Mattie Mitchell by Gary Collins Page A

the very next morning. He was eager to scout
around the outlying valleys and hills. He travelled along on
snowshoes over the virgin snow. Down each hidden forest glade
and unmarked trace he stepped joyfully along.
    In his left hand he carried a long-barrelled Martin Henry rifle
that had seen much use. In his pocket were four brass bullets for
the gun. They were the only ammunition he owned. In his right
hand he held a sharp axe that he frequently swung at low-hanging
limbs that were in his way. He paid careful attention to every
detail as if he were seeing it all for the first time.
    He was crossing a small stream. Its snowy banks, now well
above the running water, indicated that over the years it had been
well used to a deeper, swifter flow. Directly across the brook
from him was a recently foundered gravel bank that the slowly
moving water had only partly washed away. When the cut-bank
had occurred, probably during last spring’s melt, it had exposed
a large, brown, rust-stained, jutting outcrop of rock, its base notyet washed clean by the low water levels of the stream. For years
Mattie had used this stream for crossing. He had not seen the
rock formation before.
    The different and out of the ordinary always drew his eye. He
crossed the brook in a few quick strides, the frigid water leaving
a wet mark halfway up the calf of his leather boots. Standing at
the base of the jagged cliff, Mattie tried to understand what it was
he was seeing and immediately knew where he had seen it before.

    IT WAS DURING HIS TIME SPENT GUIDING for the Newfoundland-born geologist James Patrick Howley and Howley’s mentor,
Scottish-born Alexander Murray. Both men treated Mattie with
respect. Just three years Mattie’s junior, Howley treated him as
an equal.
    Howley held Mattie Mitchell in such high esteem as to
recommend his delightful Indian guide to the Newfoundland
government as the finest of men and the best of guides. Mattie
called Howley “Sage,” the Mi’kmaq word for James. James
Howley always called Mattie “Matthieu.”
    Mattie had been a single young man of twenty in 1864, yet
his remarkable skills and wilderness knowledge were well-known, from the tiny villages of Halls Bay on the northeast coast
of the island to the mountain fjords of the west coast. Murray and
Howley were in the employ of the Newfoundland government to
determine and document the island’s resources.
    The last time any serious inquiry into the natural resources
of this, tenth of the world’s largest islands, had been done was
back in 1839, when the geologist Joseph Beete Jukes had done
preliminary work here. Jukes had primarily conducted coastal
surveys with few forays into what the white men considered—because they hadn’t ventured there—the “fearful” wilderness of
this remarkable island.
    One of the few interior expeditions Jukes did make was up
the mouth of the smooth Humber River as far as the long, narrow
Deer Lake. This had been a relatively easy exploratory excursion
for the geologist. It had been made all that much easier by the
expert guiding skills provided by the west coast Mi’kmaq Indians
which Jukes seldom named.
    Murray and his eager protege, Howley, would do more than
explore the coastal regions of this unique North Atlantic nation.
They were tasked by the government, and quite willingly intended,
to traverse as much of the landscape as possible, including the
hinterland. They loved their job. It would take the two paid
pioneers many years of diligent, meticulously documented
surveying, and even then they had only skimmed a few places of
the vast interior of this intricate island.
    Alexander Murray was a geologist born on June 2, 1810,
in “Dollierie House,” Crieff, Scotland. He was the very first
director of the Geological Survey of Newfoundland. He came
to the island in 1864 and was enthralled with all of its largely
unspoiled, unexplored—at least by the