Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Spring Sledding
March 2008

David Douglas, the son of a Scottish stonemason, was born in a village outside Perth in 1799. As a boy, his inquisitive, but easily distracted, nature conflicted with the rigors of school, and at age ten he was sent to the gardener of the local manor house to begin a seven year apprenticeship. The lad was good with plants, and a dozen years later his energy, field expertise, and unquenchable enthusiasm won him a job as a horticultural collector for the London Botanical Society.

In spring 1825, Douglas arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River and spent the next two years collecting plants all over the place, including multiple visits to the Colville, Spokane, Okanogan, and Walla Walla Rivers. Douglas's journal and specimens provide our first systematically-organized look at the flora and fauna of the north Columbia country; combined with the ethnographic plant knowledge he gleaned from numerous tribal guides and fur trade families, it forms an invaluable source of baseline data for the period of contact between European and tribal people in our area.

Douglas is often portrayed as a rather troubled character -- obsessive, demanding, and solitary as he pursued the plants in an often hostile wilderness. But in fact a generation of fur traders had settled into our region by then, many of them with Scottish backgrounds that mirrored Douglas's own. They were used to far greater physical rigors than Douglas experienced, and several shared his interest in natural history. Thrown together in a magnificent setting, they often took pleasure in everyday events. Nowhere is this notion of enjoying the ride expressed more clearly than during Douglas's trip upriver with the Hudson's Bay Company's spring express of 1827, under the leadership of Edward Ermantinger.

Through April of that year, as the brigade worked its way up the Columbia River to Fort Colvile at Kettle Falls, Ermantinger's concise field account of the journey never mentioned Douglas's collecting activities. After their extended stop at Colvile, he did list his passenger as "D. Douglas, Esq." From there the party paddled north to Boat Encampment, at the Columbia's northernmost turn. This marked the jumping-off point where they switched from canoes to snowshoes to ascend the Rocky Mountains via the Athabasca Pass trail, and it was here that Douglas finally did something worthy of a brief notice in Ermantinger's daybook: "A wolverine hovers about our camp and Mr. Douglas wounds him, but he escapes."

On May 1, the brigade slogged to the crest of Athabasca Pass. In an area of scarce game, Ermantinger managed to kill a single spruce grouse to share for their lunch. David Douglas took a sudden and extreme interest in his leader's quarry, noting the fine red crest, discovering spruce needles in its stomach, savoring the dark succulent meat, and finally making a study skin out of the bird to carry back to England with him. As Douglas committed the double act of eating the bird for nourishment and skinning it out for posterity, he could not hide his delight.

Suddenly reenergized, he decided to tackle the great range of mountains at hand. "I became desirous of ascending one of the peaks, and accordingly I set out alone on snowshoes to that on the left hand or west side, being to all appearance the highest."

At the beginning of his climb, Douglas floundered through corny snow in dense woods, often sinking up to his waist and admitting that the labor was "great beyond description." The soft snow didn't keep the collector from clipping bits off a strange club moss, examining desiccated gentian flowers, and burrowing into the packed snow to search for crowberries. Halfway up the peak, above timberline in open country, a hard crust on the winter snow allowed him to scamper along with ease. Then conditions abruptly changed again as "the summit becomes a mount of pure ice, sealed far over by Nature's hand as a momentous work of Nature's God." Presumably Douglas stopped where the ice began, somewhere on the shoulder of a distinct mountain whose double peak remains easily visible just west of Athabasca Pass summit. Today it appears on the maps as Mount Brown, named by Douglas himself after an important fellow botanist.

Douglas did not claim to have stood on the very peak of Mount Brown, but rather described lingering at one spectacular vantage for twenty minutes. There was nothing but mountains as far as his eye could see, many of them higher and more rugged than the one he was on. He reveled in the glaciers of a large ice field below him: "The aerial tints of the snow, the heavenly azure of the solid glaciers, the rainbow-like hues of their thin broken fragments." He saw huge mossy icicles clinging to rocky crags, and watched an avalanche tear loose from a south slope to roar away with incredible velocity, "producing a crash and grumbling like the shock of an earthquake, the echo of which resounding in the valley for several minutes."

His adventurous ascent through powder and crust had taken five hours, but now as the afternoon waned he decided to speed up his return trip: "Places where the descent was gradual, I tied my shoes together, making them carry me in turn as a sledge." It is easy to imagine how David Douglas conjured this little sled. Collecting naturalists of the time always toted a vasculum, a tin box the size of a small suitcase that doubled as specimen case and portable desk. By tipping his snowshoes on edge and lashing one to each side of his vasculum via its leather support straps, he fashioned a Flexible Flyer kind of sled with runners and a seat. It was perfectly suited to the hard snowpack, so that "sometimes I came down at one spell 500 to 700 feet in the space of one minute and a half."

At this point even Mr. Douglas, Esquire, must have known that he had squeezed every ounce of fun from his lunch break at the top of the world, and it would have been nearly impossible for him to fly down the slope of Mount Brown without breaking into some kind of joyful scream. After only an hour and a quarter he found himself back at the summit of the pass where he had begun, and we can only wish that Edward Ermantinger had seen fit to record his smile in the company daybook. He did not.

Although just twenty-seven years old at the time, the sledder paid a physical price for his frolic, as he admitted in his next morning's journal entry. "Wednesday, May 2. My ankles and knees pained me so much from exertion that my sleep was short and interrupted." You get the feeling David Douglas knew that the adventure and fun of his exertion had been well worth it.

Illustration: H.J. Warre 1845: Crossing the Rocky Mountains [Archives of Canada]

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