Confronting the muskeg Making the ox-less slog through the Caribou Bog By: Terry Doerksen Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, Sep. 16, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/09/2023 (1089 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I like to do things thoroughly, and as we started planning our journey down the Dawson Road, I was determined to do the whole thing — right from Lake of the Woods to where the road ends in St. Boniface. But the more I learned about Caribou Bog the less bullheaded I became about walking through it, never mind travelling there by ox and cart.

The explorer La Verendrye and his men sunk in up to their necks in trying to find a way across. Once you’re under that far, there’s precious little freeboard left. Col. Wolseley, on his way to quell the Red River Resistance, lost two of his four cannons to the bog. They just disappeared. Bummer. Simon Dawson learned a new word from the Cree. Muskeg.

Dawson thought it the perfect onomatopoeia — Muskeg being exactly what the bog says when you try to pull your moccasin out of its grip. I wonder what Caribou Bog would have to say if you’d extricate an entire body with nothing but the head untouched by its suction. And that’s the bog through which Dawson wanted to build his road.

About two-thirds of the distance of the road west to Winnipeg was marshy. Dawson’s Cree guides showed him higher stretches of land where he could build his road with a minimum amount of corduroy — logs laid perpendicular to the road to form a solid surface. But the Caribou was a different animal. First rocks were dumped in and then logs were thrown on top, to a depth of up to 15 feet, until they eventually cleared the surface and it became passable. Riding in an ox cart over a corduroy road was not for the faint of heart. Or someone with loose teeth. The bone rattling eventually forced most passengers to get out and walk along behind. And with most of the corduroy having long since disappeared, there were a couple of big chunks of the Dawson Road which I would have to concede to the bog.

A town named Zik?

I’ve sometimes wondered why no entrepreneur has thought of putting a Starbucks coffee franchise in the town of Starbuck, just southwest of Winnipeg. Surely it would draw swarms of caffeine junkies who like paying to see their name written on a cup. Speaking of names, there is obviously no connection between the name of the town and the name of the coffee chain. It’s been said the town was actually named after a pair of oxen — Star and Buck — who drowned in the La Salle River, which divides the community in half.

Besides Caribou Bog, there’s one other obstacle to 21st-century ox cart travel on the Dawson Road: the missing bridge over the Whitemouth River. The old one burned down a long time ago. Not knowing how deep the water would be and knowing there was a steep bank on the far side, I was forced to abandon my thoughts of taking my own ox, Zik, across. I didn’t want to give any cause to the Vermettes — the beautiful couple who have retired on the west side of the Whitemouth — to name their acreage “Zik” in memory of an animal that wasn’t built to do the front crawl.

So my plans were decided for me by the road itself. We would travel by ox and cart from the Whitemouth River for 100 kilometres to arrive in St. Boniface at the banks of the Red River. And for the 70 kilometres before that, Patty and I would walk, slosh and wade our way over accessible sections of the Dawson Road. It felt like a bit of a concession, but come to think of it, maybe the most historically accurate way to experience the road. And if we were taking a walk down memory lane anyway, wouldn’t it be nice to do it with friends?

Walking with Walter

It was as juniors at Winnipeg Bible College that Walter Martens and I gained notoriety for a certain “walk” we took together. Graduation was a required event, dreaded by many of us as a form of sedentary torture. Walter and I took on the responsibility for spicing it up. With a couple of musty old choir robes revealing bare legs, one Darth Vader mask and a paper bag with eye-holes, we were dressed to make our appearance at grad. Timed to coincide with the most boring speech of the ceremony, we stationed ourselves at opposite sides of the balcony.

At a silent nod across the void and in full view of the entire audience, the two of us made our slow and ethereal descent down our respective stairways to where we met at the stage. There we bowed in honour of the graduates, hugged each other, and floated off backstage and out onto the street. College staff members were less than amused. After sleuthing out the perpetrators, the deans held court and assigned us some probationary acts of contrition over the summer. Only upon completion were we allowed to return for our senior year.

Two of the students in that graduating class, Patty Wiens and Chris Krahn, had gained their own reputation for activities that ranged from the ill-advised to the nefarious. Their graduation picture in the yearbook showed the two of them breaking into the men’s dormitory. It was just one year after the “choir-robe incident” that Patty Wiens and I both found ourselves in Walter and Chris’s wedding party. They returned the favour a few years later, and walked up the aisle for Patty and me. At both wedding receptions, some esteemed guest or another felt it their duty to re-enact the graduation walk that wouldn’t die.

In the ensuing decades we all matured a little bit and our friendship gained a new depth. It might be a couple of years between visits but whenever we would get together, conversation flowed seamlessly from laughter to prayer and back again. When it came time for Patty and I to decide on walking partners down the Dawson Road, it didn’t require a college degree to figure out who to choose.

The four of us hiked and laughed and prayed for healing on the land as we travelled the 150-year-old road. We got our feet soaked in muskeg. We saw ditches dug by Simon Dawson’s crews, now grown in with large cedars. We camped two nights at Birch River — right where the first “hotel” along the road had stood. The Scottish proprietor of that rest stop had only two things on his menu: bologna and bread. So we enjoyed the same fare as the original guests. We ended our walk by wading across the Whitemouth River and introducing ourselves to Germaine and Paulette Vermette who reside on the other side. Come to think about it, in our four days together, the graduation walk didn’t come up once. Maybe we subconsciously agreed to finally let it rest. And here I go and publish it in the Free Press for all of Winnipeg to read. Sorry my friend.

We hugged Walter and Chris goodbye, and right on schedule, Zik was delivered alive and dry to the west side of the Whitemouth. I love that ox. Of course we had to do our own little huggy thing: I carefully fit myself between the pointy ends of his horns, he puts his head on my chest and then we lean into each other. Weird, but comforting. As far as trying to remember how to hitch up to a Red River cart? That was tomorrow’s problem.