William Brooks Cabot

William Brooks Cabot (1858-19??) was born into a successful merchant and banking family in Battleboro, Vermont in 1858. While still a young man he developed an interest in nature and the outdoors that lasted all his life. Cabot received his schooling in civil engineering at Yale and at Rensselaer, where he graduated in 1881. For the next twenty years he was engaged in an active and successful career, building railroads in the west and bridges throughout New England and New York. He supervised mining operations in Pennsylvania and oversaw many construction projects, including a portion of the New York aqueduct, the subway system under Times Square and, in Boston, the Charles River dam and esplanade. In 1899, a mid-winter vacation trip found him with two Indian guides on a long overland trek to the Hudson Bay post at Lake Mistassini. One of these guides, John Bastian, had travelled extensively through Quebec and Labrador, and probably piqued Cabot’s interest in this part of the world. Between 1900 and 1925 he made annual trips to Labrador and the Quebec North Shore with the intention of living and travelling with different groups of Indians. He spent parts of eight summers (1903-1910) in Northern Labrador among the Naskapi (Innu) and three summers (1921, 1923, 1924) along the Southern Labrador Coast. He “felt passionately that the interior regions of the Quebec-Labrador plateau belonged to the Indians who had long lived there” and probably kept quiet about iron ore deposits he may have encountered in his travels because of a fear that development of the area would destroy their way of life. Although he travelled extensively in the North, he did little to publicize this part of his life beyond a few lectures and a modest publication (Northern Labrador). More than 3000 of his photographs survive in the form of negatives, glass lantern slides and photographic prints, along with his journals,maps and boxes of correspondence. [Source: O Darkly Bright: The Labrador Journeys of William Brooks Cabot, 1899-1910 by Stephen Loring]