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home > media > books > book 15
Entertaining, folk-type tales of ghosts, the Wendigo, loups-garous [werewolves], witches, and other dark legends from the lumber camps. When I first saw the book, I thought it might be for older kids, but this older kid enjoyed it just fine! It’s a mixture of true stories and folktales and it’s curious that the ones that sound like folktales are true and vice-versa. A dripping sailor who came back to accuse timber baron George Usborne of causing his death. The lovely, ghostly head of Mah-Nah-Tah rising out of a haunted lake. The blasphemous ghost of Tousant who cursed in sign-language. An excerpt from this book: Retold
by Joan Finnigan The Spirit of Alice Snowshoes In many of the Indian tribes of the Ottawa Valley it was the custom to leave behind their old people who could not keep up with the movements and pace of the tribe. The people of the tribe put pitch in the old people’s eyes, blindfolded them and left them behind to die because the survival of the tribe was more important than any one single person. Old Alice Snowshoes, an Algonquin Indian, was left to die on the Eardley Road near Aylmer, Quebec, in front of the Donald McLean house. Mrs. McLean heard Alice Snowshoes moaning outside, brought her into the house, wiped the pitch from here eyes, and nursed her back to health. She lived with the McLeans ever afterwards, helping with the housework, making baskets, moccasins and beaded mitts, acting as midwife and using her knowledge of herbs to help sick people. In those early days there were no doctors. So Alice Snowshoes traveled the countryside, through blizzards, rain storms, and dark nights to help people who were ill, making her way through the wilderness to the settler’s cabin with her medicine bag and her own scant supply of food. Nobody ever knew how she knew that people were ill and needed her help. She seemed to have some special native instinct that told her help was needed by families isolated and many miles away. And she would travel to them and fall like a ghost from the sky. Without any word or warning, she would just suddenly be there at the bedside of the sick child, or the young mother in labor, or the injured father. In many log houses all through the Ottawa Valley many an evening prayer was offered for Alice Snowshoes, the good spirit they could always count on, who would never fail them, who appeared always like a ghost out of nowhere. After helping
many generations of sick people, Alice Snowshoes died on Christmas Day,
1874, at the age of one hundred and twenty. Her body was taken to Quyon
by members of her tribe and buried somewhere deep in the forest. But
the spot of her last resting place has never been revealed to the people
she helped so much. < back |
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