Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 10.
Folklore of the Gatineau Valley
Gunda Lambton
What we call folklore is not something quaint, outside our daily lives, but very much part of it, though usually, as Jung maintains, subconscious. For thousands of years before the “Gutenberg Galaxy", as McLuhan calls it, all human traditions and beliefs were passed on by word of mouth, and where people did not read or write, such traditions persisted much longer. Information was passed on by special people, usually in the form of songs or ballads, and such singers continue in certain areas today: the Irish communities of the Gatineau belong to these areas.
Recently l studied the folklore of the Acadian French, who for 300 years were isolated from people of their own language, and passed all information on verbally. Antonine Maillet wrote a fascinating thesis on the similarities between these folklore traditions and the words, stories, jokes and supernatural beliefs she found in Rabelais, that is, the early 16th century. Not that the Acadians read Rabelais; but in his work, and their daily lives, very old traditions continued, not only from the middle ages, but from pre-Christian times.
Myths that have continued in this way are so universal, that folklore specialists who collected fairy stories, for instance, began to number certain types: they simply appear all over the world. No. 650 in Aarne & Thompson‘s collection of stories, published in 1961, is the good giant: in France he is known as Gargantua; in parts of Quebec the “Grande Gueule", which means the same thing: Great Gully. This type existed in European folklore long before Gargantua was immortalized by Rabelais. ln the Ottawa valley we have our Joe Montferrand, who performs Herculean tasks and leaps across rivers. (example: Joan Finnegan's, Look, This Valley is Growing Giants). Montferrand is a legend rather than a fairy tale, because he actually lived, from 1802 until 1864. When the Quebec historian and folklorist, Benjamin Sulte, wrote his biography in 1884, stories about him had already magnified his performances; and such stories continued to make him grow, particularly in the lumber camps, where the French needed his help against the large number of Irish shanty-men. You may have seen the wonderful woodcarvings of Montferrand, throwing the Irish into the Chaudiere, at the Public Archives in Ottawa, where they were exhibited in the Fall of ’83. Normally they are at the Chateau Ramezey in Montreal.
At the time Suite wrote about French folklore much of it in this area, E. W. Thomson did so in English: his Old Man Savarin stories were popular around the turn of the century, and one of these stories is about the Wendigo. This is another universal figure: the bad giant who eats people; we have such giants in numerous fairy tales, “Jack and the Beanstalk”, for instance. To their surprise, European immigrants found that the Indians, too, had such a giant, the Wendigo. This giant was a demon who entered the human body and made people, under duress, eat human flesh, that is, break a strong taboo. Such people became outcasts, often mentioned by early travellers: Samuel Hearne, Paul Kane, Anna Jameson. The shanty-men of this valley feared the Wendigo so much that it was considered unwise to even mention his name. In Finnegan's book the good giant, Montferrand, fights the bad giant. the Wendigo. Thomson gave his story another twist: the shanty-men from one camp refuse to go on when they find what they believe to be Wendigo foot-marks in the snow. huge claw marks sprinkled with blood. Only one of them would not turn back: he suspected someone from another camp trying to get at prime lumber. He was right: the footsteps had been ingeniously made by enlarging snowshoes with deerskin covers and fastening branches to them that made the tracks look claw-like. The rival shanty-men nearly succeeded in keeping other gangs out of that forest.
If there are stories about giants, there are others about people, much smaller than human beings: elves, "lutins" in French, who are particularly fond of horses. Horses they have ridden at night will have their manes finely braided in the morning, and this is done by the elves who hung on to that mane. The French immigrants in Gaspé and elsewhere brought over stories of such elves 300 years ago, and though the Irish did not come to the Ottawa valley until 150 years ago, they were so isolated in certain parts of Ireland that the same Celtic beliefs were kept intact there.
But the belief in little people is not confined to Europeans. William Commanda, the former chief of the Maniwaki Indian reserve, whose great- grandfather, Pakinawatic, had brought his people there from Oka in 1854, was talking about his grandfather's death. His grandfather saw a small man coming up from the river and asked him to go away. When the little man kept coming, he shot at him with a very light bird-shooter. The little man fell. Immediately, four others came out of the rushes and carried him to a canoe they had ready. They loaded him into the canoe and paddled away, out of sight. They disappeared as if they'd melted into air. All you could hear was the sound of their paddles touching the water, you could not see them. Shortly after that, his grandfather died.
Premonitions of death vary in certain cultures: in Ireland it is the Banshee that warns of a death in the family. In her collection of folklore, Lady Gregory. W.B. Yeats’ friend, refers to the belief that Banshees often are connected with specific families.1 In Venosta, a Banshee was heard crying by Paddy Kealey's barn when anyone in the Darcy family died; Mrs. Kealey was born a Darcy.
Only certain people heard this Banshee, which cries with a voice not unlike that of the Skreeker or Gytrash, the black dog forecasting death which appears in English literature — Walter Scott, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronté, and recently. The Iron Wolf by Richard Adams. This black dog is a huge, shaggy animal with glowing eyes. Whether it appeared at the Skillen farm south of Brennan's Hill at the time a boy of theirs drowned in the river, or after that, no one seems to remember. But a black dog did appear on that farm, as well as eery lights rather like swamplights which, to many in this valley, also mean premonitions of a death in the family, while the Polish and French inhabitants of the Picanoc valley are more inclined to see swamplights as ghosts or “revenants”.
Certain people have premonitions of death in the form of dreams. A Kazabazua woman foresaw a car accident in such a dream. One of Laurel Doucette's informants for a folklore study she made in Venosta2 would see a grave dug in a dream, or hear a voice calling him. When his mother died, he heard this voice quite clearly. He and his wife had just returned from his mother's, late at night, and he woke up, thinking his wife was calling him. They returned to his mother‘s just in time, before she died. This man was endured with psychic insight: at times he could see wraith-like figures moving along the railroad track in the dark; once he meta strange woman in the morning. He had come back from a dance on the Borough Road, which runs west from the north of Venosta. His horse balked and tried to run up the bank. He saw a woman in a long white dress, wearing a white hat. He actually offered her a ride but she disappeared with what he describes as a sort of thump. This was a woman who had died not very long before this encounter and others, too, would meet this white ghost on that very road. Helen Creighton in her book Bluenose Ghosts mentions such a lady in white, part of Irish folk culture, but also related to real, well-remembered deaths.
While psychic abilities may not be connected with the ability to divine water, they sometimes are. The above—mentioned informant has the ability to divine water in common with several men in this area. He was also able to cure warts, and, like the seventh son of the seventh son in fairy tales, to staunch the flow of blood. He found out about this when his brother cut off the tip of his finger, chopping ice. Later, at Haeffy‘s famous logging camp near Maniwaki, he saved a man who had nearly bled to death after a logging accident. He used a pure silk handkerchief — to stop the flow of blood it has to be pure silk. This man also had some herbal lore, medical knowledge he may have learnt from his mother, Mary McCarthy, who also had psychic experiences, and whose treatment had worked for him when, as a child, doctors had given him up (he had sucked the sulphur off a box of matches). The very fact that he had survived set him apart as someone special.
Healers of a sort existed in almost every community. In Farrellton, the healer was William McCaffrey, who is well remembered for having cured some bad sprains, like the one his nephew received during a baseball game. Herbal lore often came from the Indians: in the book Picanock by William Bertal Heeney young Harry (the one who later ran the Danford Lake post office)had a bad sprain cured by laying on boiled tamarack bark, which would have been an Indian cure, while certain plants like mullein or catnip, brought over by pioneers, now grow freely by the roadside, but were once extensively used. Jack Foster, whose father had a sawmill in Cawood, was brought up by a grandmother who cured most stomach ailments with catnip. This grandmother lived until she was 102, never going to a doctor. She was born in 1821 — just imagine being brought up by someone going that far back into the last century. The area where Mary Box came from, Devon, had hardly a town without haunted houses. Haunting is not confined to any particular nationality, though R.S. Lambert, who made a thorough study of haunted houses, claims that many such houses belonged to Irish or Highland Scottish immigrants. Psychic powers are, however, attributed to people of all races, though those who show them often do live in isolated areas. Lambert’s Exploring the Supernatural (re-published in 1967) and A.R.G. Owen,s Psychic Mysteries of Canada (1975) both describe as the most amazing type of what they call “Poltergeist”, (a German word for “the spirit that goes bump") the case of the Dagg farm near Shawville, where a girl adopted from Scotland produced fireballs at will and made a male voice say terrible things that perhaps she herself thought. Two houses in the Fieldville and Brennan's Hill area displayed similar Poltergeist symptoms which may also have been caused by a high emotional charge from , usually, teen-age children, often but not always, girls. In the Fieldville farm house people would see a strong and very strange light, rather like that others have descried when waking up in a haunted house. Passing the Brennan‘s Hill farm at night, Jim Kelly, going to night—shift at the Paugan dam, would see a similar light. Others heard a dog bark, a piano play in the middle of the night; yet others told of a piano that refused to be moved out of the house. Poltergeists are different from regular ghosts in that they are confined to a certain time while this charge is produced in ways of which we know little, but which we could compare to the “tent-shaking" of Indian medicine men. Father MacGregor, the Farrellton priest for 20 years after 1937, exorcised the Poltergeist in the farmhouse between Farrellton and Brennan’s Hill, but such houses do not always react to exorcising. However, in the 1970s, two friends of mine, one after the other, have lived there without hearing or seeing anything supernatural. The two families whose houses were temporarily haunted during the second quarter of this century were Irish Catholics, and the Otter Lake house where a ghostly lady gently pulls at one‘s bedclothes also belonged to an Irishman, Robert Farrell, the 19th century manager of the Gilmour farm on Farm Lake, where his wife is said to have met with an unnatural death. There are also stories of haunting at the George Derby farm which is near the confluence of the Picanoc and the Gatineau, close to Gracefield. This family is English and Anglican, and they live on an old supply farm for lumber camps which before that time may have been an Indian camping place, even a burial ground. Arrowheads have been found there. The haunting may go back to an event that happened a very long time ago. Sometimes all that is remembered of a house is that it was haunted, like that of the Goods in Wakefield, in the valley of the Lapéche river. The Goods, who were Anglicans, had come from Ireland around 1870, according to the census.
One of the most fascinating haunted places belongs to our president, Mr. Phillips, though it is hard to tell whether the haunting or Poltergeist is due to the area or to the house where most of it takes place. The farm is a former Foley farm, also an Irish name; but the log-house in question is a log-house moved from Carp where it once belonged to a Montgomery family. The area where it was moved to had been greatly changed through the construction of the dam on the Gatineau. When there were still rapids an Indian girl is said to have drowned there.
Many of us, at the time of a picnic of this Society at the Phillips’ place, were intrigued by Mr. Phillips’ stories of the odd behaviour of a large picture of Queen Victoria, which at times could be seen literally bouncing on the wall, before it fell down and broke. As soon as this picture was covered by a poster of an ordinary landscape, it ceased acting up. In another house the Phillips had been disturbed by footsteps just before dawn; their mother, when living there, also complained of “someone walking around". The tenant of the log-house, waking up at night, might find his room brilliantly lit, in the way l described other Poltergeist lights. At one time, the cat refused to enter the building, its hair standing on end—just as the horse had balked meeting a ghost on the Borough Road. While all this sounds like a Poltergeist, the recent appearance of a shadowy figure with long dark hair shows that ghosts may continue, rather than recede in time, depending on their grievances being solved; something hard for us to know unless we know the history of the place.
Furniture moving around is part of Poltergeist activity, but may occur without great disturbance: Jack Foster, whom I have already mentioned, had a housekeeper in his parental home who firmly believed that his mother's chair, which before her death always had a certain place by the window, kept moving back to that place when put elsewhere. Mrs. Campbell also believed in the evil eye, which might stop the butter from churning or turn the milk. The remedy against this was iron: you heated a flat-iron over charcoal and put it wherever evil spirits might enter: hence the horseshoes over doors. George Foster, whose sawmill was not on a river and operational only through horse-power, one year lost 18 horses to swamp-fever, a terrible loss in his business. The house-keeper could not believe that there was not some hexing involved; she suspected Jack of "overseeing" the horses, that is, of having the evil eye. To tease her, Jack's brother once tied a string to a chair so that Mrs. Campbell could not see it, then had Jack stare at it while he moved it around. “He’s overseeing it", she cried out. And I don’t think she changed her mind even when the boys showed her that it had been a trick.
Early in this century beliefs in magic were quite general in this area. In the 1920s, when Andy Brennan came back from a dance on the Lac Bernard Road. south of Brennan’s Hill, he and other young people saw the strangest lights spiralling round and round, from south to north, in the direction of what is known around there as the Fairy Holes. They were about a mile away from the river. facing east. Seeing these lights - presumably swamp-lights - they had no premonitions of death, as others might; but they might connect the lights with the other mysterious properties of the Fairy Holes passed on to them by older generations.
The name Fairy Holes was given to two deep, well-like cavities on either side of the present Macdonaid Road, which runs west from the Brennan‘s Hill Hotel, once Carroll’s Saloon. The crest of that hill would have formed the banks of an older, wider bed of the Gatineau River. Andy Brennan lives on the farm where one of these strange holes is situated - the other is on the former Driscoll farm. His grandfather had settled there by 1850; he remembers his parents speaking of seeing strange lights there. Others, coming from midnight mass, might hear sounds like music coming from these holes. As a young man, Andy, clearing his field of stones, tried to fill the hole on his side of the road: but however many stones he dragged to the Fairy Hole and threw in, he had to get more. They all disappeared: the hole seemed to be bottomless.
Supernatural qualities were at one time also ascribed to the caves discovered east of Wakefield around 1867. Suite, who wrote about them in 1875, mentioned the fear of werewolves, which exist in French as well as in Irish folklore. In a Celtic Miscellany3 there is a fascinating story of three female werewolves in the Cave of Cruacha, Ireland. ln County Sligo, where the Venosta Kealeys originated, at least one prehistoric burial site has not yet been excavated because local people refuse: they firmly believe that the fairy—queen lives there; and that brings us full circle to our fairy holes in Brennan’s Hill.
The tiny, now very rare, book by Beniamin Suite Les Cavernes de Wakefield was published by Burland-Desbarats in Montreal at a time when the discovery of these caves caused tremendous interest. You can feel Sulte’s description tingle with excitement; he was overwhelmed by the cathedral like quality of the caves after squeezing through an entrance then not widened; he had to slip in sideways. The caves were on the Pelissier property near Lake Pelissier which now has another name. His description makes it clear that an old water-way had hollowed out the rocks and at one time. perhaps. connected two lakes, one underneath the mountain reached by a well-like opening from the now well-known caves, the other Lake Peiissier. Fumes and noises can be caused in such ancient waterways through Spring run-off or even very slight earth tremors. known to produce an eery light sometimes. This would explain the lights and noises coming from the Brennan’s Hill fairy holes, situated where earlier water-channels may have led to a higher river-bed.
Natural phenomenae usually attracted the attention of the singers and story tellers of the region: in years of high Spring floods - the one in 1908 for instance - a blind singer and story teller named Joseph Landreville would appear in Maniwaki.4 A natural phenomenon like a clay slide could cause a train wreck like that at Stag Creek in Low. about which, fortunately, a folk-song gives exact details. The song was written by Thomas Quigg, who knew three of the men killed in this accident for which the song gives an exact day, November 16th, but for which none of us could find the year. Laurel Doucette, who recorded this song for her collection, in 1982 interviewed Quigg‘s daughter in Ottawa, who agreed that the tune (a very fine one) was right but that the words “It's a warning to all brakesmen, their duty to God to attend" were missing from the later version; these indicated that one crew member may not have been sufficiently vigilant. She also supplied another name. Meagher, to the three mentioned in the song. This song starts with “Ye tender-hearted Christians" but ends with a curse on the Gatineau Valley Railway, though this is carefully laid into the mouths of sorrowing parents, way over in England, mourning the loss of their son. the youngest crew member, James Hammond. Quigg worked in the ballast pit on Skillen’s farm south of Brennan's Hill, from which the train took gravel to a site north of Low.
I had a good look at the railway bridge across the Stag Creek where the accident took place. It is close to the present Highway 105, and the creek, about ‘/2 mile from its confluence with the Gatineau, is very wide there, and its banks are of clay. November is a treacherous month, and at 5 past four, the exact time given by the song, the visibility may be poor. Wilson, in front. saw the bridge had collapsed and blew his whistle, but too late. The locomotive was later dug out of the mud, but its bell was never found. That sounds like other old legends. There was no newspaper account for the year 1887, the one indicated to Laurel Doucette, and going through November after November in the Ottawa Evening Journal on microfilm, I was about to give up, when. Eureka, on November 17, 1892, a day after the accident, an account of it was given in this paper, confirming every detail in the song.
The song combines emotional comment on the effect of the tragedy on Wilson's, Blakeley‘s and Hammond's families, but it is also a ballad relating an event, working up to the most dramatic verse, the fourth, when the train plunges into the depth of the creek bed. Train wrecks are such a special subject of ballads and songs that an entire issue of the Bulletin of the Canadian Folk Music Society (October '82) was devoted to such songs, the issue in which Doucette published her article on the Stag Creek Wreck. In the Gatineau valley, apart from this song, those most often sung are the Wreck of the old No. 9 and the Wreck of the 97. The most recent train wreck in the Ottawa valley is the Almonte train wreck of 1942. and the famous song about this is also sung around here. Other songs are connected with death and trains:
"There's a little box of pine
On the seven-twenty-nine“.
Many local songs refer to logging, and sometimes to tragic events there: "There‘s an empty cot in the bunkhouse tonight". You're sure to know lumbercamp songs like The Jam at Gerry's Rock, The Chapeau Boys, the Log Drivers Song, the Old Black River Song. The Farmers Son and the Shanty Boy or Haeffy's Camp, a camp near Maniwaki where so many local men used to work in their youth.
It would be great if we had more songs about local events. we have the ballad of The Battle of Brennan's Hill which took place three years after the Stag Creek Wreck. These events happened in the last century but seem to be preserved more vividly than more recent events of equal magnitude or tragedy. In the Low area there was scarcely a family that was not affected, one way or another, by the construction of the Paugan Dam. There are still disputes over who took the first team across that then totally unprotected new cement dam in 1928. Howard Kealey took the Brooks‘ team across, he remembers that; Andy Brennan remembers being asked that Spring to risk his own team; he took it across six times daily for six months without a mishap, but there were accidents too, connected with the dam. The same year eleven loggers lost their lives when the wrong gate of the Paugan dam had been opened. There may have been songs about such events too, but they have not survived. Such events don‘t always make the history books, they belong to what the French call “la petite histoire du pays". There are the family stories of those who lost their farms through flooding when the Paugan dam was built: many remember seeing the farm buildings and the house of the old Ramsay farm floating down the river. Thomas Ramsay had settled in Denholm township, east of the Gatineau, and Reno, his grandson, gave me photographs of the old house and buildings and the family, on land now flooded. The old man was senile in the 1920's and when the Hull Electric Company sent their representative, he was made to sign papers in his family's absence. The family took the matter to court and the lawyer advised leaving everything exactly as it stood. So they lost everything, they did not even save the timbers of their buildings, which were picked up by others further down the river. Reno's father had, meanwhile, bought land between Martindale and Low, and had married the daughter of Bill Brooks; Reno later added some of the Bill Brooks land to his own. Folklore has it that on that land a man called Jim Russell was buried long ago, no one remembers the date, beside a treasure he had accumulated. Folklore about buried treasure is common and often connected with haunting, since the devil is said to have had a hand in the accumulation of wealth. But while the devil has been seen as a dancing priest, showing a cloven hoof, in the Otter Lake area, he has been remarkably quiet around the Gatineau. Too much competition from the Wendigo, perhaps.
Crafts, too are an important part of folklore; wood-carvings like those of Montferrand. or the skills of the old time harness-makers, of whom there are few left. Quilts made by women have had more attention, many of them have been collected and photographed for the National Museum. Teresa Menes, the oldest Indian woman in Maniwaki, makes corn husk dolls for which she scrapes moosehide and makes beading to clothe them. The birch bark canoes made by William Commanda are great works of art, ornamented with wonderful figures of indigenous animals. while his wife, Mary, is adept at a number of crafts.
I have not even scratched the surface with this account; there is so much that can get lost. In the seven years since Laurel Doucette recorded the many songs and family stories in her collection, several of the old people she interviewed have died, or have been silenced by illness and solitude in homes for the aged. If any of you have contacts with such old people, try to get them to talk. Even if, like Mrs. Ryan, Thomas Quiggs daughter, they can‘t sing any more, they can still talk.
Folklore experts are willing to help each other; the Quebec Archives are helpful and the National Museum of Man. Summer courses in folklore are given at Memorial University. Newfoundland, from mid~June to early August. They are useful to help sift and organize information you may have, or wish to gather. They will send you a study guide for this purpose and you can join the Association of Folklore Studies.
Footnotes:
| 1. Lady Gregory - | (Collected and Arranged) Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. (With two Essays and Notes by W.B. Yeats). Gerrards Cross. Bucks; Colin Smythe Ltd. 1970 pp. 170-179. |
| 2. Laurel Douoette - | Skill and Status: Traditional Expertise within a Rural Canadian Family. Mercury Series. Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies. Paper No. 28-1979. |
| 3. Kenneth Hurlstone-Jackson - | A Celtic Miscellany. New York, Penguin 1971. P. 162. |
| 4. Anastase Roy - | Maniwaki et la Vallée de la Gatineau. Ottawa/Hull. lmprimerie du Droit. 1933. |
Although much of the research for this and other projects in the Gatineau Valley carried out by Gunda Lambton, of which this is a condensation, was done on her own initiative she did participate in the ‘Search for History’ program of the Society and, as such, received some modest financial help toward expenses.