retold by Joan Finnigan
Copyright ©1994 Joan Finnigan Mackenzie

The Spirit of Alice Snowshoes

In many of the Indian tribes of the Ottawa Valley it was the custom to leave behind their old people who could not keep up with the movements and pace of the tribe. The people of the tribe put pitch in the old people’s eyes, blindfolded them and left them behind to die because the survival of the tribe was more important than any one single person.

Old Alice Snowshoes, an Algonquin Indian, was left to die on the Eardley Road near Aylmer, Quebec, in front of the Donald McLean house. Mrs. McLean heard Alice Snowshoes moaning outside, brought her into the house, wiped the pitch from here eyes, and nursed her back to health. She lived with the McLeans ever afterwards, helping with the housework, making baskets, moccasins and beaded mitts, acting as midwife and using her knowledge of herbs to help sick people.

In those early days there were no doctors. So Alice Snowshoes traveled the countryside, through blizzards, rain storms, and dark nights to help people who were ill, making her way through the wilderness to the settler’s cabin with her medicine bag and her own scant supply of food.

Nobody ever knew how she knew that people were ill and needed her help. She seemed to have some special native instinct that told her help was needed by families isolated and many miles away. And she would travel to them and fall like a ghost from the sky. Without any word or warning, she would just suddenly be there at the bedside of the sick child, or the young mother in labor, or the injured father.

In many log houses all through the Ottawa Valley many an evening prayer was offered for Alice Snowshoes, the good spirit they could always count on, who would never fail them, who appeared always like a ghost out of nowhere.

After helping many generations of sick people, Alice Snowshoes died on Christmas Day, 1874, at the age of one hundred and twenty. Her body was taken to Quyon by members of her tribe and buried somewhere deep in the forest. But the spot of her last resting place has never been revealed to the people she helped so much.