# The Tourist's Maritime Provinces/Chapter 10

CHAPTER X
THE VALLEY OF THE RIVER ST. JOHN
St. John—Fredericton—Woodstock—Grand Falls—St. Leonards—Edmundston.
The rail route from St. John to Fredericton is via the Canadian Pacific (66 m.) through Grand Bay, Westfield and Fredericton Junction, where the road turns north from the main line, St. John—Montreal.
The Victoria Steamship Company and the Crystal Stream Steamship Company leave on alternate week-days from Indiantown. North End, for the capital city, 84 miles up the St. John River.
The Victoria and the D. J. Purdy are moderately good river-boats, though far inferior to those found elsewhere in the world on streams of so great importance as highways of travel. The journey to Fredericton consumes about 8 hours by the Victoria, which is somewhat faster than its competitor. The noon meal served on board is rather better than those experienced—one uses the word advisedly—on most Provincial steam-boats.
The river whose flow is deepest and broadest between St. John and Fredericton has been extolled as a superior combination of the most romantic water-ways of this and other continents. It must needs be a very prodigy of a river to merit the comparisons drawn by exaggerative visitors and by native writers over zealous for the scenic fame ​of their mother province. A commissioner writing from Annapolis in 1783 pronounced it "equal to the Connecticut or the Hudson," but more recent scriveners have declared it paramount in pictorial beauty to the Hudson and the Rhine. Between the shaggy snout of Boar's Head and Gagetown (47 m.) ranges of sharply silhouetted hills are effectively displayed on either bank; the river's width is amplified by deep bays and coves, and grassy islands mark the middle course. Bounteous pastures and well-planted farms rise from the water-edge and cover the breast of the upland. Along the lower reaches of the river are inviting colonies of villas and rustic cabins among groves that cling to the ledge of bluff and shelving beach. Beyond Gagetown the prospect subsides in breadth as in beauty. Above sedgy-looking shores is an occasional knoll with its dawdling village; steamer landings are stacked with the crated harvest of orchard and farm; log-rafts drift past the tawny mouths of down-creeping rivers; here is an Indian canoe, there a skimming launch, or a lumber schooner with bellowed sails. The St. John has no thrilling moments. One is impressed by it as by broad-bosomed maternity. Its presence is stately, benevolent. It gathers its children from the west and the east and moves spaciously down a productive valley to the sea. In the spring it bestows an alluvial blessing upon island and low meadow, so that thick grasses spring up and ​form herbage "unsurpassed by the natural grasses of any portion of the American continent." The apples grown in valley orchards have a high reputation for their flavour and blooming cheeks. One of the eight New Brunswick shires watered by the St. John, the County of Kings, produces in a year a million and a half pounds of rich cheese and butter. In profile, the narrow peninsula of this county which lies across the outlet of the river plainly resembles on the map of the valley a running horse with ears laid back and mouth dropped open. Along the under line of the outstretched neck is the expansive bay formed by the Kennebecasis River. Long Reach, a straight passage 20 miles in length, extends from the muzzle to the ears, and Belleisle Bay from the crest to the withers of this imaginary steed.
The steamer makes frequent calls at wharves from which passengers and produce are embarked. Above Hampstead (33 m.) the channel is cumbered by a group of oddly-shaped islands endowed with "intervale" soil. Twisted Long Island has a pond in the centre. Lower Musquash admits the river to its heart through a slender strait. At this point Washademoak Lake joins the out-going flood. Ten miles to the north is Gagetown, the seat of Queens County. On the other side of the river ​Grand Lake emerges between the curved shores of the Jemseg. The largest colliery in New Brunswick is on the banks of this sizeable body of water which is traversed bi-weekly by steamers from St. John to Chipman, on the Salmon River, a total distance of 100 miles. The estimated supply of the Grand Lake coal-field is 150,000,000 tons. Duck, deer and moose inhabit this district.
The mouth of the Jemseg was chosen as a strategic point of defence by the French in 1640. The fort erected here was the object of an assault by the English in 1654 and was held under the English flag for nearly twenty years. Villebon, Governor of Acadie, made Jemseg his capital until 1692 when, on account of its susceptibility to floods, he abandoned this position for one 30 mile's up-stream nearer the Malecite villages. A memorial has been set up on Emenenic Island to a company of Frenchmen from St. Malo who established a settlement there in 1611.
Tributary to Grand Lake are Maquapit and French Lake on whose borders have been unearthed examples of pottery used in the Stone Age. One urn tooled in the rush pattern and decorated with lines of dots, is in the possession of the New Brunswick Historical Society. It was taken from an island in Maquapit Lake in 1904. Similar discoveries have been made in the Kennebecasis Valley, where implements fashioned from carnelian and chalcedony have been spaded from ​their hiding-places. Opposite the convergence of the Oromocto River and the St. John is Maugerville (71 m.), significant as having been the scene of the parent settlement of the English in this province (1763). This part of the Valley has always been a hunting-ground for the Indians of the Malecite branch of the Abenaki or Etchemin family. Their Micmac cousins are also Abenakis, and both tribes are of basic Algonquin stock. The language of the Malecites resembles the Passamaquoddy rather than the Micmac tongue. Champlain who was the first to record their existence called them Les Etchemons, By 1679 they were almost exterminated through contests with the English. A few years later a French priest wrote that they were "brave as the Francs and Romans," severely chaste and honourable. He declared there was no blasphemous word in their language and that lying, thieving and vulgarity were almost unknown. Many of the Malecites, of whom there are about 700 in New Brunswick, have intermarried with the French of the upper St. John counties.
A few miles above Maugerville appear the embowered banks and hills of the capital of the province.
Fredericton is a base for hunters in the fall and winter, and for fishermen in the spring. At all times it is an agreeable place of residence. Tourists are most impressed by the park-like rows ​of shady streets and by the bulk and effectiveness of provincial and government buildings which seem irrelevant in so village-like and placid a community. Fredericton is remote enough from larger and more broad-minded towns to be and also to appear self-sufficient. Since 1787 it has been the seat of the province and until the last quarter century barracks and drill-ground were gay with red coats. Before New Brunswick's first governor called it Frederick Town for the second son of King George III, the town then occupied by French Acadians was known as St. Anne's Point. Villebon's fort on the opposite bank of the St. John was the centre of a still earlier settlement which, in 1696, was cannonaded by a Massachusetts force assembled to avenge the joint French and Indian attack against Pemaquid. In this engagement the New Englanders lost twenty-five men and precipitately retired to their sloops, leaving Villebon's garrison almost intact.
FALLS OF THE NEPISIGUIT RIVER, NEAR BATHURST, NEW BRUNSWICK
​show softly grey against a background of heavy foliage. Architecturally the edifice has unusual merit. A tablet within commemorates General Smyth, the one-time Lieutenant-Governor of the province whose name was given to the first steamboat which ran between St. John and Fredericton, the year being 1816. The Parliament Building is visited for the tower view, for the portraits in the Assembly Hall and the treasures of the Library.
Near the cathedral, at River House, lived the English woman of letters, Juliana Horatio Ewing whose husband, Major Ewing, was stationed at this garrison for two years. One of Fredericton's sons is Bliss Carman, born in 1861 in a house also on the shadowy river-bank. He and his cousin, Charles G. D. Roberts, who is a native of Douglas, New Brunswick, are great grand cousins of Emerson. In the country north of the Bay of Fundy, Roberts acquired his first knowledge of woodcraft, but began his career as a writer after coming to live in the capital.
When Prince Edward of Wales came here in 1860 he stayed at Government House on the outskirts of the town. In the grim stone mansion he received the visit of a party of Indians who came in canoes from their village across the river and made him presents of blankets and feather-work. Later he returned their visit. Other notable guests entertained under this historic roof were ​the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Connaught (1869), the Earl of Dufferin, Sir John McDonald, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Derby, Prince Jerome Bonaparte, Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne, Lord Lansdowne and Earl Minto.
The University of New Brunswick is situated a little over a mile from the town on a well-shaded height.
Visitors remaining in Fredericton for any length of time will enjoy driving past Wilmot Park and the grounds of The Hermitage to Spring Hill on the way to Woodstock, and across the bridge to Marysville, a lumbering town 3 miles up the Nashwaak. The Fredericton Tourist Association will outline canoe trips and shooting and fishing excursions into the great game woods of which Fredericton is the rail centre.
The Fredericton Division of the Intercolonial Railway runs for 129 m. northeast along the course of the Nashwaak and Miramichi Rivers to Loggieville on Miramichi Bay, Gulf of St. Lawrence. At Chatham Jc. (112 m.) the road crosses the trunk line of the Intercolonial Railway, Halifax—Montreal. The timber country served by this branch is important for the production and manufacture of lumber, and is visited during three seasons of the year by trout and salmon fishermen, and trackers of deer, moose, bear and caribou. Boiestown and Doaktown are principal outfitting head-quarters for sportsmen and their guides.
McGivney's, 34 m. from Fredericton, is at the junction of the Intercolonial branch and the Transcontinental Railway, Moncton—Edmundston (230 m.) via Chipman (Grand Lake), Plaster Rock, Grand Falls and St. Leonards. This line traversing the forests of the province from the ​south-east to the northwest corner is the New Brunswick Division of the great national highway of the Grand Trunk System which is to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific.
As indicated above, the Grand Falls of the St. John may be reached from Fredericton by the Transcontinental Railway via McGivney Jc. A more frequented route is over the Canadian Pacific Road, Fredericton—Woodstock (via Newburgh Jc.)—Grand Falls, 138 m. Another route is by way of the new St. John Valley Railway (see Note 1, this chapter).
The Middle St. John may also be viewed from the river-boat which goes from Fredericton to Woodstock (64 m.) via Kingsclear, the impressive outlet of the Pokiok River, Canterbury and Northampton. The river rapids provide rugged sport for the canoeist, who may go all the way to Grand Falls or make by-excursions on tributary streams with short portages.
Woodstock—Grand Falls—Edmundston.
Few tourists essay the routes that wind west and north of Fredericton, but those who do are compensated by the breadth of vigorous forests and wild river views, and by the glorious cataract of the St. John, which of itself is enough to reward a journey to this section of New Brunswick.
Woodstock is situated on the short road which links the Canadian Pacific line from Fredericton with the one that runs up from St. Andrews and McAdam Junction to the Maine frontier (see Note 4, Chapter IX). From the Grafton side of the twelve-piered bridge that spans the St. John, the town makes a graceful picture reclining in an arena of rounded hills with the river for foot-stool. Carleton County, of which Woodstock is the ​capital, ranks in fertility and abundance of miscellaneous crops with the richest agricultural areas in a province said by a Harvard authority to be superior as a farming region to any New England state.
Beyond Woodstock and Newburgh Junction the journey along the St. John is diverted by characteristic New Brunswick scenery—steep hills running up to low mountain peaks, rough patches of trees with peaceful intervening pastures, the paraphernalia of lumbering and milling, logs hurtling through boisterous waters, brooks chattering down secretive glens, grey river rocks that serve as precarious pedestals for well-accoutred fishermen . . . In this country angling that is sport for well-dowered visitors is a vocation for men to the wilderness born. At Perth, 48 miles above Woodstock, a railway follows the classic Tobique for 28 miles to Plaster Rock on the Transcontinental Line. Across the St. John from Perth is the village of Andover which to fishers of salmon signifies canoes, guides and the provisioning of weighty pack-baskets. Guests at Perley's forget the ticker-tape in comparing rods and the newest thing in reels. Friendships are made or sundered on the question of a fly, reputations gauged by the scales.
Canoemen know a way to paddle and pole from Andover to the Bay Chaleur by the Tobique and ​Nepisiguit Rivers, with short and infrequent carries.
The railroad swerves close to the frontier at Aroostook Junction, and sends off a branch into Maine. The Aroostook Valley as far as Presque Isle, 34 miles from the Junction, belonged to New Brunswick for fifty years following the international boundary settlement of 1783. Consequent upon a show of arms in a border dispute that waxed hot enough to threaten the peace of two countries, the territory was conceded to Maine in 1839 by a complacent British commissioner.
The railway climbs higher among the hills during the journey of 18 miles from Aroostook Junction to Grand Falls. Here the river makes a wide detour and holds the village within the curve. As the train nears the bridge which carries the rails to the opposite bank of a frothing gorge the Falls come startlingly into view up-stream. Over the lip of a daring precipice the narrowed flood vaults in a perpendicular cascade that caroms from ledge to ledge and sends off clouds of mist. The town is on the level plain above. A little way from it we come to the edge of the river and follow its course to the brink where without warning it tumbles over with a protesting roar. The measure of its descent is 80 feet. Spume and prism-ray light the sullen chasm and play against the bold wet flanks. In the logging season the ​sticks of voyaging trunks pierce the luminous vapour like black arrows, or leap far above the foaming stream, then drop again to grind and tangle in whirlpools at the base of the canyon. Any town child will show the way to the stairs that give a view of the cataract from the side, or will point out the Caves and the seething Coffee Mill, the Great Well and Pulpit Rock, and relate without fail the old tale of the Mohawks and the Malecite women which is adapted to the exigencies of every important water-fall in the province.
Beyond Grand Falls the River St. John performs a service for the Dominion and the United States by marking the boundary for nearly a hundred miles. Madawaska County was settled by the Acadians who were dispossessed when the English occupied central New Brunswick. St. Leonards is the terminus of the International Railway which takes the general direction of the Restigouche River and crosses the Upsalquitch on its way to Campbellton, a station on the main Intercolonial line. These names signify less to the tourist than to the sportsman. The journey of 112 miles from the St. John to the Bay of Heat has its distractions in scenes relating to the deep woods. Lumbering and farming are the occupations of all the male inhabitants who are not engaged in the remunerative profession of "guiding"— ​remunerative at least in the moose yards and on the sovereign streams accessible by rail from St. Leonards. The New Brunswick forests are especially rich in hemlock, hackmatack, spruce, maple, elm, oak, birch, beech and ash, of which exports to the value of $5,000,000 are annually shipped from the province. About 300,000,000 feet of lumber is cut in a year. A modest proportion of the total output is retained for the domestic manufacture of wood pulp, shingles, laths, boards, blinds, doors, sashes. On main rivers there are numerous saw-mills which are fed by branching streams that carry the felled trees swiftly, with the aid of agile "drivers," to the place of their dismemberment. Each log bears its owner's brand on the butt so that little confusion arises at the "sorting" when individual rafts are assembled to be towed down navigable currents by tugs.
The hotel at St. Leonards is quite surprisingly modern in its appointments, the proprietor having had consideration for the trend of sporting traffic from the United States over the Boston and Albany and Canadian Pacific Roads into the heart of the New Brunswick woods. The new International Bridge crosses the St. John from St. Leonards to Van Buren, Maine, where connection is made with the Bangor and Aroostook Railway.
The route northwest of St. Leonards bears through an Acadian farm country to ​Edmundston, also a railway centre of some importance. Three lines join here, two of them to diverge again in opposite directions. This is the end of the Canadian Pacific division from Fredericton. The new Transcontinental Railway continues from Edmundston into Quebec. The Temiscouata Railway, whose northern terminus is on the St. Lawrence River at Rivière du Loup, Quebec, makes a right angle at Edmundston (81 miles) and follows the St. John to Connors, N. B., 32 miles west of Edmundston. A few miles beyond Connors, the St. John River enters Maine, the state of its birth, its head being near the source of the Penobscot, 450 miles from the sea.
* ↑ The St. John Valley R. R. (St. John—Grand Falls) has recently been under construction between Gagetown, Fredericton and Woodstock.
* ↑ By following this route a circuit of the province can be made without retracing steps. Campbellton—Moncton, 186 m—St. John, 276 m.