“How would you like to go to Labrador, Dillon?  Hubbard’s rock is still out there at the forks of the Susan, and I’m sure we can find it.”

It was on a steamy evening in July 1972, that I popped the question to my friend, Dillon Wallace III, as we sat in the living room of his country home in old Fishkill, New York, across the Hudson River from the city of Beacon-Newburgh and sixty miles north of New York City.  Spread out before us on the floor were artifacts and relics of his father’s Labrador journeys of 1903, 1905 and 1913.  The relics were only a small part of a treasure trove, stored in Wallace’s basement, of exploring paraphernalia collected by his father over a lifetime.  These included a section of the tent in which Leonidas Hubbard Jr. perished on his ill-fated 1903 expedition, and Wallace Sr.’s own Labrador tents, fly rods, trail gear, notebooks, and Naskapi Indian caribou-skin garments and artifacts.

“Interesting thought,” Wallace replied, “but I hope your visit to Hubbard’s grave in Haverstraw to-day hasn’t caused sentiment to overcome reason.  The painted letters of the inscription my father carved in 1913 on the boulder at Hubbard’s last camp would have long since been worn away by the elements, don’t you think?  The stone would be pretty hard to spot in the bush.  Besides, it is hard to imagine that some professional hasn’t beaten us to it.  Come to think of it, if anyone has found the marked rock, you would think the discovery would have been reported somewhere. It would be pretty satisfying, all right, if we were fortunate enough to be the first ones to visit the site in sixty years.”

“Think of it Dillon”, I said, “The valleys of the Susan and Beaver are as wild and unspoiled to day as they’ve always been.  The very rapids and gorges that made traveling so difficult for Hubbard and your father have protected the rivers from human encroachment all through the years.  Paddlers aren’t interested in them because the going is too rough, and decent-sized trout hard to find.  But what a country to explore by helicopter!  A small machine could put us down anywhere we liked.”

 “Your enthusiasm is contagious,” replied Dillon.  “I’ve never thought of going into the Labrador country my father traveled, but you make it sound easy”.

“One more thing, Dillon; there is some unfinished business from the 1903 and 1913 expeditions that we could tackle on the trip.  All the big lakes named by Hubbard and your father, such as Hope and Disappointment, have been added to the official maps, but no one has ever pinpointed Elson and Mountaineer Lakes, or Goose Creek.  The features named by your father in 1913 are also missing from the map.   I have spoken to the Secretary of the Canadian Committee for Geographical Names, and he is anxious to see a few more names on the new topographical series.  Some of the 1:250,000 sheets don’t have a single named feature on them. If we could verify locations of the forgotten features of 1903, either on the ground or from the air, Ottawa will identify them on the map”.

“This is a pretty big undertaking for a couple of armchair travelers, but it certainly would be the experience of a lifetime if we could pull it off.  I’ll give some serious thought to it overnight,” said Wallace, as my wife and I said our goodbyes to him and his wife before departing for our hotel in Beacon.

Early next morning, after we had enjoyed a farewell breakfast with the Wallaces before leaving for our home in Canada, Dillon motioned me aside and said,  “I’ll go with you, Rudy.”

 The quest for Hubbard’s last camp in Labrador was on, but another year would pass before arrangements could be made for us to get away.

Wallace’s suggestion that the pilgrimage to Hubbard’s grave may have unduly influenced my judgement left me feeling a little uncomfortable.  But I knew that if we succeeded in pinpointing the long-forgotten stone marking the place where Leonidas Hubbard Jr. made the famous last entry in his diary, it was certain to spark a renewed interest in the Hubbard expeditions, and at the same time bring to the attention of the public the story of Wallace Sr.’s little-known 1913 expedition to the place where Hubbard died.  I had made a familiarization trip to North West River and the central Labrador country in 1971 with my wife, and studied the Susan and Beaver Rivers from the air.  Even if the attempt by Wallace and me to find Hubbard’s campsite failed, a more thorough aerial tour of one the last of the world’s truly wild places—undisturbed from Hubbard’s day except for the intrusion of its air space by low-flying warplanes from the Goose Bay air base--would be a worthwhile experience for me.  And Wallace would see for the first time the scene of his father’s great adventures.

On my 1971 trip to North West River, inquiries about the marked stone at Hubbard last campsite were met with skepticism and outright incredulity.  Yes, some said, they had heard about Hubbard, but none of the trappers working the Susan valley had ever mentioned Hubbard’s old campsite.  “There’s no fishing in the Susan area,” a district wildlife officer explained, “so it’s not of much interest to anyone.  As far as the boulder is concerned, it would be pretty hard to find it in that country.  The spring freshet   probably washed away what was left of the campsite, and any marks left on the stone sixty years ago would be gone by now.”

The discouraging responses to my queries in North West River squared with my concerns that outsiders with romantic notions about walking in the footsteps of Labrador explorers of a eighty years ago might be thought of by the locals as being slightly out of touch with the reality, and therefore not to be taken seriously.  The sentiment that lured Hubbard and Wallace to the country for which Wallace’s son and I were I bound, did indeed appear, in the words of Newfoundland historian Patrick O’Flaherty, to be “out of place in the Newfoundland and Labrador of to-day.”  But his acknowledgement of the enduring significance of Wallace’s tale left me convinced that locating the place in the wilderness where the story took root—the actual campsite where Hubbard died—might arouse a renewed interest by the people of North West River and Happy Valley-Goose Bay in an important part of their history.

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In the decades following the First World War, as advances in aviation signaled the end of exploration’s heroic age, there were still plenty of adventurers around who were anxious to see for themselves, on the ground, the harsh, largely unexplored land where the famous Hubbard story was spawned.  Although none acknowledged it publicly or in print, it was Wallace’s books that first brought unknown Labrador to the attention of a new breed of explorers.  In 1929, Henry George “Gino” Watkins, the illustrious British kayaker and explorer, tested himself in Labrador before going on to achieve fame in Greenland and elsewhere.  Elliott Merrick, the teacher and disciple of Thoreau turned wilderness traveler and chronicler of Labrador life in the early thirties; filmmaker Varick Frissell, who was the first to film, in 1925, the Hamilton (Churchill) River and its great cataract; and the American polar explorer, Lincoln Ellsworth; all came under the spell of Wallace’s writings.  In the 1999 television film documenting Frissell’s life, White Thunder, a copy of The Lure of the Labrador Wild is seen to occupy a special place on the bookshelf in his study.  Elliott Merrick, in his essay on the Hubbard and Wallace expeditions, The Long Crossing, published in 1992, joins the list of Mrs. Hubbard’s admirers, but there is no concealing the influence of Wallace’s books.  A careful reading of Merrick reveals a hint of envy of Wallace’s well-earned reputation as an explorer and author. Buried in the pages of Lincoln Ellsworth’s autobiography, Beyond Horizons, is an account of an unpublicized journey, ostensibly in search of fossil algae, which he made through Labrador in 1930, following his 1926 transpolar triumph by dirigible with Amundsen.  The journey, by way of the Moisie River, Hamilton (Churchill) Falls and the Hamilton (Churchill) River, included a stop at North West River, where Ellsworth stood on the spot where Hubbard began his 1903 journey.   Not a word about Hubbard or Wallace in Beyond Horizons, but a quotation from Hubbard’s favorite poem, Kipling’s “The Explorer”, opens Ellsworth’s book, just as it does in The Lure of the Labrador Wild:

 “Something hidden.  Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—Something lost behind the Ranges.  Lost and waiting for you. Go!”

 One hundred years after Hubbard’s death, the hardy paddlers of the 2003 Hubbard Memorial Centennial Expedition, succumbing to the pull of Labrador so eloquently set to words by Wallace a century ago, succeeded in retracing the exact routes, over their full length, of the 1903 and 1905 Hubbard expeditions—the first wilderness travelers ever to do so.

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 My own interest in the exploring expedition of Leonidas Hubbard Jr. began at the age of twelve, in 1938, in a remote railway village in northwestern Ontario, where the traveling railway car library periodically delivered up a box of discarded books donated by the Toronto Public Library.  One day, a fire-damaged copy of The Lure of the Labrador Wild was discovered at the bottom of the box by one of my two close boyhood chums, and the lives of the three of us were changed forever.  On make-believe exploring trips in the surrounding forest, which we had all to ourselves except for the occasional Cree encampment (complete with real teepees), every chapter of the book was played out.  My forte was “knocking over” spruce grouse with my air gun, in the manner of George Elson.  Killing partridge with a pellet gun, without a hunting licence, was against the law, of course, but there were no wildlife officers about, and the meat was a welcome addition to the icebox at home during those lean years.  After each trek through the bush, or on rainy days, my companions and I spent much time debating just what it was that Wallace and his companions had done in the fire-obliterated passages of our hallowed book.

It was against this background; after I grew up, that I began nurturing a burning ambition to some day visit the country of my boyhood dreams and adventures.  In order to place the proposed Labrador project of Dillon Wallace III and myself in better perspective, it is necessary now to go back to the day of its inception in 1972, in Fishkill, New York, when I sat down with my friend over his father’s Labrador treasures.

  Early in the morning of the day I proposed to Dillon Wallace that he join me on my Labrador trip, I visited the Wallace family burial plot in Fishkill, as I had done before on holiday trips though the area.  Later, in Hubbard’s home town of Congers, thirty miles to the south, now a crowded suburb of New York and drastically different from Hubbard’s time, I failed to find the house where he lived.  In Haverstraw, five miles north of Congers, my attempts to find someone who could direct me to Mount Repose Cemetery were rewarded when the elderly owner of a small real estate office I was directed to smiled broadly at my mention of Hubbard’s name and said,” Leon Hubbard! The Father of Labrador!  He’s in Mount Repose all right, but the graveyard office is closed to-day and I’m afraid I can’t be of any help in telling you where to look.  Good luck with your search!”

Presently, under a sweltering sun, I began an arduous exploration of aptly named Mount Repose, whose seemingly endless rows of grave markers extended up the steep slopes of the Hudson Palisades, as far as the eye could see.  As the late afternoon shadows lengthened in the valley of the Hudson, I found myself standing in the far upper reaches of the cemetery, alone, before three bronze plaques, mounted on finely chiseled grey granite slabs, marking Hubbard’s grave.  Hubbard’s wife, Mina, I knew, had designed the memorial tablets and had them placed there in 1936.  A large eastern cedar, no doubt planted under the supervision of Mrs.Hubbard herself, dominated the site.

Here, then, was the last resting place of Dillon Wallace’s “intrepid explorer and practical Christian”--the central figure of one of the most enduring of Canadian wilderness adventure stories.  The place seemed as remote from my home in Ontario as Labrador itself.  The bronze plaques, positioned in the shape of an inverted triangle—side-by-side at the top and the third below—carried the following inscriptions:

The glaring absence of the name of Dillon Wallace in Mrs.Hubbard’s handiwork came as no surprise to me.  I had read her book, A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador, as well as newspaper stories of the time and various historical accounts, and was quite familiar with her monumental effort to get even with Wallace for, as she saw it, stealing the glory away from Hubbard, her “dearest laddie”.  But the carefully crafted words of the memorial, composed more than thirty years after Hubbard’s death, and carrying not a hint of the existence of her husband’s trail companion and dear friend on the tragic 1903 journey, reflected an audacity that was beyond my comprehension.  What kind of woman was this?  No doubt some future biographer or trained psychologist would explain it all.

Wallace’s masterful telling of the story of Hubbard’s exploring expedition, in The Lure of the Labrador Wild, went into twenty-three editions and was acclaimed around the world.  The fact that Wallace was Hubbard’s only companion on the expedition, other than the half-breed guide, Elson, and that Wallace himself had nearly lost his own life on the journey, clearly was of no consequence to Mrs. Hubbard.  In her 1907 book documenting the “completion of her husband’s work”, she did not once mention Wallace by name.  Everyone knew, of course, who it was she was referring to when she made veiled hints that seemed to question the honorableness of her husband’s companion of 1903.   Wallace’s name was not deleted from Hubbard’s diary or from a narrative written by Elson, both reproduced at the back of the book, but in each, references to Wallace were strangely sparse and unflattering. 

It was not until decades later, when the Hubbard diaries surfaced, that the first researchers to go to the trouble of comparing the actual diary of Hubbard with the version printed in A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador, discovered that Mina’s version was significantly shorter than the original, and was devoid of passages that revealed the weaknesses and shortcomings of Hubbard.  Although no historian or archivist has recorded other serious discrepancies, it would be naïve to believe that anything too complimentary to Wallace, as judged by Mina, would not have been similarly expunged from her version of her husband’s diary, twisted in some way to cast him in an unfavorable light, or omitted altogether.  As for the narrative purportedly written by Elson, whose strengths obviously did not include facility with the written word, the hand of Mina is evident throughout.

When Mina Hubbard’s book was released, reviewers and historians alike criticized it as being seriously marred by a lack of appreciation of Wallace’s services to her husband.  In 1936, Hubbard’s sister, a close friend of Wallace and his wife, expressed revulsion, as did Hubbard’s surviving friends and associates, at Mina Hubbard’s final act of malevolence towards Wallace, in placing the plaques with their revisionist inscriptions on Hubbard’s grave.  By 1936, Dillon Wallace’s second book, The Long Labrador Trail had gone into many editions, and Wallace deservedly received the public acclaim he had earned.  His reputation as a wilderness traveler, woodsman, explorer and author had long eclipsed the accomplishments of his great rival of 1905.  The belated casting of the three bronze plaques to mark Hubbard’s grave in Haverstraw was believed by many to be a final attempt by a vindictive Mina to discredit Wallace.

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In 1925, OUTING magazine, whose publisher, Casper Whitney, had sponsored Hubbard’s 1903 expedition, and for whom both Hubbard and Wallace worked for at various times, began a series of articles honouring “the voiceless band of heroes, not unhonoured but usually unsung, who have risked and often given their lives in the wilderness, on the water, or among remote mountains”.  Leonidas Hubbard was the first chosen to receive “due tribute for the flame of courage that burned through storm and suffering”.  The magazine had no difficulty in deciding that Dillon Wallace should be the one to write “A Comrade’s Tribute to the Man Who Gave His Life to Open the Labrador Wild.”

Wallace began his tribute with a description of his frequent visits to the “unmarked grave of a hero”, in the cemetery at Haverstraw-on-the-Hudson. His moving eulogy to Hubbard concluded with another reference to the unmarked grave: “He it is who lies in the unmarked grave and whose memory I love to honour.”  Wallace, not a spiteful man, could not resist exposing the irony of Mina Hubbard’s professed devotion to her “dearest laddie”, while not even bothering to mark his grave.

The OUTING piece did not escape the attention of Hubbard’s widow, even though she was now remarried and living in England.  Wallace, she decided, would not be allowed to get away with broadcasting to the world that her “dearest laddie”, the famous Labrador explorer and hero whose work she had completed in Labrador, was buried in an unmarked grave.  She would set that right by placing not one, but three, stone monuments on his grave.  It would also destroy, once and for all, the ugly rumour she heard had been circulating in the lower Hudson valley for years:  that Mina had exhumed Hubbard’s body and taken it to England.

In 1913, on the tenth anniversary of Hubbard’s death, Wallace, now in his fifties, mounted a final expedition to Labrador to permanently mark Hubbard’s death place.  His detailed story of that perilous journey, by way of unknown rivers and unexplored country, never published in book form, was serialized in National Sportsman magazine.  There is no record of Mina’s reaction to Wallace’s journey of remembrance, but as late as 1936, when she traveled from England to install the markers on Hubbard’s grave, the inscrutable widow, now remarried, was still in no mood to give Wallace his due, even though she would have known deep down by then that it was through the Lure of The Labrador Wild that her husband’s place in history had been assured, and not the story of her guided canoe trip through Labrador, with its spiteful undertones and lofty claims of exploratory achievement.

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Public interest in the Hubbard and Wallace saga waned in the years leading up to the Second World War.  Radio and motion pictures began supplanting the library book as sources of vicarious thrill and wilderness adventure.  Wallace died in 1939, but The Lure of the Labrador Wild remained on library bookshelves throughout the world, as did his second successful work, The Long Labrador Trail, the well-written account of his 1905 trans-Labrador expedition.  “The Lure”is still to be found in circulation in public libraries everywhere.  Mina Hubbard’s book had long become a collector’s item and reference work by the time of her 1953 death in England, under the wheels of a speeding train.

With the emergence in the decades following the Second World War of a new wave of Canadian authors and historians, anxious to bring a rapidly expanding population into closer touch with the country’s rich historical past, particularly that of the North, it was inevitable that the story of Dillon Wallace’s wilderness antagonist—a woman, of all people—should re-emerge.  She was truly the stuff from which legends are made.  Dartmouth archivist Alan Cooke, in a one-sided 1960 article in The Beaver, “Canada’s magazine of the north”, was the first to revive the story of her rivalry with Dillon Wallace, going to great lengths to lionize her at the expense of Wallace:  “No more fittingly ironic humiliation has ever been the misfortune of an inconsiderate man than that of Dillon Wallace, beaten at his own game…” he began.  The former journalist and popular historian, Pierre Berton, author of The Mysterious North and other tales of the Canadian frontier, was the next to take up the cause of Mrs. Hubbard.  In a Global Television documentary series, reworked in book form in 1977 as The Wild Frontier, the title of his segment on Mrs. Hubbard left no doubt about whose side he was on: The Revenge of Mina Hubbard.  For good measure, Berton reminded his readers that the Lure of the Labrador Wild was largely the work of a ghostwriter.  It was not Wallace, he said, but Frank Copley, who had devised the “purple passages” that made the book such an enormous success.  Berton’s implication was clear:  Wallace was not only a cad, but also something of a fraud. (In the original editions of The Lure of the Labrador Wild, Wallace did acknowledge the assistance of Frank Barkley Copley, a personal and literary friend of Hubbard, in preparing the book, but the credit did not appear in some subsequent reprints). 

It was at about this point that I began thinking seriously about doing whatever I could, not as professional historian or writer, which I obviously was not, but as a lifelong admirer of Wallace and reader of his books, to bring some balance to the historical record.  My friend Dillon Wallace III was a boy of fourteen when his father died.  My father died when I was the same age.  It was inevitable that we should form a bond of sorts.  But Dillon, displaying his father’s traits, made it clear that he would not be a party to any scheme to rehash the story of the famous rivalry. The subject of Mina Hubbard was not one he was anxious to discuss, but I managed to elicit from him a story he had heard that Mina had had Hubbard’s body exhumed from Mount Repose and taken it to England.  The tale didn’t seem to square with the existence of the memorial plaques, but I had heard it before.  The subject of Mina Hubbard was dropped then and there, and from that point forward, it was our proposed pilgrimage to Hubbard’s rock that took centre stage.

Our first priority was to obtain official government maps, if any existed, of the area traversed by the Hubbard and Wallace in 1903; in particular, the route of the explorers between the headwaters of the Susan River, and the Beaver. Central Labrador, we learned, was one of the last areas of Canada to be mapped from the air in the Canadian Government aerial photo surveys conducted by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the post-Second World War period.  In 1973, the only available topographical maps embracing the Susan River and middle Beaver River areas were those in the small-scale 1:250,000 series. Provisional 1:50,000 sheets of the area west of the headwaters of the Susan, showing features of the 1903 Hubbard journey named by Dillon Wallace, such as Ptarmigan Lake, Hope Lake and Disappointment Lake, had been compiled in 1962 by the Surveys and Mapping Branch of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys from the aerial photographs taken in 1951 and field surveys done in 1959.  But detailed large-scale maps of the area of the Susan and upper Beaver Rivers we intended to inspect from the air--the country that had so sorely tried the explorers in the early stages of their journey, and where Hubbard eventually died--had not yet been published.  It would therefore be necessary to use government aerial survey photographs of 1951 to locate the features shown in Wallace’s rough sketches of 1903.

My excitement was difficult to contain when I spread out before me ten aerial photographs sent to me by the National Air Photo Library in Ottawa, and zoomed in with my stereoscopic viewer on a spruce-ringed caribou moss clearing close to what I had pinpointed as the junction of Susan River and Goose Creek. The small opening in the forest near the banks of the Susan, I speculated, might well be the actual place where Hubbard spent his last hours, and where stood the long-forgotten inscribed boulder marking the spot.  As it turned out, finding the site of Hubbard’s final camp, on the ground, would prove to be a different matter.  It was at about this time that I made my first disconcerting discovery about the great story of the exploring expedition of Leonidas Hubbard Jr. put together by Dillon Wallace and Frank Copley.  For reasons that no doubt had as much to do with creating an absorbing book as it did to reflecting, in an age before the airplane and modern maps, an exaggerated, but honest, perception of time and dimension, Wallace clearly over-estimated distances, and the size of some lakes.  Hubbard himself, in his diary, estimated the forks of the Susan to be thirty-three miles from Grand Lake.  In fact, the distance was about twenty-five miles. These discrepancies would not be helpful in pinpointing Hubbard’s last camp, and retracing on the ground one of the most difficult legs of the 1903 journey—the Hubbard portage trail from the Susan River to the Beaver River by way of Goose Creek, Mountaineer Lake and Elson Lake.

END OF UNCOMPLETED DRAFT

Click on: http://www.rudymauro.net (The Search for Hubbard’s Rock) for the sequel to this story.