Coppermine River

“ After a journey of thirteen hundred miles to the west he found the Coppermine River and the Great Slave Lake, and he traced the river to its mouth and emerged on the northern shore, being the first known white man to see the Arctic Ocean between the Boothia Peninsula and Bering Strait. ”

“ The country on either side of the estuary of the Coppermine River was not without vegetation. There were stunted pines and tufts of dwarf willows, and the ground was covered with a lichen or herb, which the English of the Hudson's Bay Company knew by the name of Wishakapaka, [7] and which they dried and used instead of tea. There were also cranberry and heathberry bushes, but without fruit. The scrub grew gradually thinner and smaller as one approached the sea, and at the mouth of the river there was nothing but barren hills and marsh. ”

“ After quitting the Copper Mountains, and passing a valley occupied by a chain of small lakes in lat. 67° 10', long. 116° 45', we travelled over a formation whose prevailing rocks are spotted sandstone and conglomerate, and which forms the height of land betwixt Bear Lake and the Coppermine River. The [Pg 311] ascent to this height from the eastward is gradual, but the descent towards Bear Lake is more rapid. The country is broken and hilly, though the height of the hills above the sea is perhaps inferior to that of the Copper Mountains. ”

“ In 1848–9 all the coast between the Mackenzie and the Coppermine rivers was searched in vain. At Great Bear Lake, the expedition's winter quarters, very carefully registered observations on meteorology, magnetism, &c., were carried on throughout the winter. After Richardson's return to England, Rae in 1849 descended the Coppermine river with a single boat, but his effort to cross Wollaston Land was frustrated by an impassable block of ice (see Rae's Letter to the Admiralty, date 1 Sept. 1849, printed for H.M. Stationery Office) . ”

“ They have also a tradition among them that they originally came from another {170} country, inhabited by very wicked people, and had traversed a great lake, which was narrow, shallow and full of islands, where they had suffered great misery—it being always winter, with ice and deep snow. At the Coppermine River, where they had made the first land, the ground was covered with copper, over which a body of earth had since been collected to the depth of a man's height. ”

“ There is a constant exhalation of moisture from the ice and swamps during the summer months, which is, perhaps, prevented from being carried off by the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains, and, therefore, becomes condensed into a fog. The coast to the eastward of the Coppermine River is high and dry, and far less encumbered with ice.
Some deer appearing near the encampment, a party was despatched in pursuit of them; but having been previously fired at by Augustus, they proved too wary. The exertions of the men were, however, rewarded by the capture of some geese and ducks. ”

“ Like the Coppermine, the only other large river of this part of Canada, it is rendered unnavigable by a succession of rapids and rocks. It was discovered and explored by Sir George Back in 1834. Its total length is 560 m. ”

“ On the 27th I set out, with two men and four dogs, to explore the barren grounds stretching from Dease River to the Coppermine, and to determine the most practicable route for the transport of our boats, baggage, and provisions. For three days we ascended Dease River, in a north-easterly direction, carefully tracing its course, which is very crooked. The ice-marks visible upon the trees and banks indicated the height of the water when liberated in the spring, but at this period we found it everywhere frozen to the bottom. The woods grew thinner and more stunted as we advanced ”

“ November 18.—Cockburn Creek, now an important stream was followed down for four miles, when it formed a junction with the Staaten. The width of the main stream is about 400 yards, in many channels sandy and dry. It now runs generally west and very winding. The country and timber were much as before described, with the exception that a mile back from the river, (a chain of lagoons) generally occurs, some of them being large and deep and covered with lilies. Beyond, a waste of sandy tea-tree levels, thickly covered with triodia or spinifex, and other desert grasses. ”

“ Hundreds of feet below, the water seethed round a beautiful island covered with trees, and looking quite peaceful, in spite of the angry torrent.
While she stood there, wondering, two tiny forms were borne along by the river, and flung out over the edge of the waterfall.
“Oh, Tibbs! Oh, Kiddiwee!” screamed Coppertop. “Oh, how terrible! They will fall and be smashed into a thousand pieces!” ”

“ Here a succession of precipitous glaciers sweep down from the lofty cradles of their birth to the waters of the sea, making an icy cliff of more than fifteen miles in breadth, where it breaks in constant reverberation and repetition. At the mouth of Copper River all silt carried down from old eroded glacial paths has been deposited for thousands and thousands of years, until a big deltoid chart of sea-water channels in muddy relief of bank and shoal has been formed, and through which the flood of an ice-chilled river takes its rapid course. ”

“ If the geological survey was correct, the basin would be a good ten feet below the water-bearing gravel strata that should be carrying the bulk of the lost water from the ruptured underground Spokima Reservoir fifteen miles upstream. The river bed lay in a slight natural fault and the water should follow beneath the old river bed without too much side loss.
In a half hour the six units had carved out a cavern in the solid rock fifty feet high and extending six hundred feet upstream from the vertical bore. ”

“ The scenery here contrasted strangely with that of Chasm Reach, for the steep hillsides now were richly clothed with a luxuriant growth of primeval forest, and rising to a greater altitude, had their summits capped with a broad mantle of snow, which showed to great advantage against the deep blue of the sky. In the narrowest part of the channel, where the flood tide was making southward in a rapid stream, numbers of fur seals were gambolling in the water, and the energetic movements of the cormorants testified to the abundance of the fish. ”

“ Near the mouth of the creek on the north side, an abandoned miner's trail branches from the Beaver River trail and leads up the creek for 11⁄2 miles, where it crosses by a dilapidated bridge and climbs the mountain slopes to a thousand feet above the valley-bottom : then following the West Branch, crosses the divide and goes down the North Spillimacheen Valley, thus giving access to several mining claims opened up at Copperstain Mt. So long in disuse, this trail can only be found with much difficulty. ”

“ It haunts me day and night. It's the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that's fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!"
The thought passed through my mind that in the face of my companion, as he looked upon her without speech or motion, I might have read his niece's history, if I had known nothing of it. I never saw, in
The River
any painting or reality, horror and compassion so impressively blended. He shook as if he would have fallen; and his hand—I touched it with my own, for his appearance alarmed me—was deadly cold. "She is in a state of frenzy," I whispered to him. ”

“ Sometimes the path led us down to the Copland River, giving us beautiful peeps of snow-clad mountains with a foreground of forest and rushing stream. These excursions into the open were a great relief. The atmosphere in the bush is like that of a hot-house; the sun or wind rarely penetrates into it, and everything is dripping with moisture. One soon ceases to wonder at the tropical vegetation ”

“ A strip of alluvial land of a sandy character extends from the lake up the river three or four leagues, where it is succeeded by hills of a broken, sterile aspect, covered, chiefly, with a growth of pine, hemlock, and spruce. Among these hills, which may be considered as lateral spurs of the Porcupine Mountains, the copper mines, so called, are situated, at the computed distance of thirty-two miles from the lake, and in the centre of a region characterized by its wild, rugged, and forbidding appearance. ”

“ The gathered floods swept on down the cañon and formed another great lake in the region now known as the Kittitas Valley.
But the struggle between Wishpoosh and Speelyei did not end, and the former in his mad fury went on thrashing around in this greater lake. For a long time the rocky barriers of the Umtanum restrained the flood, but at last they gave way before the onslaughts of the wrathful beaver, and the loosened waters swept on down and filled the great basin now occupied by the fruit and garden ranches of the Cowiche, Natchees, and Atahnum. ”

“ The Nile never flows over the top of the dam, but always through the gates and the canal at one side. When the gates are closed during the dry season, enough water is held back by this structure of steel and granite to form a [133] lake over one hundred miles long, and this is let out as needed to supplement the ordinary flow of the river and give the crops plenty of water all summer through. There is water enough in the reservoir to give all the families of the United States all they could use for four or five months, and enough to supply Great Britain and Ireland the entire year. ”

“ Three great travellers, Hearne, Franklin, and Richardson, had successively pronounced the ascent of the Coppermine, above the Bloody Fall, to be impracticable with boats; and our people, recollecting only the violence and impetuosity of our descent, entertained the same opinion. ”

“ A cause less general is hardly sufficient to account for the wide distribution of fragments of the copper veins and vein-stones which have so long been noticed as characters of this lake. The basal remains of this antique dyke form the peninsula of Keweena. The tempests beating against this barrier from the northwest, have ripped up terrific areas from the solid rock, and left its covering, amygdaloid and rubblestones, in fantastic patches upon the more solid parts, or constituting islands in front of them. ”

“ After the ridge, or saddle, is passed which separates the plain of Thebes from that of Orchomenus, the richness of the soil increases, but the land becomes very swampy and low, for at every half-mile comes a clear silver river, tumbling from the slopes of Helicon on our left, crossing the road, and flowing to swell the waters of Lake Copais—a vast sheet with undefined edges, half-marsh, half-lake—which for centuries had no outlet to the sea, and which was only kept from covering all the plain by evaporation in the heats of summer. ”

“ As one drops down the long westward slope from Beachy Head into a sequestered and far-spreading Down country this little river, cleaving a narrow way into the sea below, without port or harbour or village or anything but an isolated homestead or two within apparent touch of it, seizes one’s fancy not a little. For this reason the Cuckmere as a replica in miniature of the Ouse and Arun, but of curiously sequestered habit on this otherwise rather populous coast, has a place of its own somewhat apart from its fellows. ”

“ It topped its bank and joined the flood-water that was hemmed between two low hills just where the embankment of the Colliery main line crossed. When a large part of a rain-fed river, and a few acres of flood-water, make a dead set for a nine-foot culvert, the culvert may spout its finest, but the water cannot all get out. ”

“ The channel of the river at the Copper Rock is rapid and shallow, and filled with detached masses of rock, which project above the water. The bed of the river is upon sandstone, similar to that under the Palisades on the Hudson. The waters are reddish, a color which they evidently owe to beds of ferruginous clay. The Copper Rock lies partly in the water. Other details in the geological structure and appearance of the country are interesting ”

“ This stream is an important branch of the Grand, entering it at the foot of the great valley, after that river has passed around the end of the Uncompahgre Plateau, and just as it plunges into the course of canons by which it passes the Sierra la Sal.
Traveling along the crest-line of the Uncompahgre Plateau, one is interested in observing how sharply the crest-line serves as a water-parting. The drainage toward the west heads in the crest, without cutting it at all. The bluff-wall is everywhere continuous. ”

“ For the first ten miles after leaving Concepcion, our route lay along the right or northerly bank of the Bio Bio river. Here [99] most of the railway cuttings were through a clay-slate rock, which alternated with bands of black shale, and occasionally exhibited thin seams of coal. Further on, and throughout the rest of the journey to Angol, the cuttings were through banks of sand exhibiting horizontal stratification, and being apparently of fluviatile origin. ”

“ The tourist generally spends the time possible for the casual excursionist at Scale Force, on a feeder of the Cocker after it has cleared the lake. It is a sheer fall of over a hundred feet when there is plenty of water. A kindred cataract in the neighbourhood is Sour Milk Force, the second waterfall of that name mentioned in this chapter. The main river, having sped through the meres and the meadows that separate them, passes through the Vale of Lorton, and enters the Derwent near the castle ruins at Cockermouth. ”