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The Great Falls formed many thousand of years ago when glacial ice blocked the previous channel down what is today Irving Creek. The new channel has been digging back from its confluence with the Flat River ever since, some thirty kilometers now.
The earliest recorded name for the Great Falls was Mahoney Falls which was the term Klondikers heard for it from Yukon Natives. Perhaps, the Nahanni Indians used that term? No one knows for sure. According to Dene oral traditions and stories gathered by Poole Field, the Nahanni where killed off in a surprise ambush by Slavey Indians sometime around 1870, after disease and starvation conditions had reduced the Nahanni population.
The Slavey term for the Great Falls is "Naidli Tcho" which is how Nahanni Butte Elders referred to it in 1980 in recorded conversations with Wendell White who wrote of their stories in "The Birth of Nahanni - Nahande Beguli - A Local History of the People of Nahanni Butte" (Parks Canada Publication # 286).
Klondikers were among the first Europeans of record to visit the Falls - Hudson Bay Company explorers are not known to have penetrated so deeply, though early independent traders may have. In 1898, Jack Stanier met a Newfoundlander named Frederick in the Splits area, who had seen the Falls. And Joe Cote, who had established a trading post at Ross River in 1904 visited the Falls several times thereafter from the Yukon side. In fact, the stairs leading down from the Falls where placed there by Cote and his Native guides.
Virginia was the daughter of Fenley Hunter who explored the South Nahanni in 1928 on behalf of the Geological Survey of Canada. Hunter was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London and a member of the New York Explorers Club. He was well versed in art of map-making and the use of a sextant.
Fenley Hunter measures
the 'Great Falls' on the Nahanni, 1928.
(See the following
page for photos and map diagrams.
See also photo of FH on "Friends" page)
On trips up the Stikine River in northern British Columbia in 1921 and up the Frances River in the southeastern Yukon in 1923, Hunter had made meticulous contour drawings of the regions and gave them, gratis, to the GSC. When next he contacted the GSC to inform them of his plans to descend the Mackenzie River, they requested he visit the South Nahanni River to gather data on that poorly described region.
After four weeks traveling upriver from Nahanni Butte, Fenley arrived at the Great Falls on the day of his daughter's birthday, August 21st. With the maps that he later submitted to the GSC, he requested that her name be used for the Falls. In recognition of his many contributions, the GSC agreed.
While visiting northern communities in August of 1970, then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau flew with his party to Virginia Falls to see the wondrous South Nahanni, and departed on an RCMP patrol boat down river to the Hot Springs where he met Gus and Mary Kraus a few days later, then flew out.
Mr. Trudeau derived great pleasure from this brief wilderness escape and was so inspired to secure it's preservation that The Nahanni National Park came to be.
See Order from Canadian Dep't of Justice, 1971
There is an irony to this name-game grandstanding. On his Nahanni GSC trip, Fenley met Ray Patterson and Gordon Matthews. Hunter took Patterson under his wing, and over the subsequent years introduced him to nature painter Carl Runcallus, mine mogul and big game hunter Col. Harry Snyder, and other gentlemen wilderness naturalists who greatly advanced Patterson's career.
The same fellow who would have Hunter's Nahanni contribution forgotten, campaigned to name a mountain west of Calgary "Patterson Peak."
Rather than rewrite history and innumerable map references, might not a fitting tribute to the Prime Minister result from augmenting the name "Nahanni National Park" to the "Pierre Trudeau Nahanni National Park." Mr. Trudeau was a keen conservationist as was Theodore Roosevelt in the United States, and a National Park in the US was named after Teddy in this manner.
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