KIDNAPPED AS BABY

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 July 1927, Page 8

KIDNAPPED AS BABY

TEN YEARS WITH INDIANS. Kidnapped as a three-year-old baby, and brought up by Indians, after they had killed his parents and set fire to their lonely shack in the great Aictic wastes, in the days of the old Hudson Bay Company, Dr. H. J. Esmonde, now lives in Melbourne, where he arrived recently from the United States. His life is like a chapter from one of Jack London’s or Rex Beach’s romances, with a touch of R. M. Ballantyne, who was an old Hudson Bay Company servant. When Dr. Esmonde was 13 years of age he was recovered’ ; from the Indians’ control by an old missionary priest who had known his parents, and had been searching for the missing boy for ten years. The missionaries directed the boy’s education along such good lines that he qualified as a doctor. Now Dr. Esmonde spends his time travelling round the globe. Married to an Australian, he intends to make Melbourne his home for the future. Of a quiet, reserved disposition, the doctor seems to have absorbed the Indian distaste for demonstration. He impressed by his very reserve. He spoke of his life among the Indians in the great wastes of snow and ice. "All I can remember of the awful tragedy that befel my parents,” Dr. Esmonde said in a recent interview, “is of the flames when the Indians set our home on fire. I can recall even now the flashing of the fire and the coming of the Indian attackers. My father, who was a doctor, and my mother lived in their timber cabin on the banks of the Proserpine River. The nearest settlement was a place called Rampart, and their nearest neighbour, another Hudson’s Bay Company representative, was about 700 miles distant. lam speaking now of the “seventies,” when settlers were almost unknown in those regions. The half breed, who did the rougher wod’k for my father, was absent at the time of the Indian attack, 1 learned later. Even to-day I don’t like to think of the awful agonies my father and mother must have undergone on that tragic night. “The hut was about 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle. All that district was in the Nor’-West Territory, and was under the control of the Hudson Bay Company, which later handed it over to the Canadian Government. And later still it became known as the Yukon. At that time nobody dreamed that the country would one day be invaded by fortune seekers hurrying forward to make their fortunes—so they hoped—on the goldfields. The yellow metal was well hidden under the snow’ and ice. “The Dogrib tribe of Indians,, who had taken me away with them, were kind to me in their own undemonstrative .way. We followed the game wherever it went, and roamed the country for hundreds of miles. All the signs in the book of nature, as we knew it there, became as easy for me to read as is the alphabet to a Melbourne schoolboy. The great open fields were my school. When we found game plentiful we lived well; when it was scarce we lived lean. The law of nature, of course. “In those ten nomadic years of my life 1 learned the Indian dialects and the Eskimo tongue. My training stood me in good stead in after life. It taught me to take what came philosophically. I learned early how to make for the timber when caught in a blizzard and dig myself and my dogs into a snowbank. It might be for hours or for days that we should remain snug in that shelter, but we would be provisioned for our journey and would come out safely. If a man were trapped by a heavy blizzard in what were known as the ‘bad lands’ —endless miles of open country .without timber—it was all up with him. Only a miracle could save him.” Dr. Esmonde’s story of his journeys on dog sleighs caused wonder at the hardihood of the men who go out to dangers that lie ahead in their treks over the snow plains. Away north, where they get used to living in the shadow of the Pole, they treat lightly blizzards and northerly busters lying in wait for them round he next clump of timber.

“A man can do from 40 to 45 miles a day on a dog sledge,” said the doctor. “On the other hand, he may do only from five to ten miles. It depends mostly on the sort of track you have. My best, single-day performance with a dog team was 75 miles. That was on a perfect track, of course. My longest journey was 1300 miles, from east of Dawson City to Nome, on the Alaskan coast. It took me more than seven, weeks to do the trip. “Settlements were few and far between in those early days, and it was a long, lonely trek. The Klondike gold rush had not begun, and it was not the sort of country that the ordinary individual would visit as a holiday resort.

“I carried flour, bacon, beans and coffee. Of course, I had my rifle and ammunition. The dogs were fed once a day with smoked salmon. An average load for a sleigh would be between 3501 b. and 4001 b.

“Among the Indians I learned to drive a team of 16 dogs, which I harnessed fan-wise, Indian fashion. This arrangement permitted each dog to be harnessed directly to the sledge and it had to pull its weight. “Eight dogs constituted the average teams on the old ‘sour-dough’ miners oh the Klondike fields. The animals were harnessed in couples, one in front of the other.

“Usually these dogs are referred to as ‘huskies.’ The real huskies, however, are the dogs used for lighter work, while the heavier work is done by malahuts, who bear the same relation to the huskies that the Clydesdales do to the light draught horse.” The doctor explained that the huskies are a cross between the wolves and the collies that the Scottish employees of the Hudson Bay Company took from Scotland with them. They were apt to be treacherous, and were not the sort of dogs to pet after a day’s work.

“I came into close touch with the Eskimos during my wanderings,” the doctor continued. “I have stayed in their igloos—snow houses —and felt as snug as we are at an ordinary fire, although it was below zero outside. When they retire to bed the entire family snuggles into the one large family sleeping bag, minus their clothes. They huddle together for warmth. Although the conditions would make a modern city health officer speechless at the fashion in which health laws are ignored by the nonchalant Eskimo, they are as happy as they are dirty.

“After ten years of roving life my missionary friend succeeded in his quest and found me. He had learned from a hint here and a word there that the Dogrib Indians had a white boy

living with them. Having heard of my parents’ tragic fate he surmised that I was that boy. Ultimately he tracked me down. I can never forget what he has dpne for me/ It seems strange to look across the bridge of years and picture that little white baby that grew to boyhood in such strange surroundings, living a nomadio life with savages, and speaking the Indian and Eskimo tongues. “Australia will be my home in future. All the same, there are joyous experiences for the boy or man born ‘way up there near the Arctic Circle that are outsiae the ken of folks who know naught fcut sunny lands.”