On a remote railway across mid-Quebec wilderness, a tiny settlement called Oskelaneo rose and fell within a lifetime in the 20th century.
Its melodious name gets little recognition now, but in its time, Oskelaneo played a part in the chief romantic adventures of Canadian history – impulsive railway building, a gold rush, the fur trade, bush aviation, and contact with Indigenous people.
Location largely created its bustling economy. The National Transcontinental Railway (now part of CNR) intersected here with a far-reaching water route north over the height of land into the Hudson Bay watershed, on to Mistissini and down the Rupert River to James Bay.
For prospectors seeking gold in the Chibougamau region in the 1920s, the first step was to buy a train ticket to Oskelaneo, then proceed north by canoe. The Hudson’s Bay Company used the route to supply its inland northern posts. Recreational canoeists launched here for trips as far as James Bay.
But an especially colourful impact on Oskelaneo came from large numbers of inland James Bay Cree who canoed south on the route in summer in the 1930s and 1940s.
Their practical goal was to buy winter provisions at cheaper prices along the railway and earn income freighting goods north for the HBC. In time, though, the experience evolved into a family holiday with many camping for weeks to shop, visit friends, feast, wed and enjoy Oskelaneo diversions such as cowboy movies, square dancing and watching the evening train arrive daily with the rest of the town.
The Cree visitors numbered over 500, as reported in the Quebec Diocesan Gazette in 1941 by an Anglican missionary. “The encampment was a family affair as the squaws [sic] and children had all made the long journey down by canoe.” Communion was taken by over 300 and “brightness was added to the gatherings” by three weddings and a feast of roast moose.
By this estimate, the Cree far outnumbered the resident population estimated at around 100. Observers said the island where they camped in Lake Oskelaneo was white with their canvas tents.
I considered writing about the water route, and no story would be complete without learning from Cree participants how they enjoyed Oskelaneo and their 100-mile-plus summer journey.
In 1998, I interviewed several Cree who went to Oskelaneo, but I never wrote the intended story, mainly because I lacked the canoe skills to experience it myself. Also, my information seemed too scattered to assemble into a flowing story.
But some two decades later, I pulled out the interview transcripts and was impressed with their revelations.
Smally Petawabano was my first Cree contact. He was a former Mistissini band chief and an early Oskelaneo voyageur who spoke English, having gone to school for two years. Almost 30 years after the interview, I recall a well set, good-humoured man, thoroughly easy-going, patient with my questions, and ready with solid answers.
Petawabano said he was only six when he first paddled what they called the “railroad route.” His job was to help his father by carrying paddles and rifles on portages. He was proud to recount that “my father [Jean-Baptiste] was known as the greatest paddler and the strongest portage carrier ever known, able to carry 1150 pounds for 27 feet or something. That’s how I learned to carry loads.”
He recalled that Oskelaneo already looked like a ghost town in the 1940s. But it had a theatre showing cowboy and Indian movies. “Of course, Indians got slaughtered. I said, what kind of Indians are they, getting beat by white people? It should be the other way around,” Petawabano commented.
The train’s arrival was the main town entertainment for both visitors and residents. “Everyone was there to see who was getting off,” Petawabano said. “It was nice to see. When the train left, you’d go to bed.”
Residents recall visitors’ alarm as the train came round the bend, huffing and showering sparks. “They all took off, hiding behind things, then came out slowly,” said resident Allen Edwardson, who noted that the Cree called the train a “fire machine” (shoute taban).
So, did the people run and hide? “Well, it was something,” said Petawabano. “It was frightening because you could feel the ground shaking. People were scared.”
They also fled the sight of seaplanes that flew mining exploration equipment to Chibougamau from Oskelaneo. “When the first plane came in, everyone took off into the bush to watch from there. This thing landed on water! That was the biggest day they ever had: how can a machine fly without flapping its wings?”
I asked about their dramatic entrance into Oskelaneo in a long single file of canoes tied together and towed by a canoe with a motor.
It was reported in the Quebec Diocesan Gazette in 1943 as “an arresting sight to see the Indian families and groups arriving in their canoes, sweeping up Oskelaneo River into the lake and landing on Indian Point to put up their tents and greet their friends.”
Edwardson likened it to emulating a line of geese.
Petawabano said the striking arrival was on purpose. Families, who had travelled the route in small groups to avoid jamming up portages, came together on approaching Oskelaneo to make the dramatic entrance.
“We wanted to show the white man that we always stayed together – like holding hands together,” he said. “According to my grandfather, by staying together, you could be stronger than any other person, especially if you fight for something.”
And while the simple explanation for going to Oskelaneo was to buy cheaper supplies, Petawabano gave a more human motivation. “People liked to work hard in those days. They didn’t like to come out of the bush in June and sit around all summer because you get sloppy.
“So, they say, there’s work to be done – get our supplies from Oskelaneo, it took us a month and a half and when we got back, we were in top shape and ready to go back into the bush.”
Petawabano stressed that the railroad route was not easy. Without a major river to follow, where rapids could be run, it was interspersed with small creeks with many portages, especially on the homeward trip when water was low and their canoes were loaded down with their personal supplies and those freighted for the HBC.
An idea of the scope of HBC freighting work is given in the Oskelaneo post journal dated July 6, 1934: “Loaded 22 canoes with 20,341 lbs of freight for Mistassini and Chibougamau.”
Petawabano, who died at age 76 in 2010, remembered little alcohol drinking because the RCMP watched over bootleggers and the Cree couldn’t take a chance on landing in jail when they were expected to come home with winter supplies.
However, other witnesses such as Edwardson recall parties and dancing “pretty near every night” with everybody coming together. They were good fiddlers (naming Freddy Mianscum) and revellers enjoyed square dances and western dances, plus one called the “duck dance” named for ducking under arms.
“They were on holiday there,” Edwardson said.
Another witness to the Cree visits was Ben Midlige, son of the village’s founder and informal mayor John Midlige. The “Mistassini crowd,” Ben told me, were a “very healthy lot, fine looking Indians and very religious Anglicans. We would see a woman in the store pregnant, she would go home to have the baby and come back that afternoon.”
Midlige recalls that the Cree, when they first came, hadn’t seen oranges and bananas and didn’t know how to eat them. And when they got a case of Kik soft drink, they thought it was liquor. “They really thought they got tight,” he said. “It was mind over matter.”
I also spoke with Evadney Gunner, another Oskelaneo visitor remembered for her youthful beauty and talent as an English interpreter. At my visit, she lived with a sister on an island south of Mistissini – the Waconichi River camp. A boat tied up on shore allowed visitors to row to the island.
Gunner was a big woman, bursting with good humour and delighted to talk about Oskelaneo. “We liked that place,” she said.
The railroad route was more than a shopping trip to get their winter supplies of flour, sugar and more.
“We didn’t just grab whatever we found in the store and go home. We’d hang around in the little town for a month, month and a half,” Gunner recounted. “We would walk around, go to the restaurant, go visit people, or go to the dancing place, things like that. The men went out on the lake, fished and dried and smoked fish.
While Petawabano described a largely male-only trip, Gunner said, “Women don’t like to stay behind. A man has to take his family. Women have to help their husbands carry stuff over the portages – so many portages.”
What was on her shopping list? “Well, all kinds of junk,” she laughed. “Plaid material to make our dresses, coats, sweaters, whatever we find, like nice fancy looking boots.”
The trip home was its own adventure.
“We didn’t go straight home, we sometimes stayed in one place for two-three days to go fishing or hunting on the way back,” she recalled. “Sometimes it was too windy, and we couldn’t go on the lake. Sometimes it would rain for two-three days, and you had to stay where you were. You couldn’t keep on going.”
Gunner died at age 84 in 2013; a weathered, wooden cross marks her grave in the old cemetery at Mistissini.
A view of shopping congestion is given in the Oskelaneo post journal dated July 9, 1940: “There are now over 300 Indians in town and when 100 or more try to jam into the store at one time, we have our hands full.”
Cree from Ouje-Bougoumou also had fond memories. Interviews with Elders Helen Sharl, Elizabeth Dixon and Robert Bosum highlight the social aspect of Oskelaneo visits. It was an occasion to meet friends they didn’t often see.
Arriving in Oskelaneo, people “would greet us and the most memorable thing was that people were good to each other and how friendly they were,” said Sharl. “We’d set up camp and meet people from all over such as Mistassini, Obedjiwan and Chibougamau.”
Bosum added, “The family always looked forward to going to Oskelaneo every July. We would go for a month or two. I think the main attraction was the inexpensive food and meeting friendly people.”
Oskelaneo trips faded away when supplies for Mistissini started coming in by Canso plane (giant amphibious cargo planes) or by a new road from Lac Saint-Jean to Chibougamau. Oskelaneo’s population declined and the water route to the railway lost its voyagers.
As Oskelaneo slid into obscurity in the 1960s, residents saw possible salvation in building or repairing locks and dams on the Oskelaneo River, allowing large boats to travel between the railway village and the Gouin Reservoir.
A petition to Ottawa noted that the water route is “very much used by everyone here,” including fishermen taking out fish from the Gouin Reservoir, timber harvesters, forest rangers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, prospectors and tourists. “Please note also that hundreds of Indians travel these waters from break-up to freeze-up.”
But the plaintive cry was not heard.
This blow came a decade after another economic hope fizzled out. A boom in pulpwood harvesting gave Oskelaneo a feel of revival through the 1950s. The Mistissini Cree who earlier canoed to Oskelaneo for summer shopping now flew down to cut pulp, creating spending in town.
But the pulpwood cutting ended around 1959, leading to the shutdown of Oskelaneo’s HBC store, according to its last manager Gerard Lafontaine. Without fanfare, the flag was lowered on July 31, 1962, ending a run of 36 years.
Lafontaine, who was mayor of Senneterre when I met him in 1993, fondly recalled the good life in Oskelaneo, “living right in the bush, but with the convenience of the train.”
But only about 60 people were left in 1962, he said. They were mostly retired or on welfare. “The important townspeople had left, except for John Midlige, who kept to himself and followed his stocks.” (Midlige died in 1970.)
A few years later, the end came for the Oskelaneo River railway station, built in the 1920s to meet the “expected rush of prospectors and mining men to the famed Chibougamau gold fields.”
The post office struggled on until September 1973.
Oskelaneo’s name remains on Quebec maps along the lonesome railway line, as if something was going on there. But except for a few customers of a fishing and hunting outfitter, the melody has ceased, no Cree gather to watch the evening train, and all my contacts who helped tell Oskelaneo’s story have passed on.