In his 1969 book Newfoundland, Harold Horwood recounts the story of a caribou drive in western Newfoundland in the late 1800s. He heard it in the Codroy Valley, from “an aged man named Placide White back in the 1950s.”
Placide White: 19th Century Caribou Drive
Mr. White, a hunter and woodsman as well as a farmer, took part in the great caribou drive of the last century – the only attempt that I know of to round up caribou and treat them like Lapland reindeer. It began when a European company hired a crew of Newfoundlanders to go to the southern end of Grand Lake at the time of the autumnal caribou migration, to round up a herd of the animals for export. The plan was to drive them into a crude corral, as the Algonkian Indians used to do when they wished to slaughter a herd of white-tailed deer, then to tame them, as far as possible, and finally drive them to the coast. The camp was built on the central plateau just east of the Long Range Mountains within sight of the lake, and the caribou came past by thousands.
‘You should see them – oh! my dear man! stretching off, you know, over the barren ground, as far as you could see, covering a whole hill at a time, thousands of animals on the move. And we cut out small sections of them, you know, like cowboys cutting out cattle from a herd. We rode horses wherever the ground was open enough. We had built a great enclosure of logs with an opening like a funnel in one side, and we’d drive the caribou in.
Detail of map in Horwood’s Newfoundland, showing Grand Lake near top (tap to enlarge)
Kill themselves from panic
‘It didn’t work too well, though. They used to kill themselves from panic – break their legs, even their necks. And we couldn’t get enough feed for them. But finally we got the survivors quieted down and drove them out, in small herds, to the coast. We lost some of them on the way, and we lost others trying to load them on a ship, but the ones that survived were stowed, at last, in the hold of a vessel, and taken to Europe to stock game parks, you know…’ [pp 20-21]
Poor caribou! It’s kind of the reverse of another misguided and ill-fated tampering with fauna: introducing reindeer to Newfoundland. I’ve never heard of this caribou drive for export. And I couldn’t find anything more about it by googling.
Placide White was born “in the Codroy Valley almost a hundred years ago,” so likely in the 1860s. “He was a member of the widespread family named LeBlanc,” Horwood says.
Harold Horwood books
There’s more from Mr. White and others about the history and peoples of the west coast. The book includes Horwood’s travels across the island and Labrador. Some copies of his Newfoundland are available on Amazon (tap green link to see) and maybe in used bookshops. Horwood is not shy about sharing his opinions! It’s a good book, descriptive of place and history. And, at 50 years old, its ‘present’ is now itself history. Also see his 1986 Corner Brook: A social history, below.
Newfoundland Mi'kmaq, family history, Coronation Street, etc.
Placide White was born “in the Codroy Valley almost a hundred years ago,” so likely in the 1860s. “He was a member of the widespread family named LeBlanc,” Horwood says.
There’s more from Mr. White and others about the history and peoples of the west coast. The book includes Horwood’s travels across the island and Labrador. Some copies of his Newfoundland are available on Amazon (tap green link to see) and maybe in used bookshops. Horwood is not shy about sharing his opinions! It’s a good book, descriptive of place and history. And, at 50 years old, its ‘present’ is now itself history. Also see his 1986 Corner Brook: A social history, below.