Description Pictou Harbor holds famed legend lovers

Passing Parade

Pictou Harbor holds famed legend lovers

By Dr. R.H. Sherwood
Historical Writer

The hundred of motorist who cross the Pictou Harbour Causeway are often attracted by the sight of the nesting cormorants on the old coal pier east of the highway.
But, few, if any, know of the legend associated with the mile-wide harbour water and it may be that the attraction of the cormorants, after the building of the Causeway, will ruin for all time and Indian story, fanciful in the manner of the Micmac story- tellers, “The Legend of Pictou Harbour on Christmas Eve.”

This is a legend of lovers and young love, and, as it had run through the ages, the story of a father’s anger.

Pictou Harbour, in earlier days, was an iced-locked body of water for four months of the year. And in those days, when the poor highways were blocked solid with snow, safe routes across the harbour ice were marked with lines of spruce bushed, so that man, beast and motor cars dotted the solid what surface as the safe way from Pictou to Pictou Landing and Abercrombie.

The Micmac Indians used it as often as the white men, but it was often told by the story tellers on the Indian reservation that no one could cross the harbour ice on Christmas Eve, for, the story tellers said, that the usually solid ice was always drifting on that one night of the year. And it had always been so since long ever ago when an Indian brave and his sweetheart raced in fear to the harbour’s edge on Christmas Eve. They expected to find he solid and safe way over the ice, and to their dismay they found only unsafe drifting ice on the wide waters of the harbour.

BACKWARD TRAIL

To bring alive that Legend of Pictou Harbour, we take the backward trail of the long, long years ago, and hear again the story as related by the teller of tales in a Micmac village.
It was told that Moolbeam, the beautiful daughter of a Micmac Chief was the light of her father’s life, and he planned her future well. He had made the plans, had provided the dowry that she was to take when she became a princess in the lodge of a young chief of the Cape Breton Indians. But Moolbeam had been to the squalling new tow called Halifax in those early and lusty days when Cornwallis was anchoring it firmly along that splendid harbour. There Moolbeam had met a handsome young Maliseet brave who had been a scout with Gorham’s Ranger. The two had fallen in love.

When Moolbeam’s father learned of his daughter’s love for one of the Maliseet tribe of New Brunswick; a tribe feared by the Micmacs, his rage made members of the council fire tremble. His daughter, he declared as befitting the daughter of a great chief, would marry within her own tribe, and only a chief of the Micmacs. So, the father sought to keep the young lovers apart.

But young love, aided and abetted by Moolbeam’s mother, found a way for the lovers to meet in secret.

So it was arranged for Moolbeam to slip quietly away while her father was off on the hunt, meet her lover, journey with him to Pictou where his Indian friends would have horses ready to take them over to the harbour ide, and on to seek sanctuary at the English fort on the Fort Lawrence Ridge in Cumberland County.
But when Moolbeam slipped out of the village, the spies of the wiley chief carried the word to him, and in his great anger he turned from the hunt to seek and kill the Maliseet brave who had taken his daughter. The young lovers reached Pictou Harbour on Christmas Eve, but everything was wrong. No waiting friends which horses were there to meet them.

LOVERS DISMAYED

The close-packed trees stood to the harbour’s edge, all decked in snowy ermine for the festive season. It was a scene of quite beauty, but the lovers were dismayed. The Harbour ice had broken up, and only a great expanse of moving ice greeted the lovers. No help was near, and death crept through the forest behind as Moolbeam’s angry father and his attending braves followed the woodland path to where the two lonely lovers stood on the shore. The loves spoke no words, but joined hand and went forward to die together in the icy waters of Pictou Harbour on that long ago Christmas Eve.

According to the Micmac Legend, a strange thing happened. The winter moon, like a great silver dollar on Christmas Eve, laid a pathway of silver moonbeams across the face for the water. It reached to the feet of the young lovers, and they stepped upon it to walk in safety to the far shore.

Behind them the angry chief and his braves saw the lovers upon the moon path, and raced out to overtake them. Just then, as the lovers reached the far shore, the moon slipped behind a cloud. The silver pathways on the on the water disappeared, and the following braves plunged into the icy waters of the harbour.

This legend is still alive with the Micmacs, and they say, that even to this day the ice breaks up on Christmas Eve, and the moon lays a silver pathway across the face of the waters. And they say that if young lovers are on the harbour edge at Norway point on Christmas Eve, they too can walk on the silver pathway on the water, as did the Indian lovers of long, long ago. For, they say, this is a miracle reserved for those who are young and in love, when all things are possible.

If you believe in the faith and strength and corsage of young love, and if you believe in legends, it may be that if you cross the Pictou Harbour Causeway on Christmas Eve, you may see a silver moon path on the water, and two misty figures fleeing to safety and happiness together in the mystic Indian world of long, long ever ago.