896, the Rev. John Lofthouse penetrated inland along the “Tha-anne” River from the coast north of Churchill to a point about three days from the Kazan River and Lake “Tath-Kyed.” [9] By World War I, these reports had been Memorable supplemented by a handful of other accounts left by traders, church workers, a few naturalist-explorers, Manitobans and police officers. It would only be with the inspections made by Kaj Birket-Smith under the auspicies of the Fifth Thule Expedition in the early 1920s that systematic information about the inland Inuit started to be compiled. [10] Traditional survival on the barrens depended much upon the movements of the caribou herds. [11] The failure of the animals to appear on schedule at a given place could have serious consequences for Historic Sites resident bands, and this remained true well into the twentieth century. Captain of Manitoba Thierry Mallet’s 1930 memoir contains a chapter “When the Caribou Failed.” A veteran trader of the Revillon Freres Fur Trading Company, he recounted one dramatic episode of what was to become an all too familiar phenomenon in the eastern arctic in the depression years and after World War II: the spectre of starvation among the inland Inuit. In the course of a trek northeast from the Ennadai Lake area, he recalled: [12] ...we were in plain sight of the whole band of Eskimos. The igloos were built on a rocky point, while the entire tribe seemed to be scattered a mile or so out on the ice. “Fishing,” was our thought, and at once we knew that our friends were in a bad way. No Eskimo fishes inland through the ice in winter unless he has missed the herds of caribou in the fall and has been unable to stock up with meat and fat until the next spring. Mallet was not the first to have noticed the periodic failures of the caribou to arrive. In The Wildlife of Canada (1920), Angus Buchanan reviewed some of the earlier reports of this failure in the Lac Du Brochet area north of Reindeer Lake, as reported by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Roderick Macfarlane: “Caribou seen each year from 1874 till 1884: none seen from 1885 until the autumn of 1889.” [13] In his own venture into the tree-line country in 1914 and 1915, (well beyond news of recent war) Buchanan thought at first that he too, was destined to miss the caribou, even though their signs were everywhere in the immediate landscape: [14] http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/45/tolstoy.shtml[4/21/2020 11:27:26 AM] Manitoba History: “When the Caribou Failed”: Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929 Day after day I waited — and watched.... Everything in the land had at first been beautiful in my eyes — but God! how the awful silence of its vast space grips you. Even now I felt it, even before the great covering of snow had muffled every corner of the earth, and land and water came to be bound in iron ice-grip. The consequences of such a failure of the caribou to appear in this area were later made famous by Farley Mowat with the publication of People of the Deer in 1952. [15] At about the same time that Thierry Mallet was preparing his memoir, an expatriate Russian from the United States, Ilia Tolstoy, was making his way north by rail to the Pas, destined for the barren lands of Keewatin. His party had left Winnipeg on August 14, 1928, and he too was in search of caribou, but only indirectly for purposes of traditional survival. He and his travelling companions were attempting to obtain film footage which would contribute to William Douglas Burden and William C. Chanler’s production, The Silent Enemy, one of the last and greatest of the silent films, released in 1930. [16] Ilia Andreevich Tolstoy (1903-1970) Ilia Tolstoy Source: Explorers Club Archives A grandson of the great novelist, Leo Tolstoy, ilia Tolstoy was born at Toptivovo, Tula, Russia, to Andrey L. Tolstoy and Olga Diterichs, daughter of Czarist officer, General K. K. Diterichs. Following schooling in Odessa and the Moscow School of Agriculture, he was a cornet in the Imperial Cavalry and http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/45/tolstoy.shtml[4/21/2020 11:27:26 AM] Manitoba History: “When the Caribou Failed”: Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929 served at Tashkent. He later joined the Lieb Guards Dragoon for the White Army during the revolution. A taste for horses and exploration developed early in life. In 1915, at the age of only twelve, he was assistant to the Director of Cavalry Training Command, and traveled on horseback from Samarkand to Pewhawar. In 191718 he worked for the Russian Department of Agriculture and was on assignment in Turkestan. Between 1922 and 1924 he was active on the Volga, assisting with famine relief. Unsympathetic to the new Soviet regime, Tolstoy emigrated to the United States in 1924 and took further training at William Penn College followed by studies in animal husbandry at the University of Iowa, Ames.