Ober's journey, week 2

Oberholtzer Foundation

Week No.2

June 15-21, 1912

The Hudson Bay Company had a long presence in Manitoba when Ernest “Ober” Oberholtzer and Billy Magee entered the region ready for their summer of paddling. They supported forts and railroads, supplies and men in Manitoba, and Ober and Magee would need the HBC occasionally, though, for weeks at a time, the two men would be dependent only upon themselves, their canoe and their own good skills.

One hundred years ago this week, Magee and Ober are up in Hudson Bay Junction. The mosquitoes are worse, with “smudges all along the way to protect cows.” Their “outfit” has arrived. Ober relaxes a little and his writing becomes descriptive:

“Whole land abloom with fragrant wild roses, all shades of pink. Many other wild flowers, including woodbine, columbine, honey-suckle, tiger lilies, and peas. Strawberries in bloom but wilted by heat and dryness.”

Finally, on June 25, Ober and Magee catch the train for Le Pas. “Smudge. Bull flies. Peaty ground. Generous hostess… Young Swede driver, deaf but very careful.”

At long last, the chestnut canoe hits the water and these two men take paddles in hand. On June 26, they leave Le Pas, “Slight showers… We make good distance and camp at nine o’clock on a very muddy shore. Billy dips up muddy water with the bucket attached to a long stick.”

So their journey begins well after the summer solstice and in the cumbersome, if brief, heat of Manitoba. Ober chooses words like “sultry” and speaks of the flies as big and troublesome. I read definite understatements in Ober’s terse entries when he writes about the Tearing River, “had to wade several rapids,” or later, “finally arrived at Cumberland Lake… spent a very uncomfortable wet, hot night.”

I wonder how many times the two paddlers doubted themselves? Their journey soon began to take on a life of its own, and, not long into it, there was clearly no going back. Nor were there escape routes if one of them were injured. It was a case of going forward, stroke by stroke, and then surviving and learning from their environment or, in Ober’s journal so often — recording some element of its beauty.

The man who hung onto six journals of notes on this 2,000-mile voyage also noted the flowers, the colors, the scents or odors in the air, the feelings along the way. One hundred years later, we know that the man who noticed columbine, honey-suckle and tiger lilies also planted those flowers on his island in Rainy Lake.