The Legend of Alice Snowshoes

Adapted from Tell Me Another Story
By Joan Finnigan

In many Indian tribes, it was the tradition to leave the old people who got to be too old to be useful, behind. This was done to ensure the survival of the tribe. The tribe put pitch in their eyes, blindfolded them, and often left them near where white people lived.

Alice Snowshoes was left near the McLean house on the Eardley Road. Mrs. McLean heard her moans and brought her into the house, wiped the pitch from her eyes, and nursed her back to health. Alice lived with the Mcleans then, making baskets, moccasins, beaded mitts, acted as midwife and used her knowledge of herbs to help people.

The following is an excerpt from the Aylmer Reporter Scrapbook:

“When blizzards roared through the countryside, many families were isolated deep in the forest. When a thick blanket of blinding snow cut off lonely people from food, medicine, and sympathy, Alice Snowshoes seemed to sense this from a native instinct.

“She would make her way on snowshoes through the deep snow, twisted windfall and branches with her medicine bag and her own scant supply of food. In many log cabins, evening prayers were often softly and sincerely uttered for her.

“As winds moaned through the deep pines – adding to the feeling of isolation, lonely settlers knew Alice would be a connecting link if things went wrong.. Thick frost coating over windows held no fear as light flickered from a home-fashioned candle over a sick child tended by Alice. There was many a young mother who nodded in peace over her first-born because of Alice. They knew if illness struck again, they could count on her.

“She would come to them in their small corner of the earth that was the vast wilderness. She never failed them. And she never would, they knew. Children were born, grew to adulthood, died, but Alice seemed to go on forever. She could have been that promise of the eternal life if she hadn’t caught one of the white man’s germs on one of her missions of mercy.

“When Alice died after helping many generations of white people, her body was taken to Quyon by the Indians and buried somewhere in the forest. The spot of her last resting place has never been revealed. She died on Christmas Day, 1874. They said she was 120 years old.”

The Legend of Alice Snowshoes was published in the Country Roads Daytripper in 1989.