Letters to the Granddaughter: The Story of Dillon Wallace of the Labrador Wild

By Philip Schubert

The North seduces you. It can kill you too.

Philip Schubert discovered the joys and dangers of travel in trackless wilderness starting in 1999 after reading Dillon Wallace’s "The Lure of the Labrador Wild". He spent a decade retracing the routes in Labrador and northern Quebec described in "The Lure", in Wallace’s follow-on book, "The Long Labrador Trail", and in Mina Hubbard’s "A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador".

Nothing in Dillon’s early life as an impoverished youth on a farm suggested that he would still fascinate people nearly 150 years later. Dillon was blessed in fact with “Grit A’Plenty”, which no one would suspect from his unimpressive physique and unsmiling face. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps, rising from gristmill employee, to self-trained telegraph operator, to stenographer, to finally becoming a lawyer. His life from that point on, however, was equal parts tragic and heroic, but continued to be marked by splendid accomplishments. Starting at the age of 40 in 1903, he carried out a series of trips in Labrador and today’s northern Quebec covering several thousand miles. No one person to date has been equal to the task of fully retracing them.

The first trip sadly resulted in the tragic death of his trip leader and best friend, Leonidas Hubbard, and a narrow escape for him. His book on the trip, "The Lure of the Labrador Wild", published in 1904, became a best seller and is still in print. It would change Dillon’s life forever. It told the story of the trip as it was documented in his and Leonidas’ trip journals. Leonidas’ widow, Mina Hubbard, who would be forever changed also due to the unbearable loss of “her laddie”, had commissioned the book. When Dillon refused to rewrite the book and make Leonidas into the larger than life figure she had been expecting, she became Dillon’s sworn enemy for life.

There then followed two extraordinary trips in 1905 across Labrador, following the route planned in 1903. Dillon led one. Mina, drawing on skills that no one had realized she had, led the other. She planned hers in secret, and then provoked a life-long estrangement from Leonidas’ family by telling the press as she left that she suspected that Dillon played a role in her husband’s death and was on her way to investigate it. A third fascinating figure, voyager George Elson, the other survivor of the first trip, safely canoed Mina the length of Labrador down some of the most challenging rivers that George and his crack team of outdoorsmen had ever seen. No one was more impressed than George, or more disappointed than Mina, when Dillon and his only team member, forestry student Clifford Easton, successfully completed the trip as well. The evidence that George, a heroic figure in his own right, had fallen in love with Mina and which may have motivated him to agree to organize the trip at Mina’s behest, added another fascinating dimension to the saga. The 1905 trip formed the basis for Dillon’s second book and he went on to publish another 25 books, becoming a legend in his time.

This is the story of Dillon Wallace as told by Philip Schubert, with an introduction by Dillon’s granddaughter, Amy McKendry. It includes extensively illustrated maps and dozens of Philip’s photographs of the challenges faced and overcome in the wilds by the saga participants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Schubert
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780991813629

Philip Schubert

I've always tended to take on physical challenges. In my first summer job after my first year as an engineering student, I worked as a surveyor for Canadian National Railways in northern British Columbia. Whereas my fellow workers passed the weekends lying in their bunks drinking beer, I was out climbing the nearby mountains. Years later, living in Brussels with my wife and kids, I climbed mountains in northern Norway while we were on a summer holiday there and then while we lived in Spain, I climbed the highest peak in the Pyrenees, Pico de Aneto. I competed in track and field this whole time, specializing in the 400 meters. Back in Canada, I learned to canoe by taking my kids on excursions to Algonquin Park, a wilderness park not far from where we lived. My first taste of trackless wilderness occurred when I hiked the Long Range Traverse in Grosse Morne National Park in Newfoundland and Labrador. Shortly after this I began retracing the Hubbard and Wallace Saga after reading Dillon Wallace’s The Lure of the Labrador Wild. My good friend Gerard Kenney, an author of books on the North, lent me the book and the two of us the following summer in 1999, canoed up Grand Lake and portions of the Naskaupi and Susan Rivers. Little by little I retraced about half of the 1903 trip forming the basis for The Lure of the Labrador Wild and most of the summer portion of the 1905 trip forming the basis for Dillon Wallace’s second book, The Long Labrador Trail. Not to be forgotten in all of this is Mina Hubbard’s book, A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador and her 1905 trip. I retraced the greater portion of her trip as well. A key event that convinced me to write the biography on Dillon Wallace was the Mina Hubbard Centennial in 2005, which took place in North West River, Newfoundland and Labrador, the starting point for the trips in 1903 and 1905. I was invited by the organizers to do a presentation at it, as part of those invited “from away” as the organizers put it in good Labrador parlance. I was at first surprised and then concerned that organizers were completely ignoring another key figure in the events of 1903 and 1905, Dillon Wallace. After convincing the organizers to not forget Dillon Wallace, I was invited by them to locate surviving family members. Thanks to this I got to know Wallace’s son and daughter and then finally his granddaughter, Amy McKendry, who lives in the Seattle area. Amy and I decided that it was time there was a biography on her grandfather and met for a week in October 2008 to look through the extensive archives held on the saga at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. It has been a big job researching and writing the biography, with work on it taking place during spare moments as I continued to work as an energy specialist for the Canadian International Development Agency. I live in Kanata, Ontario (now a part of greater Ottawa), where I'm married to Beth and have three grown children. Beth has shown great patience over the years with my heading off to Labrador and northern Quebec each summer.

Book preview

Letters to the Granddaughter - The Story of Dillon Wallace of the Labrador Wild

by

Philip Schubert

with an introduction by Amy McKendry (granddaughter of Dillon Wallace)

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by Philip Schubert

ISBN: 978-0-99181-362-9

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

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What others are saying about

Letters to the Granddaughter

"Phil’s Letters to the Granddaughter takes us with him as he explores the Hubbard and Wallace saga…with authority, having himself been physically over the very terrain that he writes of…"

Gerard Kenney, author of 3 books on the Arctic including Ships of Wood and Men of Iron

Gripping reading, the reader gets caught up in the danger and drama of the multiple canoe trips. The vividness of the account is enhanced by the wonderful photographs and detailed maps which take us right into the heart of Labrador. A grand book…

Dr. Roberta Buchanan, Professor Emerita at Memorial University and a co-author of The Woman Who Mapped Labrador, a biography of Mina Hubbard

This book is also available in print through: http://magma.ca/~philip18/HWSaga/OrderBiography.html.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Opening Words

Introduction by Amy McKendry

1 The Trip to Hubbard Rock

2 At Hubbard Rock

3 The Loneliest Death

4 The "Lure" Changes Everything

5 On to Ungava

6 Michikamau at Last

7 The Search for the Headwaters of the George

8 The Escape from Death

9 Monster Rapids

10 Arrival at Ungava Bay

11 The "Lure" was no Fluke

12 A Legend in his Time

13 Life After Labrador

About the Author

Notes

Reviews by Writers on the North

Acknowledgements

Further Information on Copyright

OPENING WORDS

No need to tell you how really fine he was - you know: when you and I got raving mad over those bronze tablets in Mount Repose, he refused to even get stirred up. Every one of our relatives who met him said he was one of the finest men they ever met.

To me he was a super-man and the last link with that awful tragedy of 1903-04. George doesn't count - he is only a tool. When my cousin, Dr. M.C. Hubbard, died last year I wrote George at Dr. Melvin's wife's request as Dr. Melvin has corresponded with George. No reply of course, but it only shows how he is subjugated to Mina's demands.

Margaret Daisy Williams, the sister of Leonidas Hubbard,

in her letter dated September 29, 1939, to Dillon Wallace’s widow.

INTRODUCTION BY AMY McKENDRY

In my family, getting to know one’s relatives is a bit like being a time traveler - the generations are that far apart. We are not so likely to know one another, but our family stories carry messages across great expanses of time. My grandfather, Dillon Wallace, was born in Craigville, New York, on June 24, 1863, which by his own account was just a few days before the Battle of Gettysburg. From this date midway through America’s Civil War, which seems improbably long ago, he spent most of his childhood on a farm, not unusual for the time; in 1870 only about a quarter of the U.S. population was urban. His father - my great grandfather - was at various times a schoolteacher, a lawyer, and a businessman. He also seems to have been a hard drinking man, which may have given added momentum to the plunge in value of the family assets in 1876, the fallout resulting from a national financial downturn in the early 1870s.

Dillon Wallace was the subject of stories my mother told, an unsmiling man in photographs, often formal and posed. As a child I knew vaguely that he had taught himself telegraphy while working in a gristmill, and became in succession a telegrapher, a secretary in New York City, a law student, and finally a lawyer. It did not occur to me that this was a classic up-from-the-bootstraps story, and when I heard of his transition from New York lawyer to Labrador explorer, it did not occur to me to think of it as anything unlikely.

Such transitions were not completely out of the blue. At around the same time Theodore Roosevelt, not yet the 26th president of the United States, managed to be a man of politics and letters while taking time off to engage in buffalo hunts and cattle ranching. It was in the air that men of certain means could throw aside the trappings of their dignified occupations and go off on epic adventures. Roosevelt, for his adventures, commissioned tailor-made hunting suits, and his cavalryman’s uniform was custom made by Brooks Brothers. Unlike Roosevelt, Dillon Wallace came from a family that lost nearly everything due to the panic of the early 1870s although they somehow managed to hold on to their farm, at least for a while. The farm was eventually lost to foreclosure in November of 1880.

But the family story of how Dillon Wallace happened into Labrador was that my grandfather, worn down by the long decline and death of his first wife, Jennie Currie, was at loose ends, distracted and ready for change.

Much later in life, in an otherwise polished manuscript draft written for submission to Biographical Encyclopedia for its 1939 edition, my grandfather wrote nonsensically, In April, 1897, of New York, managing to leave out both subject and verb. Another entry: In 1900 my wife died. Many years later, on a photocopy of this draft, my mother wrote in the missing information: In April 1897, I married Jennie Currie of New York. In 1900 my wife died of ‘consumption.’ In these autobiographical notes written at age 76, Dillon Wallace seems to have been hardly able to bring himself to write even the barest of facts about his first wife.

Fortunately he kept a diary from January 13, 1898 until early January 1901: it is a record of Jennie Currie’s decline and eventual death and my grandfather’s despair. Although it was a natural thing for my grandfather to keep a diary— at the age of twelve he began the habit of regularly recording the events of his life—the diary keeping also likely served as therapy as Dillon helplessly watched his wife waste away.

Tuberculosis, often called consumption because of its tendency to consume its victims slowly and brutally, was one of the common diseases of that time. Most infected people had a latent infection. About one in ten latent infections progressed to full-blown tuberculosis, and of these, over half died. Antibiotics would not be available to combat the disease until the late 1930s and 1940s.

In his diary, my grandfather recorded a snapshot of the diminishing life of a tuberculosis patient: the use of peptinoids, anti toxin injections, Dewey’s port, Tokay wine, mustard plasters, something called proteinenal, oxygen treatments, quieting powder, and heroin were each used either as an attempted cure or to alleviate symptoms. For about ten years from 1898 until 1910, the Beyer Company marketed heroin in the U.S., where drug regulation was virtually nonexistent, as a pain reliever and cough suppressant. Researchers were soon to discover that, unfortunately, heroin was dangerously addictive. The crazy quilt of medicinal substances the doctors recommended for Jennie came no doubt because there was nothing else left to try.

Dillon Wallace’s diary reveals a man wishing for a cure despite his probable realization that the odds were not in his wife’s favor; he records more than once that Jennie had lost much flesh, one of the signature symptoms of tuberculosis.

The diary is also a running account of life as a lawyer in the city, a reasonable, ordinary life, with its share of everyday tasks. During these years of his wife’s illness, my grandfather went to the office, sometimes worked late, and often shopped on the way home: one day he might pick up fish, or bread and corn cakes from the baker, or laundry and fruit, or heroin from the local pharmacist. He visits with his sister Annie, and writes letters to his sister Jessie in Albany and his cousin Janie in Massachusetts. Evenings he reads Ivanhoe aloud to his wife.

There are occasional mishaps, as on February 2, 1900, when Dillon mentions in a rather perfunctory manner at the end of a long entry, Oct 15 I was thrown from my bicycle and put my arm out of joint it is now in pretty good shape. He and Jennie change apartments to escape faulty plumbing. A sign of one who has been raised on a farm, Dillon often notes the weather. Visitors, shopping, correspondence, work, weather, Jennie’s health: it is a record of the personal. Politics and economics are not mentioned although in a previous diary Dillon notes that he has voted for Cleveland. There is some introspection, but no tendency to intellectualize Jennie’s tuberculosis. In fact, nowhere in the journal, which spans three years, does he give the disease a name, revealing the narrowed focus of a household bearing the burden of illness.

As for his wife, Dillon writes mostly of her struggle to hang on to her health. In the beginning Jennie is well enough to serve refreshments to evening visitors, but already Dillon is worrying: I do not like her to have a cold and particularly a cough, as there might be serious results, if it should get on her lung.

A couple of years later, on Thursday Feb 10, 1900, Dillon writes, With all her sickness and, at times, intense pain, Jennie has been so cheerful, and in general so bright and hopeful. He reports that Jennie is determined to repay him for his kindness during her infirmity and notes her selfless insistence, when he wishes aloud that he could trade places with Jennie and take on her suffering, that it is better that he the breadwinner is the healthy one.

Later, in the last months of her life, it is an accomplishment when Jennie spends a few hours of the day sitting up. One evening, my grandfather reports, I was unusually late not reaching home until 6:30 and found she had the table set for me, and was herself in the big chair with her red wrapper on. This is an event worth reporting. Quite a few times Dillon writes that she is frail and losing flesh; her health diminishes. Nearing the end, Dillon writes, I noticed a great change in her . . . her voice had lost its life, and she was very weak. Friday night . . . she was not able to collect her thoughts. She told me how she had wished that day for some asparagus.

He is often hopeful for a cure, but has moments of profound discouragement. On Thursday, February 8, 1900, he writes, A letter came today at the office from Janie [his cousin in Massachusetts]. It was a letter of sympathy, a good sweet loving letter. I was very, very glad to get it, though I think it has brought before me as nothing else has done a realization of Jennie’s condition. I cannot write any more now.

When Jennie finally dies in April 1900, he writes, I hardly know which way to turn or what to do. The ambition of my life has gone with my wife. Earlier, in March he had written, We are told that all things are possible with God, that he would save my poor wife now and give her back to me well again. I can only wait and see if He is a merciful God. Now he writes, I felt the hand of the great Destroyer had touched her.

In 1901 and at the turn of the millennium, Dillon Wallace was 38 years old, questioning the particulars of his faith, and entering his ninth month since the death of Jennie.

* * *

At some unrecorded time after Jennie’s death, my grandfather met a congenial companion, Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., who was recovering from typhoid and wanting to rejuvenate his career in journalism. He recruited his new friend Dillon Wallace for a trip of exploration in central Labrador, a region known only to the Naskapi Indians, with the goal of traveling inland from North West River some five hundred miles. Neither man had ever undertaken a trip of this length in country so unknown—but that was the point: Hubbard needed a big story to secure his reputation as an outdoor adventure writer. It did not, apparently, take much to convince Dillon Wallace, for he soon agreed, and they began to plan their trip.

* * *

Sailing north on June 20, 1903, Leonidas Hubbard, aspiring adventure writer and trip leader, George Elson, their voyageur, and my grandfather, a forty-year-old lawyer, departed New York on the S.S. Sylvia. Arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Dillon reports that this was the first time I ever set foot outside of Uncle Sam’s domain.

He must have relished the newness of it all. His diary reports on fellow passengers, a regular cast of characters:

Mr. Judson – the sport-- Mr. Birmingham the deaf man who paid his cab man $3 to take him half-hour’s ride – Mr. Squires, R.A. man from Amityville – two gents as Hubbard calls them, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Smith [and] Mr. Harley who is busy flirting with two woman passengers and a few others in the cabin.

He is busy sending messages home to his sisters and his friend and head of his legal firm, Alonzo McLaughlin; nearly every day he writes letters. In his diary he notes sunshine, then rain, choppy, rough sea, and once they land in St. John’s, Newfoundland, icebergs, spouting whales, and rough, rocky, and barren country. After several days in Newfoundland, he comments, No industry have we seen anywhere on the island but fishing, and the smell of fish pervades everything.

The trip north becomes complicated: Hubbard, Elson, and Wallace are ready to travel to North West River, an outpost in Labrador, directly; but the boat schedules do not seem to favor quick, direct travel. With several layovers and much switching of gear among various boats, Leonidas, Dillon, and George managed to reach North West River at 1:00 in the afternoon on July 14. The trip from New York had taken twenty-four days.

The explorers spent a night in North West River, welcomed by Mr. McKenzie, the manager of the Hudson’s Bay Post. In the morning they packed the gear in their canoe, took a few photographs, and pushed off from shore by nine o’clock a.m.

1 THE TRIP TO HUBBARD ROCK

Dear Amy,

Your grandfather would have remembered the smell of the vegetation in Labrador. When safely home again, it clings to your clothing, sleeping bag, tent, and packs. It permeates the space in which they are stored as a subtle reminder of this wild place and of things that were left unfinished there.

Labrador remains wild to this day. It must be the black flies above all that keep it so.

Certainly Dillon Wallace expected black flies as he and his partner, Leonidas Hubbard, and their voyageur, George Elson, set out on July 15, 1903, from the Hudson’s Bay post in North West River. George and Leonidas would have warned him about them and he likely experienced some around the post. No explanation, however, could have equipped him for the reality as they camped for the first night on the shore of Grand Lake.

Grand Lake, running to the northwest for 40 miles after crossing Little Lake from today’s village of North West River, located 25 miles east of Goose Bay, Labrador and Newfoundland, is stunning in its beauty. It is framed in by high hills on both shores. In 1999, when I paddled its length for the first time, we had been cautioned by the locals that a wind could kick up huge waves on it in no time flat. We were told to take great care when passing in front of Cape Caribou on the southwest side as its vertical cliffs made escape from the lake impossible in the event of a sudden wind storm.

Cape Caribou on Grand Lake (known as Cape Corbeau in Wallace’s day).

Dillon and Leonidas were likely cautioned in a similar fashion by the agent in charge of the Hudson’s Bay post, this area known as Cape Corbeau at that time. They made it safely past the cape on their first day out before looking for a campsite. George would have looked for a stretch of black spruce forest in a level area, not easily found as the hills come right down to the lake. Even though the forest looked impenetrable from the lake, there would be open spaces in it large enough for