Down a Dead Man’s River

Fifty years after Art Moffatt’s death on the Dubawnt River – a canoeing tragedy that still echoes in the minds of today’s barren land paddlers – Che-Mun tracked down the first men to paddle the length of the Dubawnt after Moffat’s group. In contrast to Moffatt’s, theirs is a story of preparation, competence, self-assurance, and success in the pioneering days of tundra-river paddling.

If a 75-day, 1150 mile wilderness canoe trip can be summarized with a single fact, consider this one: Paddling a river descended only twice in the previous seventy years, and one that took the life of the leader of its most recent passage, four young men, completing the most remote section of their trip, arrived at the Inuit community of Baker Lake on the exactly the day they planned – August 6, 1966.

Bob Thum, his younger brother Carl, Tom Bose, and David Wilson did not die on the Dubawnt River. Their trip was smooth to the point of being punctual. The four college students, “Voyageurs Canadiens” as they dubbed themselves, paddled from Uranium City on Lake Athabasca to Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay efficiently, safely, and without re-supply. They traveled with a confidence and competence that belied their youth — Bob Thum and Wilson were the group elders at all of 21 – but that reflected their meticulous planning which included two long preparatory expeditions.

After the death of Art Moffatt on the river in 1955, the Voyageurs Canadiens, along with paddlers like Stu Coffin, John Lentz, and Eric Morse, pioneered recreational canoeing in the far north and showed how tundra river paddling, though fraught with inherent perils, could be done safely and happily. Moffatt’s tragedy, now fifty years in the past, resonated then as now in the minds of paddlers venturing deep into the tundra wilds. Moffatt died of exposure after two of his party’s three canoes dumped in a rapids that now bares his name. Five men ended up swimming in the frigid water. On the tundra, leaderless in already-snowy mid-September, the surviving party was fortunate to return to civilization alive.

All Photos by John Skemp

After the death of Art Moffatt on the river in 1955, the Voyageurs Canadiens, along with paddlers like Stu Coffin, John Lentz, and Eric Morse, pioneered recreational canoeing in the far north and showed how tundra river paddling, though fraught with inherent perils, could be done safely and happily.

For a current paddling generation now used to the modern accoutrements of deep wilderness travel, it’s useful to imagine the tundra tripping era before satellite phones and Personal Locater Beacons.

“A trip like that was an order of magnitude more difficult than either of our previous two,” Bob Thum offers. “The run from Stony Rapids to Baker Lake – there’s nobody there to help you. Even if you’re paying meticulous attention to what you’re doing, it’s really rather sobering to think what could happen in the middle of that.”

“We thought we might be able to have the airline that flew over that route protect a frequency for us, so if anything happened we might be able to radio up, but they said, ‘No way.’”

Into that vast, treeless beyond, in wood-canvas canoes and with enough food, fishing lures, and ammunition, they thought, to feed themselves for the seven-week stretch on the Dubawnt between settlements, the Voyageurs Canadiens paddled Joseph Burr Tyrrell’s river in the wake of Moffatt.

Re-writing the Moffatt Story
Because of Moffatt’s ordeal, not in spite of it, the Voyageurs Canadiens chose the Dubawnt for their crowning trip. “Moffatt is precisely why we took the trip,” Bob Thum, these days a lawyer in Los Angeles, says. “I thought experienced trippers could cover Tyrrell’s route safely and skillfully, which we did.”

“Those guys had no business being up there,” Thum adds matter-of-factly of Moffatt’s group. “They were a bunch of guys who didn’t know what they were doing and led by a guy with poor leadership skills. They fooled around and did a lot of crap and it finally came back to bite them. This was simply a group of novices led by someone more interested in film than travel, which squandered its time and resources and then made some tragic mistakes.

Thum came to his hard view forty-some years ago, before he’d paddled a single stroke above tree line, but as he, his brother, and Bose were getting a thorough canoe-tripping education in the Quetico-Superior region of northern Minnesota and Ontario. In 1962, an influential counselor at Ely, Minnesota’s Camp Voyageur, which the three attended, told Bob Thum about the two-part Sports Illustrated article on the Moffatt trip.

“Dave Millett had remembered it,” Bob Thum recalls. “I don’t remember why – he was sort of a dreamer – and then I got my hands on it that fall. He said that if you guys work hard enough, maybe you could take that trip. Of course, I hadn’t heard about the barren grounds — nobody had because nobody was going there – but that caught my interest. I thought, maybe when I’m good enough and I’ve developed good enough skills, maybe we could take a trip up there.”

Thum remembers the middle of the group’s Albany River trip . . . as “backbreaking, the hardest kind of tripping you’ll ever do.” The group was forced to cut their own portages through the seldom-traveled country.

The contrasts between the Moffatt trip, as gleaned from the 1959 Sports Illustrated story and from the 1996 book A Death on the Barrens by Moffatt party member George Grinnell, and that of the Voyageurs Canadiens could hardly be more stark. While the Moffatt story unfolds as a tragedy just waiting to happen – indifferent leadership, an inexperienced party, short rations, bad chemistry, a plodding pace, and an apparent apathy toward the season closing on them, – the Voyageurs Canadiens trip plays out like the final stage of the methodical, multi-year build-up that it was.

“That was kind of our approach to the trip – to get a lot of miles under the belt, get a lot of experience – and prepare ourselves accordingly,” Bob Thum explains. “We wanted to avoid the situation that Moffatt got himself in where he had some experience, but not much. And he went with a bunch of guys that had very little experience. I think he’d gone down the Albany maybe two or three times. That’s a nice river, but not a terribly difficult trip.”

Not counting the miles paddled and rods portaged during their typical camper-summers at Camp Voyageur, the Thum brothers — the stern paddlers on the Dubawnt – paddled 3000 long-trip miles in preparation for the tundra crossing. Along with Bose and another paddler they tripped the 1200 miles from Ely to Fort Albany in 1964; with Wilson, a Princeton classmate of Bob Thum’s, and a fourth (but without Bose) they covered the traditional fur trade route from Lake Athabasca to Rainy Lake, including the wicked stretch through Lake Winnipeg, in 1965, an 1800 mile trip.

Thum remembers the middle of the group’s Albany River trip – connecting the beaten trails of the Quetico-Superior (now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park) to the Albany headwaters – as “backbreaking, the hardest kind of tripping you’ll ever do.” The group was forced to cut their own portages through the seldom-traveled country.

The preparatory trips, though long enough to be “lifetime trips” for many a paddler, toughened the group, honed the team’s tripping skills, tested personal compatibilities, and reinforced the notion that the county is big and trippers are small.

Mistakes on the trail, served as lessons learned for the future. “One of the canoes went over on a rapids on the Churchill,” Bob Thum remembered. “We hadn’t scouted – a classic mistake – and there was a ledge that went about three-quarters of the way across the river. One boat went over. I thought that’s a pretty good lesson as far as not feeling that you’re better than the woods.”

“We didn’t take a lot of chances,” he continued. “When we got on the Dubawnt trip, we took even fewer chances. You know the old saying about the Indian on the portage: No Indian ever died on a portage. There’s lots of opportunities to screw up up there, and when you screw up like Moffatt did, when the water’s that cold, that can be the end of you.”

A Search for Knowledge
It’s easy today to forget the collective experience, knowledge, and lore accumulated in the years since the nascent days of barren land travel. Advice now found in widely available books, in tripper’s journals, and via on-line sources, was impossible to come by in Moffatt’s and the Voyageurs Canadains’ era.

“There was nobody you could rely on,” Bob Thum acknowledges. “I had two things I could look to on the Dubawnt: One was Moffatt, and you couldn’t really get anything out of that at all, and the other was Tyrrell. I got a copy of his 1893 report and you could actually get a great deal of assistance out of his writing. And that was it.”

Canadian geologist J. B. Tyrrell led a party of eight including his brother James, three Iroquois, and three Métis on a route that arced from Lake Athabasca to Chesterfield Inlet down to Churchill and back to civilization via the Hayes River and Lake Winnipeg. Traveling by canoe until being rescued late in the season north of Churchill, the party then needed to dogsled and snowshoe south. Tyrrell’s trip, under the auspices of the Geological Survey of Canada, clarified the routes of the central barren land’s major water courses.

“There was nobody you could rely on,” Bob Thum acknowledges. “I had two things I could look to on the Dubawnt: One was Moffatt, and you couldn’t really get anything out of that at all, and the other was Tyrrell. I got a copy of his 1893 report and you could actually get a great deal of assistance out of his writing. And that was it.”
Thum also approached members of the Moffatt group. “I didn’t view them as being any kind of model for a tripper. Because of the historical perspective, I wanted to talk to them. Moffatt was gone. I found several of them. I tried to get a perspective on what they had done.”

Though Camp Voyageur’s Millett had never paddled in the far north, his influence on the group’s manner of travel is evident. “We’d all paddled with one particular guide – Dave Millet – who was a fanatic for proper paddling technique – I don’t mean paddle-in-the-water – but canoe tripping: what you took; how you kept your camp,” Bob Thum recalls.

“We had developed, I think, a really good, tight, tripping style in our years at the camp, and honed it on the Albany. We had the system down pretty good. We knew how to pack, how to avoid excess, how to basically go as light as you can but still eat pretty well. It’s kind of basic, it seems, but you have to learn it yourself.”

Millett, nowadays a flight surgeon with the FAA, acknowledges an essentialist, detail-oriented tripping ethic. “You planned and you prepared. Everything is checked over, nothing left to chance. You have great respect for where you are going. You have no extra anything you’re not going to need. But, on the other hand, you have enough of everything you’re going to need.”

Millett, still flattered today by Thum’s regard for him, saw special qualities in Thum as well. “Bob Thum was the ideal canoeist,” Millett says. “He was disciplined, he was smart, and he had the physique. He could paddle all day; he could paddle all night. He was strong; he was tough. I can’t think of a better guy to take that trip.”

The Team Effort
For all of Bob Thum’s motivation, leadership, and individual abilities, the trip down the Dubawnt was necessarily a team effort. Aside from the experience that each paddler brought from the earlier trips, each had his own special talents and interests.

As Bose, a former Rhodes Scholar who now works in the Internet telephony field in Minneapolis remembers it; Carl Thum did the lion’s share of the cooking while he and Wilson were the fishermen and fish cleaners. Although Carl Thum shot the one caribou the group killed en route, Wilson was the truest shot and the principal hunter, even if Bose didn’t always agree with his quarry.

“Sometimes we’d be windbound and Wilson would just take off with the shotgun,” he recalled fondly. “He was the only one with any real experience, and he’d just start walking back up in the ridges. And he’d kill ptarmigan and we’d say, ‘Don’t waste shotgun shells on those dinky things!’”

Canada goose was the favored bird, and the Voyageurs Canadiens took 34 during the course of the trip.

“If the rapids were going to throw that much water over the top,” Bose explains, “we were going to portage them. We did not take chances. We shot plenty of rapids, but they were rapids we should have been shooting. That was Moffatt’s lesson.”
“Boy, we loved the geese because it was fatty!” Bose remembers. “When we were still down in the tree area, a couple times, each one of us would have a whole goose and cook it on a spit. The grease is dripping down, the flames are coming up – Oh man, that was the greatest thing, because you just crave grease.”

With each paddler playing his particular role, the personal dynamics went well, unlike those of the Moffatt party.

“We were a good crew,” Carl Thum, now the Academic Skills Center director at Dartmouth, Moffatt’s alma mater, says, “experienced, hard working, strong, determined, willing to experience hardship, a good blend of personalities, independent yet reliant on the others. We understood the value of a group dynamic that gave each member an equal voice in discussions, but allowed that the trip leader, Bob, would make any final decisions, if needed.

Wilson concurs: “The unspoken assumption was that Rob was the leader. While I recall becoming inwardly impatient with each of my companions at one time or another, as they surely were with me, I do not recall any significant disagreements. My memory is that most decisions were worked out by consensus.”

“There were no horror stories,’ Bose adds. “We helped each other; there was no question about it. By that time we’d been out together so there were no surprises.”

In addition, Bob Thum, it appears, had a nuanced sense of what leadership on a trip like theirs entailed.

“There are only occasional issues when you need a leader,” he says. “If we had been four people who had not traveled together before and didn’t know the system, then you’d have to have a strong leader. You’d have to enforce discipline; you’d have to make sure things were done the right way. We really didn’t need to have that.”

The group paddled two 18-foot custom-designed Old Town wood-canvas canoes. The boats were built deeper – with an eye toward the big water along the route — than the standard Old Town Guides of the time. The four paddled the canoes without the spray decking that is common today.

“If the rapids were going to throw that much water over the top,” Bose explains, “we were going to portage them. We did not take chances. We shot plenty of rapids, but they were rapids we should have been shooting. That was Moffatt’s lesson.”

The trip itself went smoothly. The party lost some time to ice on massive Dubawnt Lake when northeasterly winds blew rotting ice back against the western shore they paddled along. Bose remembers the group waiting out a stomach illness Carl Thum endured later in the trip. In general, though, notations on Bose’s maps show campsites steadily progressing down the river toward Baker Lake and Hudson Bay. The group averaged more than 15 miles a day — counting days lost to wind, ice, tides, rest, and illness — for the trip’s entirety.

What Endures
For all the impetus the Moffatt tragedy provided Bob Thum as he planned the Dubawnt trip, and for all the cautionary lessons the group took from what went wrong with that expedition, once on the trail Moffatt’s presence receded.

“I liked the idea of doing the Moffatt trip,” Bob Thum says, “but once we got going, I didn’t think about Moffatt at all on the trip, except where the rapids were. And, we went to his grave, of course. I was thinking about making sure this trip got through successfully, rather than thinking about how we were doing against Moffatt.”

Wilson, nowadays an attorney in Portland and an accomplished photographer, felt the previous tripper’s presence more philosophically. “Those who like to venture into the wild are usually aware, if only in a general sense, of those who have gone before them,” he says. “Moffat’s trip gave us both comfort and apprehension. Most of Moffat’s party made it. So we believed that we could make it too. Moffat did not make it. So we knew that we were vulnerable.”

“The absence of signs along the river that others had preceded us, made the experience much more intense. The accomplishments were richer; the apprehensions and fears, more profound,” he adds.

In the end, the Voyageurs Canadiens, in successfully completing their trip, found the proper balance between confidence and humility that is still vital today on the tundra trail.

“It sounds sort of boastful,” Bob Thum says, “but I think we basically had the system down pretty well by the time we’d finished 4000 miles. We knew exactly what we could do and how to do it. It was a pretty well oiled machine.”

At the same time, Bob Thum and his party never forgot the remoteness and the dangers of the land they were traveling through.

“I would like to think we respected the wilderness as a power far beyond our ability to control.”

By Charlie Mahler, Contributor