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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12874 ***
+
+THE NEW NORTH
+
+_Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic_
+
+BY AGNES DEANS CAMERON
+
+_WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR_
+
+
+_Published November, 1909_
+
+[Illustration: A Magnificent Trophy]
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
+
+JESSIE ANDERSON CAMERON
+
+AND
+
+TO ALL THOSE WHO TRY TO LIVE OUT HER SIMPLE RULE "WE MUST JUST TRY TO DO
+THE VERY BEST WE CAN"
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+It is customary to write a preface. Mine shall be short. Out of a full
+heart, I wish to thank all the splendid people of the North who, by
+giving me so freely information and photographs, and chapters out of
+their own lives, have facilitated the writing of this story. For their
+spontaneous kindness to me and mine no acknowledgment that I can here
+make is adequate. What we feel most strongly we cannot put into words.
+
+AGNES DEANS CAMERON.
+
+August, 1909.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
+
+The Mendicants leave Chicago--The invisible parallel of 49 where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver--Union Jack floats on
+an ox-cart--A holy baggage-room--Winnipeg, the Buckle of the
+Wheat-Belt--The trapper and the doctor--Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks--Boy
+Makers of Empire--The vespers of St. Boniface
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+The 1,000-mile wheat-field--Calgary-in-the-Foothills--Edmonton, the end
+of steel--The Brains of a Trans-Continental--Browning on the
+Saskatchewan--East Londoners in tents--Our outfit--A Waldorf-Astoria in
+the wilderness--The lonely cross of the Galician--Height of
+Land--Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., the sleuth of Lesser Slave
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+Athabasca Landing, the Gateway of the North--English gives place to
+Cree--Limit of the Dry Martini--Will the rabbits run?--The woman
+printer--Hymn-books by hand in the Cree syllabic--Baseball even
+here--Rain and reminiscences--The World's Oldest Trust
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
+
+"Farewell, Nistow!"--The rainy deck of a "sturgeon head" under a
+tarpaulin--Drifting by starlight--The wild geese overhead--Forty-foot
+gas-spout at the Pelican--The mosquito makes us blood-brothers--Four
+days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling
+Athabasca--Nomenclature of the North--Sentinels of the Silence
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
+
+The _Go-Quick-Her_ takes the bit in her mouth--Mallards on the
+half-shell--We set the Athabascan Thames afire--Sturgeon-head breaks her
+back on the Big Cascade--Fort McMurray--A stranded argosy, wreckage on
+the beach--Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader--A land flowing with
+coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
+
+Old Fort Chipewyan--In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John
+Franklin--Sir John turns parson--Grey Nuns and brown babies--Where grew
+the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial--Militant missionaries
+fight each other for souls--The strong man Loutit--Wyllie at the
+forge--An electric watch-maker--Where the Gambel sparrow builds--"Out of
+old books"
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
+
+Farewell to the Mounted Police--Our blankets on the deck--Fern odours by
+untravelled ways--Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of
+daylight--Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man--A 23-inch
+trout--First white women at Fond du Lac--Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a
+Fond du Lac library--The hermit padre and the hermit thrush--Worn north
+trails of the trapper--Caribou by the hundred thousands--The phalarope
+and the suffragette
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
+
+World's records beaten on the Athabasca--Down the Slave to Smith's
+Landing--Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned--The Mosquito
+Portage--Fort Smith, the new headquarters--Lady-slippers and
+night-hawks--Steamer built in the wilderness--Last stand of the wood
+bison--The grey wolf persists--Fur-trade and the silver-fox--Breeding
+pelicans.
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
+
+"Red lemol-lade" kiddies--Tons of crystal salt--Great Slave Lake and its
+fertile shores--Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh
+Edward--Hay River and its annual mail--Ploughing with dogs--Bill
+balked--The Alexandra Falls--Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputations
+while you wait.
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
+
+Drowning of De-deed--Fort Simpson, the old headquarters--A mouldy
+museum--The shrew-mice that were not preserved in rum--The farthest
+north library--Gold-seekers and grub-staked brides--Bishop Bompas, the
+Apostle of the North--Owindia, the Weeping One--Fort Simpson in the
+first year of Victoria the Good.
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
+
+Tenny Gouley tells us things--Mackenzie River, past and present--The
+fringed gentian at Fort Wrigley--The fires Mackenzie saw--The weathered
+knob of Bear Rock--Great Bear Lake--Orangeman's Day at Norman--The
+Ramparts of the Mackenzie--Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle--Mignonette and Old World courtesy--We meet Hagar once
+more--Potatoes on the Circle--The Little Church of the Open Door
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
+
+Arctic Red River--Wilfrid Laurier, the merger--Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko, the
+danseuse--Marriage as the Oo-vai-oo-aks see it--Orange-blossoms at
+Su-pi-di-do's--Trading tryst at Barter Island--Floating fathers--By-o
+Baby Bunting--Wild roses and tame Eskimo--Midnight football with walrus
+bladder and enthusiasm--Education that makes for manliness
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
+
+Sir John Franklin's lobsticks at Point Separation--We reach Fort
+Macpherson on the Peel--Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., eulogizes the
+Eskimo--An Eskimo wife must make boots that are waterproof--She ariseth
+also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her
+household--Cribbage-boards the link between Dick Swiveller and the
+Eskimo--Linked sweetness long drawn out--Chauncey Depew of the
+Kogmollycs
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
+
+The Midnight Sun--Our friend the heathen--"We want to go to
+hell"--Catching fish by prayer--The Eskimo and the Flood--Pink tea at
+the Pole--Always a balance in the Eskimo Bank--Marriage for better and
+not for worse--Christmas carols even here
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
+
+Jurisprudence on ice--The generous Innuit--Emmie-ray, the Delineator
+pattern--Weak races are pressed south--Roxi, a re-incarnation of Sir
+Philip Sidney--Blubbery bon vivants--Eskimo knew the Elephant--We write
+the last chapter of the story of McClure, the navigator--Cannibalism at
+the Circle
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TALE OF A WHALE
+
+Circumpolar Bowhead makes his last stand--Whales here and elsewhere--The
+Yankee peddler at Canada's back-door--Thirteen and a half million in
+whale values--Wind-swept Herschel, the Isle of Whales--One wife for a
+thousand years--Baleen, Spermaceti, and Ambergris--Save the Whale
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
+
+Lives lost for the sake of a white bead--The stars come back--The Keele
+party from the Dollarless Divide--"Here and there a grayling"--Across
+Great Slave Lake--The first white women at Fort Rae--Land of the
+musk-ox--Tales of 76 below--Two Thursdays in one week--Rabbits on ice
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TO MC MURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
+
+The nuptials of 'Norine--Ladies round gents and gents don't go--The
+fossil-gatherers--I give my name to a Cree kiddie--A solid mile of red
+raspberries--The typewriter an uncanny medicine--The Beetle Fleet leaves
+for Outside--Shipwrecked on a batture
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
+
+Ho! for the Peace--One break in 900 miles of navigation--A grey
+wolf--Bear-meat and the Se-weep-i-gons--Ninety-foot spruces--Tom Kerr
+and his bairns--The fish-seine that never fails--Our lobsticks by Red
+River--The Chutes of the Peace
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
+
+The farthest north flour-mill--The man who made Vermilion--Wheat at
+$1.25 a bushel--An Experimental Farm in latitude 58° 30'--An unoccupied
+kingdom as large as Belgium--Where the steamer _Peace River_ was
+built--The hospitable home of the Wilsons--Vermilion a Land of Promise
+Fulfilled--Culture and the Cloister--Thomas of Canterbury on the Stump
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
+
+Se-li-nah of the happy heart--My premier moose--The rare and resourceful
+boatmen of the North--Alexander Mackenzie's last camp
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
+
+Pleasant prairies of the Peace--We tramp a hundred miles--The Angelus at
+Lesser Slave--Poole coats and Norfolk shooting-jackets--Roast duck
+galore--Alec Kennedy of the Nile--Louise the Wetigo, she ate nineteen
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
+
+Jim wins: Allie Brick can't run--100,000,000 acres of
+wheat-land--Jilly-Loo bird still lacks a rib--100 moose in one
+month--Peripatetic judges but no prisoners--The best-tattooed man in the
+Province of Alberta--The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
+
+Edmonton again--Wyllie goes out on the Long Journey--Donaldson killed by
+a walrus--Two drowned in the Athabasca--Steel kings and iron
+horses--Wheat-plains the melting-pot of a New Nation
+
+ROUTES OF TRAVEL
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+A magnificent trophy
+Map showing the Author's Route
+Sir Wilfred Laurier
+Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada
+Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt
+The Canadian Women's Press Club
+A section of Edmonton
+The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan
+Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta
+A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge
+Athabasca Landing
+Necessity knows no law at Athabasca
+The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians
+C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.
+A "sturgeon-head" on the Athabasca
+"Farewell, Nistow!"
+Grand Rapids, on the Athabasca River
+Portage at Grand Rapids Island
+Our transport at Grand Rapids Island
+Cheese-shaped nodules, Grand Rapids Island
+Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police
+Towing the wrecked barge ashore
+The scow breaks her back and fills
+Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray trader
+The steamer _Grahame_
+An oil derrick on the Athabasca
+Tar banks on the Athabasca
+Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca
+Three of a kind
+Woman's work of the Far North
+Lake Athabasca in winter
+Bishop Grouard
+The modern note-book
+Tepee of a Caribou-eater Indian
+A bit of Fond du Lac
+Birch-barks at Fond du Lac
+Fond du Lac
+Father Beibler carrying water to a dying Indian
+Smith's Landing
+A transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing
+Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company
+The world's last buffalo
+Tracking a scow across mountain portage
+The "red lemol-lade" boys
+Salt beds
+Unloading at Fort Resolution
+Coming to "take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake
+On the Slave
+Dogs cultivating potatoes
+David Villeneuve
+Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson
+A Slavi family at Fort Simpson
+A Slavi type from Fort Simpson
+Interior of St. David's Cathedral
+Fort Simpson by the light of the Aurora
+Indians at Fort Norman
+Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman
+The ramparts of the Mackenzie
+Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie mouth
+A Kogmollye family
+Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak family
+Farthest North football
+Two spectators at the game
+An Eskimo exhibit
+Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo togs
+Two wise ones
+A Nunatalmute Eskimo family
+Cribbage-boards of walrus tusks
+Useful articles made by the Eskimo
+Home of Mrs. Macdonald
+Eskimo kayaks at the Arctic edge
+A wise man of the Dog-Ribs
+A study in expression
+We tell the tale of a whale
+Two little ones at Herschel Island
+Breeding grounds of the seal
+The Keele party on the Gravel River
+The first typewriter on Great Slave Lake
+The bell at Fort Rae mission
+The musk-ox
+A meadow at McMurray
+Starting up the Athabasca
+On the Clearwater
+Evening on the Peace
+Our lobsticks on the Peace
+The chutes of the Peace
+Pulling out the _Mee-wah-sin_
+The flour mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace
+Articles made by Indians
+The Hudson's Bay Store
+Papillon, a Beaver brave
+Going to school in winter
+My premier moose
+Beaver camp, on Paddle River
+The site of old Fort McLeod
+Jean Baptiste, pilot on the Peace
+Fort Dunvegan on the Peace
+Fort St. John on the Peace
+Where King was arrested
+Alec Kennedy with his two sons
+Cannibal Louise, her little girl and Miss Cameron
+A Peace River Pioneer
+Three generations
+A family at the Lesser Slave
+A one-night stand
+A rye field in Brandon, Manitoba
+Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway
+William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway
+Donald D. Maun, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern Railway
+William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway
+In the wheat fields
+Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior
+Threshing grain
+Doukhobors threshing flax
+Sir William Van Horne, first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Map of the Author's Route]
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW NORTH
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
+
+
+"We are as mendicants who wait
+  Along the roadside in the sun.
+Tatters of yesterday and shreds
+  Of morrow clothe us every one.
+
+"And some are dotards, who believe
+  And glory in the days of old;
+While some are dreamers, harping still
+  Upon an unknown age of gold.
+
+"O foolish ones, put by your care!
+  Where wants are many, joys are few;
+And at the wilding springs of peace,
+  God keeps an open house for you.
+
+"But there be others, happier few,
+  The vagabondish sons of God,
+Who know the by-ways and the flowers,
+  And care not how the world may plod."
+
+Isn't it Riley who says, "Ef you want something, an' jest dead set
+a-longin' fer it with both eyes wet, and tears won't bring it, why, you
+try sweat"? Well, we had tried sweat and longing for two years, with
+planning and hoping and the saving of nickels, and now we are off!
+
+Shakespeare makes his man say, "I will run as far as God has any
+ground," and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on
+going till we strike the Arctic,--straight up through Canada. Most
+writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and
+travel west by the C.P.R., following the line of least resistance till
+they reach the Pacific. Then they go back to dear old England and tell
+the world all about Canada, their idea of the half-continent being
+Euclid's conception of a straight line, "length without breadth."
+
+[Illustration: Sir Wilfred Laurier]
+
+But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt
+of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary
+and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves
+after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to
+follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from
+Dan to Beersheba to say "All is barren," but to come near to the people,
+our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than
+Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of
+Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting
+that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.
+
+We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of
+all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend
+of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward,--till
+you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our
+ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St.
+Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of
+the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong
+hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on
+the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.
+
+There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage
+was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered
+Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool.
+But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last
+unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out,
+pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a
+dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.
+
+Kipling speaks of "a route unspoiled of Cook's," and we have found it.
+Going to the office of Thos. Cook & Son, in Chicago, with a friend who
+had planned a Mediterranean tour, I gently said, "I wonder if you can
+give me information about a trip I am anxious to take this summer." The
+young man smiled and his tone was that which we accord to an indulged
+child, "I guess we can. Cook & Son give information on _most_ places."
+"Very well," I said, "I want to go from Chicago to the Arctic by the
+Mackenzie River, returning home by the Peace and the Lesser Slave. Can
+you tell me how long it will take, what it will cost, and how I make my
+connections?" He was game; he didn't move an eyebrow, but went off to
+the secret recesses in the back office to consult "the main guy," "the
+chief squeeze," "the head push," "the big noise." Back they came
+together with a frank laugh, "Well, Miss Cameron, I guess you've got us.
+Cook's have no schedule to the Arctic that way." They were able,
+however, to give accurate information as to how one should reach Hudson
+Bay, with modes of travel, dates, and approximate cost. But this journey
+for another day.
+
+Leaving Chicago one sizzling Sunday in mid-May, we (my niece and I) stop
+for a day to revel in bird and blossoms at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota,
+then silently in the night cross the invisible parallel of 49° where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver.
+
+With the Polar Ocean as ultimate goal, we cannot help thinking how
+during the last generation the Arctic Circle has been pushed steadily
+farther north. Forty years ago Minneapolis and St. Paul were struggling
+trading-posts, and all America north of them was the range of the
+buffalo and the Indian. Then Fort Garry (Winnipeg) became Farthest
+North. Before starting, I had dug out from the Public Library the record
+of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago,
+deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their
+minutes) that "Our Northern tier of States is too far north to
+successfully grow wheat." For years Winnipeg was considered the northern
+limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of
+limitation was pushed farther back until it is
+Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared "Farthest North." To-day
+we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due
+north of Edmonton!
+
+In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh
+beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all
+interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach
+Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These
+were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. "But," the old chap
+says, "the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the
+Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it
+stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal
+to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin'
+red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set
+on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and
+what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart,
+poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the
+old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at
+sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all
+wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife." This incident was
+not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known
+to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his
+way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the
+war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured
+clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing
+this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by
+the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.
+
+[Illustration: Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada]
+
+What Cook & Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg
+furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for
+two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when
+the Second Charles ruled in England,--an age when men said not "How
+cheap?" but "How good?", not "How easy?" but "How well?" The Hudson's
+Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the
+Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can
+travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except
+under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for
+you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and
+sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot.
+Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be
+transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats,
+guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort
+Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between
+Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull
+whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.
+
+For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the
+Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the
+benefit of employés, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here
+they are as we copied them down:
+
+Let all things be done decently and in order.
+    1 Cor. xiv, 40.
+
+Be punctual, be regular, be clean.
+Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
+Be obliging and kind one to another.
+Let no angry word be heard among you
+Be not fond of change. (Sic.)
+Be clothed with humility, not finery.
+Take all things by the smooth handle.
+Be civil to all, but familiar with few.
+
+As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American,--
+
+"Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let
+go your overcoat. Thieves are around,"
+
+the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our
+shoulders, "Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!"
+
+A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a
+transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, "What makes
+Winnipeg?" Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it
+out. "This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our
+nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches
+going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty
+stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the
+remittance man from England, sorr," with a quizzical look at the checked
+suit of his interlocutor, "shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies
+up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!" As Mulcahey winks
+the other eye, we drift out into this "Buckle of the Wheat-Belt."
+
+What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her
+a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of
+her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an
+increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one
+hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the
+world's history.
+
+Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and
+bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has
+had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now
+counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the
+British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway
+tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million
+dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings
+in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801;
+and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without
+Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade
+filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a
+day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed
+a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western
+Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures--the lure of the
+land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is
+estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one
+thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth
+of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring
+the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in
+figures--the "power of the man."
+
+[Illustration: Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt]
+
+Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City
+of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation
+of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg
+sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages--Armenian, Arabic,
+Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu,
+Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that
+some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast
+the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would
+Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the _London
+Times_, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out
+from among the flotsam in the kelp.
+
+Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we
+cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred
+steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate
+that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the
+six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This
+will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold
+by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for
+breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the
+list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics
+of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that
+these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do.
+"But they are all good pay," the implement-man says. Looking at the red
+ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history.
+The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out
+into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these
+ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of
+faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and
+formative!
+
+We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we
+reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A.
+Stewart says to us, "Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has
+fallen by the way." We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a
+cot. "Tell him that you are going into the land of fur," whispers the
+doctor, "he has been a trapper all his life."
+
+Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and
+his snow-shoes pinned him fast. When dragged out he had suffered so with
+the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to
+the hospital. Hard luck? Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with
+mercy. Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice
+of life,--a doctor with a man's brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the
+heart of a little child. The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has
+one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of
+motion remaining in the other leg. His vocal cords are so affected that
+the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the
+mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man. Between patient and
+doctor, a third man entered the drama,--Mr. Grey, a convalescent.
+Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother
+studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel,
+to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.
+
+Who is this patient? A man without friends or influence, not attractive
+in appearance, more than distressing to listen to,--just one more worker
+thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life. The
+consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not
+even arrest the creeping death. Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner
+of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked.
+Dr. Stewart had two men's work to do. He worked all day and was busy
+well into the night. A doctor's natural tendency is to see in each man
+that he ministers to merely "a case," a manifestation of some disease to
+be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages. But in the
+Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young
+men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.
+
+The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper
+was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke
+by twilight. We are happiest when we create. So he said to Carlton, "Did
+you ever write a story?" The head shook answer. "Well, why don't you
+try? You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody
+else knows. Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here."
+
+The outcome was disappointing. The uncouth sounds, translated by Grey,
+were bald, bare, and stiff. Soon the stiffness worked off. With
+half-shut eyes Carlton lived again in the woods. He lifted the dewy
+branch of a tree and surprised the mother deer making the toilet of her
+fawn, saw the beaver busied with his home of mud and wattles, heard the
+coyote scream across the prairie edge. Easily the thought flowed, and
+the stuff that Grey handed in was a live story that breathed. In that
+brave heart the joy of the creator stirred, and with it that feeling
+which makes all endeavour worth while--the thought that somebody cares.
+A close observer at this stage of the game may read, too, on the face of
+Grey the kindly look that comes when we forget ourselves long enough to
+take the trouble to reach out for another man's viewpoint.
+
+Carlton's short stories, submitted to a publisher, were pronounced
+good, were accepted, and brought a cash return. They struck a new note
+among the squabblings of the nature-fakers. Favourable comment came from
+those who read them, who, reading, knew naught of their three authors.
+Before this Carlton had never written a line for publication; but he had
+been a true observer. He had felt, and was able to project himself into
+the minds of those living things he had seen and hunted.
+
+I leave the hospital cot with a strange lump forming in my throat,
+although every one around me, and the patient most of all, is gay and
+blithe. I say to Carlton, "I wish I could take your knowledge and your
+eyes with me into the North, there is so much I will miss because of my
+lack of knowledge." With Grey's kindly interpretation I get my answer,
+"You must take your own mind, your own eyes; you must see for yourself."
+
+During the last day in Winnipeg, while the Kid (like faithful
+Ariovistus) is looking after the impedimenta, I snatch half an hour to
+look in at the Royal Alexandra upon the reception which the Women's
+Canadian Club is tendering to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Rain-bespattered,
+short-skirted, and anchored with disreputable rubbers gluey with
+Winnipeg mud, I sit on the fringe of things, fairly intoxicated with the
+idea that we are off and this North trip no dream. Mrs. Sanford Evans
+presides with her usual _savoir faire_ and ushers in the guest of the
+day, beautifully-gowned and gracious.
+
+Like a bolt from the blue came the summons from the president, and I,
+all muddy, am called to the seats of the mighty. I have never seen a
+more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg
+Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face
+them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of
+mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my
+unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success
+of my journey. Mrs. Humphry Ward calls attention to the lack of
+playgrounds in England. She wants to bring more fresh air and space to
+the crowded people of the Old World. I submit that my wish is the
+mathematical converse to hers. My great desire is to call attention to
+the great unoccupied lands of Canada, to induce people from the crowded
+centres of the Old World to use the fresh air of the New.
+
+[Illustration: The Canadian Women's Press Club]
+
+To those who bid us good-bye at the train, the Kid and I yell
+exultantly, "All aboard for the Arctic Ocean and way ports!"
+
+A group of Galicians sitting by the curb, two mothers and seven small
+children, one a baby at the breast, make the last picture we see as the
+train pulls out. It was the end of their first day in Winnipeg. The
+fathers of the flock evidently were seeking work and had left their
+families gazing through the portals of the strange new land. In the
+half-sad, altogether-brave lines on the young mothers' faces and their
+tender looks bent on the little ones we read the motive responsible for
+all migrations--"Better conditions for the babies." In the little
+fellows of seven or eight with their ill-fitting clothes and their
+dogged looks of determination one sees the makers of empire. Before a
+decade is past they will be active wheat-growers in their own right,
+making two grains grow where one grew before and so "deserving better of
+mankind than the whole race of politicians put together." I think it was
+President Garfield who said, "I always feel more respect for a boy than
+for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that
+ragged jacket?" It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A
+young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg
+students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic
+world--the Rhodes scholarship.
+
+We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers
+from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral,
+has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of
+forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures
+its every thought in bushels and bullion.
+
+The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg
+just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of
+David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here
+and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted
+some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony
+performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding.
+One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, "I wudna
+have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a
+properly-ordained meenister." And he was coming. Even now he was
+floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having
+reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks
+before.
+
+When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton
+phrase, "they do not teem with conversational grace." Straight from
+Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the
+Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago.
+In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and
+in his simplicity thought himself "the first that ever burst into that
+silent sea." When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled
+sound, he was in doubt how to place it.
+
+"Is it the clang of wild-geese?
+  Is it the Indian's yell,
+That lends to the voice of the North-wind
+  The tones of a far-off bell?"
+
+The Indian boatmen _said_ nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's
+parrot.
+
+"The voyageur smiles as he listens
+  To the sound that grows apace;
+Well he knows the vesper ringing
+  Of the bells of St. Boniface."
+
+Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in
+the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness
+
+"The bells of the Roman Mission,
+  That call from their turrets twain
+To the boatmen on the river,
+  To the hunter on the plain."
+
+That friend was a fellow-townsman of the "Quaker Poet." The story was
+told to Whittier and inspired the lines of _The Red River Voyageur_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+
+"To the far-flung fenceless prairie
+  Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,
+To our neighbor's barn in the offing
+  And the line of the new-cut rail;
+To the plough in her league-long furrow."
+
+--_Rudyard Kipling_.
+
+Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at
+Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it
+will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.
+
+From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and
+two railway lines are open to us,--the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
+Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the
+latter.
+
+Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand
+miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are
+pouring. "The sleeping nation beyond," is what General Sherman in a
+moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We
+are on the heels of the greatest economic trek this world has ever seen.
+The historian of to-morrow will rank it with the world migrations.
+
+The flourishing centres of Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its
+Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police,
+Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw
+towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand
+of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as
+these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp
+conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement
+warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it
+takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat
+elevator, red against the setting sun.
+
+The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo
+bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a
+sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude
+coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is
+the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the
+crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and
+fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to
+the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the
+transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.
+
+Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy,
+buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a
+busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many
+railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R.
+irrigation works, the largest on this continent. The area included in
+the irrigation block is twice as big as the Island of Porto Rico and
+one-eighth the size of England and Wales; and the ultimate expenditure
+on the undertaking will reach the five million mark.
+
+Calgary is the centre of a country literally flowing with milk and honey
+and fat things. The oil-fields of Pincher Creek, with their rich promise
+of becoming a second Pennsylvania, are contiguous to the city. The
+winter wheat grown in Southern Alberta was awarded first prize and gold
+medal at the World's Fair in Oregon in 1905. The hackney carriage horses
+which took first prize at the last Montreal and New York horse-fairs
+were foaled and raised near Calgary. If we were to continue going due
+west from this point, all the scenic glories of the Rocky Mountains
+would be ours--seventy Switzerlands in one. But that journey must stand
+over for another day, with the journey to Prince Rupert, the ocean
+terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific.
+
+Turning sharply to the north, we travel two hundred miles, and draw into
+where Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, sits smiling on the banks of her
+silver Saskatchewan. As he sees us digging out our tents and dunnage,
+the porter asks, "Then yer not comin' back?" "No." "You _are_ goin' to
+the North Pole, then, the place you wuz hollerin' fer!"
+
+With the exception of Victoria, Edmonton has the most charming location
+of all cities of Western Canada. High Hope stalks her streets. There is
+a spirit of initiative and assuredness in this virile town, a culture
+and thoughtfulness in her people, expectancy in the very air. It is the
+city of contrasts; the ox-cart dodges the automobile; in the track of
+French heel treads the moccasin; the silk hat salutes the Stetson.
+
+Edmonton is the end of steel. Three lines converge here: the Canadian
+Northern, the Canadian Pacific, and the Grand Trunk Pacific. The
+Canadian Northern arrived first, coming in four years ago. Now that
+Edmonton has arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that
+there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis,
+anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in
+commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before
+Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian
+Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals
+and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that
+sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into
+Edmonton, as little was known of the valley of the Saskatchewan as is
+known now of the valley of the Peace. Without exception, Canadian men of
+letters go to other countries for recognition, but not so all our men of
+deeds. Mackenzie and Mann, "the Brains of a Trans-Continental," stayed
+in Canada and put their genius to work here. The Canadian Northern is
+the product of Canadian minds and Canadian money.
+
+[Illustration: A Section of Edmonton]
+
+We walk Edmonton streets for ten days and see neither an old man nor an
+old woman. The government and the business interests are in the hands of
+young people who have adopted modern methods of doing things; single tax
+is the basis of taxation; the city owns its public utilities, including
+an interurban street railroad, electric lighting plant, water-works, and
+the automatic telephone. Mr. C.W. Cross, the Attorney-General of
+Alberta, is the youngest man in Canada to hold that high office. During
+the first session of the first legislature of this baby province less
+than three years ago, an enabling act was passed for a university.
+Nowhere else have I been sensible of such a feeling of united
+public-spiritedness as obtains here.
+
+Down in the river valley are hundreds of people living under canvas, not
+because they are poor but because building contractors cannot keep pace
+with the demand for homes. As we pass these tents, we are rude enough to
+look in. Most of them are furnished with telephones and the city water;
+here a bride bends over a chafing dish; another glance discloses an
+oil-painting that was once shown in the Royal Academy. From the next
+tent float the strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and, as we stop
+to listen, a gentleman and his wife step out. An auto picks them up and
+off they whirl to Jasper Avenue. The Lord o' the Tents of Shem
+disappears into his bank and Milady drives on to the Government house to
+read before the Literary Club a paper on Browning's _Saul_. To the
+tenderfoot from the South it is all delightfully disconcerting--oxen and
+autos and Browning on the Saskatchewan!
+
+The Sunday before we leave Edmonton I find another set of tents, put up
+by the Immigration Department, where East-End Londoners are housed
+pending their going out upon the land. In the first call I make I
+unearth a baby who rejoices in the name of Hester Beatrice Cran.
+"H.B.C.," I remark, "aren't you rather infringing on a right, taking
+that trade-mark?" Quick came the retort, "Ho! If she gets as good a 'old
+on the land as the 'Udson's Bay Company 'as, she'll do!"
+
+Another lady in the next tent proudly marshalled her olive branches.
+"D'isy and the baiby were born in the Heast Hend. They're Henglish;
+please God they'll make good Canaidians. They're tellin' me, miss,
+there'll be five 'undred more of us on the 'igh seas comin' out to
+Hedmonton from the Heast Hend, all poor people like ourselves. I often
+wonder w'y they don't bring out a few dukes to give the country a touch
+of 'igh life--it's very plain 'ere."
+
+By the first day of June we have our kit complete and are ready to
+leave. We have tried to cut everything down to the last ounce, but still
+the stuff makes a rather formidable array. What have we? Tent,
+tent-poles, typewriter, two cameras, two small steamer-trunks, bedding
+(a thin mattress with waterproof bottom and waterproof extension-flaps
+and within this our two blankets), a flour-bag or "Hudson's Bay
+suit-case" (containing tent-pegs, hatchet, and tin wash-basin), two
+raincoats, a tiny bag with brush and comb and soap--and last, but yet
+first, the kodak films wrapped in oilcloth and packed in biscuit-tins.
+The bits of impedimenta look unfamiliar as we take our first inventory,
+but we are to come to know them soon by their feel in the dark, to
+estimate to an ounce the weight of each on many a lonely portage.
+
+[Illustration: The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan]
+
+At seven in the morning the stage pulls up for us, and it rains--no
+gentle sizzle-sozzle, but a sod-soaker, yea a gully-washer! The
+accusing newness of those raincoats is to come off at once. Expansive
+Kennedy looks askance at the tenderfoots who climb over his wheel. His
+Majesty's Royal Mail Stage sifts through the town picking up the other
+victims. We are two big stage-loads, our baggage marked for every point
+between Edmonton and the Arctic Ocean. Every passenger but ourselves
+looks forward to indefinite periods of expatriation in the silent
+places. We alone are going for fun. Our one care is to keep those
+precious cameras dry. This is the beginning of a camera nightmare which
+lasts six months until we again reach Chicago.
+
+And the fellow-passengers? Law is represented, and medicine, and the
+all-powerful H.B. Co. With us is Mr. Angus Brabant going in on his
+initial official trip in charge of H.B. interests in the whole Mackenzie
+River District, and with him two cadets of The Company. On the seat
+behind us sit a Frenchman reading a French novel, a man from Dakota, and
+a third passenger complaining of a camera "which cost fifty pounds
+sterling" that somehow has fallen by the way. Sergeant Anderson,
+R.N.W.M.P., with his wife and two babies are in the other stage.
+
+Kennedy, the driver, is a character. Driving in and out and covering on
+this one trail twelve thousand miles every year, he is fairly soaked
+with stories of the North and Northmen. The other stage is driven by
+Kennedy's son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was
+just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man. Dwarfed in mind
+and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp.
+
+The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his
+camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and
+run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find
+the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat
+with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic
+Circle.
+
+[Illustration: Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta]
+
+The girlish figure of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in
+gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the
+little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward
+look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of "seven
+times nine," "the mountains of Asia," "the Tudor sovereigns with dates
+of accession," and other things appertaining to "that imperial palace
+whence I came." All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty
+and food scarce, a backward thought to this teacher making muddy tracks
+toward the well of English undefiled, brings pleased content.
+
+[Illustration: A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge]
+
+At noon it clears, and as we "make tea" at Sturgeon Creek (the Namao
+Sepee of the Indians), the first of the "stopping-places" or
+Waldorf-Astorias of the wilderness, the Doctor has his will and gathers
+violets, moccasin flowers, and the purple _dodecatheon_. As we pass Lily
+Lake he remarks, "This reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk's place at
+Arundel; it is just like this." South Dakoty returns, "I don't know
+him."
+
+Here and there we pass clusters of Galician huts. Instead of following
+the line of least resistance in the fertile plains to the south, these
+people, the Mark Tapleys of the prairies, choose cheap land up here for
+the pleasure of conquering it and "coming out strong." They are a frugal
+people, with a fondness for work, a wholesome horror of debt, and the
+religious instinct strongly insistent. Off on a hillside near each
+little settlement a naked cross extends its arms. These are their
+open-air churches, and in all weathers, men, women, and children gather
+at the foot of the cross to worship the God of their fathers. By and by,
+when the soil has yielded to their labours, with their own hands will
+they build a church and without debt it will be dedicated. The idea of
+raising an imposing church and presenting God with the mortgage does not
+appeal to the Galician.
+
+The clean sheets at "Eggie's," the second stopping-place, are
+attractive, and we sleep the sleep of the just. We acknowledge with
+inward shame that two years of city life have given us the soft muscles
+of the chee-chaco; we'll have to harden up a bit if we are to reach that
+far-away ocean.
+
+Next day, midway between Edmonton and Athabasca Landing, we water our
+horses at the Tautinau. We are standing at the Height of Land, the
+watershed between the Saskatchewan and the Athabasca. This little ridge
+where the harebells grow divides the drops of rain of the noon-day
+shower. Some of these drops, by way of the Saskatchewan, Lake Winnipeg,
+and Hudson Bay, will reach the Atlantic. Others, falling into the
+Athabasca, will form part of that yellow-tinged flood which, by way of
+Great Slave Lake and the mighty Mackenzie, carries its tribute to the
+Frozen Ocean. These last are the drops we follow.
+
+To save the horses we walk the hills, and I try to match giant steps
+with Sergeant Anderson. Kennedy, Junior, joins us and has a knotty point
+to settle regarding "the gentleman wot murdered the man." It is hard to
+induce a Mounted Policeman to talk. However, to be striding Athabasca
+Trail with the hero of the Hayward-King murder-trial is too good an
+opportunity to lose, and, reluctantly rendered, bit by bit the story
+comes out.
+
+Most people looking at a map of Northwest Canada would think it a safe
+wilderness for a live man or a dead man to disappear in with no
+questions asked. In reality, it is about the worst place in America in
+which to commit a crime and hope to go unpunished.
+
+In September, 1904, the Indians reported to the Mounted Police that they
+had seen two white men in the early summer, and that afterwards one man
+walked alone, and was now at Lesser Slave. An observant Cree boy added,
+"The dog won't follow that other white fellow any more." Sergeant
+Anderson, going to their last camp, turned over the ashes and found
+three hard lumps of flesh and a small piece of skull bone. Convinced
+that murder had been done, he arrested the suspected man and sent him to
+Fort Saskatchewan for trial. No one knew the identity of either the dead
+man or the living. In front of the old camp-fire was a little slough or
+lake, and this seemed a promising place to look for evidence. Sergeant
+Anderson hired Indian women to wade in the ooze, feeling with their toes
+for any hard substance. In this way were secured a sovereign-case and a
+stick-pin of unusual make. The lake was systematically drained and
+yielded a shoe with a broken-eyed needle sticking in it. Sifting the
+ashes of the camp-fire and examining them with a microscope, Anderson
+discovered the eye of the broken needle and thus established a
+connection between the camp with its burnt flesh and the exhibits from
+the lake. The maker of the stick-pin in London, England, was cabled to
+by the Canadian Government, and a Mr. Hayward summoned to come from
+there to identify the trinkets of his murdered brother. A cheque drawn
+by the dead Hayward in favour of King came to the surface in a British
+Columbia bank. Link by link the chain of evidence grew.
+
+It took eleven months for Sergeant Anderson to get his case in shape.
+Then he convoyed forty Indian witnesses two hundred and fifty miles from
+Lesser Slave to Edmonton to tell what they knew about the crime
+committed in the silent places. The evidence was placed before the jury,
+and the Indians returned to their homes. A legal technicality cropped up
+and the trial had to be repeated. Once more the forty Indians travelled
+from Lesser Slave to repeat their story. The result was that Charles
+King of Utah was found guilty of the murder of Edward Hayward and paid
+the death penalty.
+
+This trial cost the Canadian Government over $30,000,--all to avenge the
+death of one of the wandering units to be found in every corner of the
+frontier, one unknown prospector. Was it worth while? Did it pay? Yes,
+it paid. It is by such object-lessons that to Indian and white alike is
+forced home the truth that God's law, "Thou shalt not kill," is also the
+law of Britain and of Canada.
+
+We are still on foot, when a cry from the Kid hurries us to the
+hilltop. Reaching the crest, we catch our breaths. Down below lies the
+little village of "The Landing." That sparkling flood beyond proves the
+Athabasca to be a live, northward-trending river, a river capable of
+carrying us with it, and no mere wiggly line on a map.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+
+"I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;
+Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods;
+I wait for the men who will win me--and I will not be won in a day;
+And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,
+But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child."
+
+--_Robert Service_
+
+[Illustration: Athabasca Landing]
+
+Athabasca Landing, a funnel through which percolates the whole trade
+between the wheat-belt and the Arctic, is the true gateway of the North.
+Seeing our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union
+Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its
+edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an
+incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading
+itself with prodigality over the swift river.
+
+The Athabasca, after dipping to the south, here takes a sudden northward
+bend. Its source is in the crest of the continent far back in the
+Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river
+being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great
+tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to
+embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five
+miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps
+an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.
+
+We are in latitude 55° North, and between us and the Arctic lies an
+unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and
+the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging
+like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south
+of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has
+stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a
+country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown
+and dubbed "barren" because unknown, will support its teeming millions.
+Chimerical? Why so?
+
+Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of
+55° westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the
+Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map
+of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to
+follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year
+1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain,
+grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a
+half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one
+and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining
+in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are
+about to enter does not enjoy.
+
+Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by
+all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of
+moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing
+in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the
+little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large
+establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman
+Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted
+Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a
+blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of
+Cree-Scots half-breeds.
+
+Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a
+discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all
+sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the
+place,--tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike
+dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may
+be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the
+silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the
+language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, "What means a
+camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a
+needle's eye." The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and
+coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its
+coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that
+stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed
+by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only "for medicinal
+purposes." By an easy transferring of epithets, the term "permit" has
+come to signify the revivifying juice itself.
+
+[Illustration: Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca]
+
+One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the
+North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a
+rule they are not. There is no discussion of American banks and equally
+no mention of the wheat crop. The one conjecture round the bar and in
+the home is, "When will the rabbits run this year?" The rabbits in the
+North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark
+aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him.
+Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year
+means a scarcity of all kinds of fur. As surely as wheat stands for
+bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of
+the North.
+
+It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company
+making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in
+supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in
+barter during the previous winter. The big open scows, or
+"sturgeon-heads," which are to form our convoy have been built, the
+freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen
+drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the
+word which is the keynote of the Cree character,--"Kee-am," freely
+translated, "Never mind," "Don't get excited," "There's plenty of time,"
+"It's all right," "It will all come out in the wash."
+
+When the present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office
+he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a
+time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was
+shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing,
+old Duncan Tremblé, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked
+admiringly at the printed slip and said, "Aye, aye; the Commissioner he
+makes laws, but the river he boss." It is only when ice is out and
+current serves that the brigade moves forward. Old Duncan knows seven
+languages,--English, French, Cree, Chipewyan, Beaver, Chinook,
+Montagnais,--he speaks seven languages, thinks in Cree, and
+prevaricates in them all.
+
+[Illustration: The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians]
+
+At the foot of the hill we visit the English parsonage, with its
+old-time sun-dial at the garden-gate. Within, we find what must surely
+be the farthest north printing-press. Here two devoted women have spent
+years of their lives printing in Cree on a hand-press syllabic hymns and
+portions of the Gospel for the enlightenment of the Indians. We wander
+into the school where a young teacher is explaining to his uneasy
+disciples the intricacies of Present Worth and Compound Interest. Idly
+we wonder to what use these bare-footed half-Cree urchins will put their
+exact banking knowledge.
+
+Everywhere around us the wild flowers are a great joy; we hail with the
+gladness of released children the posies that sweetened childhood
+meadows--the dwarf cornel (Cornel Canadensis), dandelions, strawberry
+blossoms, wild roses, the pale wood-violet on its long stem, and amid
+these familiars the saskatoon or service-berry bushes, with blueberry
+vines, and viburnums of many kinds. On the street the natty uniforms of
+the Mounted Police are in evidence, and baseball has penetrated as far
+north as this. In the post office we read,
+
+"It is decided to hold sports on the first day of July. The Committee
+promises a splendid programme,--horse-races, foot-races, football match,
+baseball game. There will also be prizes for the best piece of Indian
+fancy-work. Dancing will be in full swing in the evening. All welcome."
+
+Opposite the hotel is a reading-room built by a Methodist parson who
+also made the furniture with his own hands; magazines, books,
+writing-material, games are available to all. This practical work of one
+man who accepted the responsibility of being his brother's keeper
+appealed to us. In a store near the hotel we see a Cree boatman
+purchasing a farewell present for his sweetheart. As he turns over the
+fancy articles, we have bad form enough to observe his choice. He
+selects a fine-tooth comb, for which he pays fifty cents, or as he calls
+it, "two skins," and asks, as he tucks it into his jerkin, if he can
+change it "if she doesn't like it."
+
+In the evening it rains, and the room assigned us becomes a living
+illustration of the new word we have just learned,--"muskeg," a swamp.
+Putting the precious cameras on top of the bureau, we let the rest of
+the things swim at their pleasure. Starting with the rest of the
+unattached community of Athabasca Landing to go down to the pool-room,
+we catch sight of Dr. Sussex and the Cree priest, who have found a
+little oasis of their own around a big stove in the upper hall and, with
+chairs tilted back, are enjoying some portable hospitality from below.
+The doctor arises to escort us through the flood, and when I rally him
+about his liquid refreshment, he says, "Oh, I had lemonade."
+
+"I see. And the priest?"
+
+"He had--what he liked."
+
+If local colour and local smell is what we have come north for, we find
+it here. Mr. Brabant comes up with "I wonder if that bunch of nuns is
+going to get here in time to take scows with us," and we pass into the
+billiard-room and watch the game. The players gliding round in moccasins
+are all half-breeds. The exclamations are for the most part in Cree or
+bad French, and as I crowd in looking for some local terms all that I
+hear intelligible is, "That is damn close, I think me."
+
+For thirty-six hours on end it rains. That roof was full of surprises;
+you never knew where it would spring a fresh leak. One room is a little
+better than the rest, and we all gather there and make the best of
+it,--smoking, writing, telling yarns. A bumping noise from across the
+hall and the cry of a child startles us. It proves to be Sergeant
+Anderson's baby whose cradle has started afloat, and there is a general
+rush to rescue Moses from his bulrushes. Everybody is in good humour.
+
+As we calm the baby, South Dakota says "It reminds me of the Englishman
+and his musical bath." We demand the story. "Well, a rich American took
+a great liking to an Englishman he had been travelling with, and sent
+him for a birthday present a Yankee invention to set up in his
+country-house--a musical bath. As you turned on the spigot, the thing
+played a tune while you were washing, and sort of relieved the tee-deum.
+The two gents met next Christmas in New York, and the Yankee he sez,
+'And how did you like the bath?' 'Oh, thank you very much, it was kind
+of you indeed, but I found it a little irksome standing all the time,
+you know.' 'Standing, what the blazes do you mean?' asked the Yankee.
+'Well,' says the Britisher, 'the tune you furnished, you know, with the
+bawth, was _God Save the King_, and as soon as it began, you know, I had
+to stand, and it's rather tiresome taking your bawth standing, you
+know."
+
+Sergeant Joyce tells how at a Mounted Police dinner at Fort Saskatchewan
+a parson, who was a guest, in proposing a toast, facetiously advised his
+entertainers to have nothing to do with either a doctor or a lawyer. It
+was interesting to watch the parson's face when there arose to reply a
+lawyer and a doctor, each a constable in the rank and file.
+
+Mrs. Leslie Wood of Athabasca Landing adds her quota to the Tales of a
+Wayside Inn. We could have listened to her for a week and regretted
+neither the rain nor the waiting scows. As a girl she remembers being
+shocked at seeing men hold tin cups to the throats of newly-slaughtered
+buffalo, drinking with gusto the warm blood.
+
+"What are the two greatest things on earth?" Mrs. Wood, as a young girl,
+asked the dusky disciples of her Sunday School class. "The Queen and The
+Company," was the ready response. "And of these, which is the greater?"
+Little Marten-Tail rubbed one moccasin over the other, and the answer
+came thoughtfully in Cree, "The Company. The Queen sometimes dies, but
+The Company never dies."
+
+"The Company," of which the little girl spoke, "The Governor and Company
+of Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay," deriving its charter in 1670
+from the Second Charles of England, is the oldest chartered concern in
+the world, with a present-day sphere of influence as large as Great
+Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined. From lone Labrador to the
+Pacific littoral and from Winnipeg to the Frozen Ocean are scattered the
+two hundred and fifty fur-trading forts of this concern in charge of its
+two thousand strong silent servants. Last year it paid to its
+stockholders a profit of forty-five per cent on the invested capital,
+and for two hundred and thirty-nine consecutive years it has been
+declaring dividends. The motto of the Company, _Pro Pelle Cutein_, is
+prominently displayed at Athabasca Landing. Literally translated, the
+phrase means "Skin for skin"; but why the promoters should have chosen
+as war-cry the words which Satan used when fighting with the Lord for
+the soul of Job, is not so apparent.
+
+As we watch the trading goods being carried in the rain from warehouse
+to scows, we think how, weaving its cross-Atlantic way through the
+centuries and joining the periwigged days of the Stuarts to this day,
+the one man-made thing that has persisted is this commerce-shuttle of
+the H.B. Co.
+
+In the days when The Company had its birth, the blind Milton was
+dictating his message and the liberated Bunyan preached the spoken word,
+the iniquitous Cabal Ministry was forming in England, and Panama was
+sacked by Morgan the buccaneer. New York merchants of Manhattan met
+every Friday at noon on the bridge over the Broad Street Canal for
+barter, South Carolina was settled on the Ashley River, Virginia enacted
+that "all servants not being Christians, imported into this country by
+shipping shall be slaves," and her Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was
+inspired to exclaim piously, "I hope we shall have neither free schools
+nor printing these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience
+and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. God
+keep us from both!" It was not until two years later that Addison was
+born, and that Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi, even as
+we now are essaying the Athabasca.
+
+Unique in commercial annals is the Royal Charter which gave, with power
+of life and death, to the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, less than
+twenty in number, "forever hereafter" possession and jurisdiction over a
+country as large as Europe. Liberty here for utter despotism, the widest
+of excesses. We marvel that from the first Prince Rupert of the Rhine to
+the latest Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Governors of the
+Ancient Company have, with Duncan-like demeanour, borne themselves so
+meek in their great office.
+
+It has been fashionable to paint the H.B. Co. as an agrarian oligarchy.
+Organized for the purpose of "making fur" before the time of the Habeas
+Corpus, two decades ahead of the Bank of England, sixty-two years before
+Benjamin Franklin began publishing "Poor Richard's Almanac," and a
+century in advance of Watt's steam-engine, it is true that The Company,
+throughout the years, devoted itself to peltries and not to platting
+town sites. This was its business. From the beginning it has
+consistently kept faith with the Indians; the word of The Company has,
+for reward or for punishment, ever been worth its full face value. It
+was not an H.B. Scot who exclaimed feelingly, "Honesty _is_ the best
+policy, I've tried baith."
+
+The feeling of devotion to The Company is as strong today as it ever
+was. When the present Commissioner took office he penetrated the North
+on a tour of inspection. At Athabasca Landing, since it was not known
+just when the Head would arrive, the local official charged all his
+clerks and minions to be ready at the sound of a whistle to salute and
+fall into line for inspection. The call to arms came on Sunday morning
+during divine service. Every attaché of The Company with one exception
+obeyed the signal. Young Tom Helly, the paid organist, stuck to his
+post; and next day he was called on the carpet. "It was a special
+service; I was in the middle of the anthem, sir, and didn't like to
+leave the House of God." "Couldn't you show some respect?" roared the
+local officer. Man was near in Athabasca Landing and God far away. Down
+in the big office at Winnipeg is a Doomsday Book where the life-record
+of every servant of The Company is kept, for no man who has ever served
+The Company is lost sight of. When there is a good fur-winter, every
+employé of The Company is handed an envelope which contains a
+bonus-cheque,--ten per cent of his yearly salary.
+
+[Illustration: C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.]
+
+The Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company and the head of one of
+Canada's big department stores were dining together at a Toronto Club.
+"After six o'clock I don't want to see or hear of an employé--he doesn't
+exist for me until eight o'clock next morning," said the head of the
+department store. "Well, I'm more curious than you," smiled the
+Commissioner of the H.B. Co., "I want to be reasonably assured of what
+every man-Jack of my people is doing all the time. I want to know what
+he reads, and if he treats his wife well, and how his last baby is
+getting along--you see, he's a working-partner of mine."
+
+There came out of Northern British Columbia last year the Indian wife
+and half-breed daughters of an H.B. Co. Factor. They were bound for
+Montreal and it was their first trip "outside." The Commissioner at
+Winnipeg contradicts the old saw, and surely has "a soul above a
+beaver-skin"; like Mulvaney, too, he "has bowels." Quickly went forward
+a letter to a tactful woman in the border-town through which the
+visiting ladies must pass--"Meet them, and see that they get the proper
+things to wear in society circles in Montreal. I don't want them to feel
+ill at ease when they get there." Stories like these give us glimpses of
+the kind of paternalism exercised by the Ancient Company, the one trust
+that has never ground the faces of the poor, and in whose people to-day
+appears the "constant service of the Old World."
+
+The big books of The Company a year or two ago in unmistakable
+round-hand declared that one Running Rabbit, lawful widow of Blueskin,
+was entitled to draw from the coffers clear-side bacon and a modicum of
+flour. But one quarterly paysheet, returned to Winnipeg from Fort
+Churchill, showed that Running Rabbit in addition to her food allowance
+had been handed out forty cents' worth of cotton. Stern enquiry, backed
+by red-tape and The Company's seal as big as a saucer, was sent up to
+the Churchill Factor. Why had the allowance of Mrs. Blueskin (née
+Running Rabbit) been exceeded? By "return mail" nine months later the
+Factor reported,
+
+"The widow's gone,
+  Her tent's forsaken,
+No more she comes
+  For flour and bacon.
+N.B. The cotton was used for her shroud."
+
+The Ancient Company was penny-wise, but in spite of the copybook line,
+not pound-foolish, as its dividend paysheets conclusively prove.
+
+There is no desire to show forth these silent ones of the North as
+infallible men and immaculate. They make many mistakes; they were and
+are delightfully human, and we couldn't picture one of them with a
+saintly aureole. But in the past, as in the present, they were large
+men; they honoured their word, and you couldn't buy them. Men of action,
+whether inside fort walls, bartering in the tepee of the Indian, or off
+on silent trails alone,--it has been given to each of them to live life
+at firsthand. In every undertaking the determining factor of success is
+men, and not money or monopoly. And because the North still breeds men
+of the H.B. type, the eye of The Great Company is not dimmed, its force
+not abated.
+
+We spoke with no fewer than three men at The Landing who came into the
+North in the year of the Klondike rush, that is, just ten years ago.
+Into the human warp and woof of the Great Lone Land of Northern Canada
+the Klondike gold-rush intruded a new strand. The news of the strike on
+Yukon fields flashed round the world on wires invisible and visible,
+passed by word of mouth from chum to chum, and by moccasin telegraph was
+carried to remotest corners of the continent. Gold-fever is a disease
+without diagnosis or doctor--infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if
+its germ once stirs in a man's blood, till the day of his death he is
+not immune from an attack. The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent
+swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous
+horde,--gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet
+firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two
+continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.
+
+Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from 'Frisco, Seattle, and
+Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have
+some records. But of that vast army who from the east and from the south
+travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has
+ever been made. Singly they went, in groups, and by partnerships of two
+and three. There was no route marked out by which they were to reach the
+glittering streams of which they dreamed; the general direction of north
+and west was all that guided them. Athabasca Landing was the portal
+through which they passed, and by every northward stream they
+travelled,--down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca
+to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore. By
+raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways
+who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to
+you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police
+Station where Sergeant Anderson rescued a dozen tenderfoots from
+drowning.
+
+To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the
+whites was a revelation. Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had
+been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed
+Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the
+outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that
+only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern
+Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first
+lessons from the Klondike miners.
+
+And what of the men who followed the gleam? Some reached Dawson. These
+were few. Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still. In the old books
+of the H.B. Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is "a band of Indians
+_cast up_ from the east," "the Express from the North _cast up_ at a
+late hour last night." On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from
+that point, hundreds of gold-miners are "cast up" on every interior
+shore. Acting as attachés to Hudson's Bay posts, engaging as free
+traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic
+seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at
+least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us. Round
+the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still
+prays for her absent son. A silence like this once entered upon is hard
+to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about him the
+garment of the recluse. Outcropping from the strata in striking
+individuality, they belong to a different race to the plodding people of
+the Hudson's Bay posts, and are interesting men wherever you meet them.
+Keen of vision, slow of speech, and with that dreamy look which only
+those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet
+places,--they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and
+dropped here and there over the white map of the North.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
+
+
+"Set me in the urge and tide-drift
+Of the streaming hosts a-wing!
+Breast of scarlet, throat of yellow,
+Raucous challenge, wooings mellow--
+Every migrant is my fellow,
+Making northward with the Spring."
+
+--_Bliss Carman_.
+
+If you have to do with Indian or half-breed boatmen in the North you
+plan to begin your journey in the evening, even though you hope to run
+only a few miles before nightfall. This ensures a good start next
+morning, whereas it would be humanly impossible to tear men away from
+the flesh-pots (beer pots) of Athabasca Landing early in any day. It
+took these chaps all the afternoon to say good-bye, for each one in the
+village had to be shaken hands with, every dog apostrophized by name.
+
+The Athabasca Transport of which we form joyous part makes a formidable
+flotilla: seven specially-built scows or "sturgeon-heads." Each runs
+forty to fifty feet with a twelve-foot beam and carries ten tons. The
+oars are twenty feet long. It takes a strong man to handle the
+forty-foot steering-sweep which is mounted with an iron pivot on the
+stern.
+
+Our particular shallop is no different from the others, except that
+there is a slightly raised platform in the stern-sheets, evidently a
+dedication to the new Northern Manager of the H.B. Co. We share the
+pleasant company of a fourth passenger, Mrs. Harding, on her way home to
+Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. The second sturgeon-head carries
+seven members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, jolly laughing
+chaps, for are not they, too, like us, off duty? Inspector Pelletier and
+three men are to go with our Fur Transport as far as Resolution and then
+diverge to the east, essaying a cross-continent cut from there to salt
+water on Hudson Bay. For this purpose they ship two splendidly made
+Peterborough canoes. The other three members of the force are young
+chaps assigned to Smith's Landing on the Slave River, sent there to
+protect the wood bison of that region, the world's last wild buffalo.
+The third craft we observe with due respect as "the cook boat." The
+remaining four scows carry cargo only,--the trade term being "pieces,"
+each piece from eighty to a hundred pounds, a convenient weight for
+carrying on the portages.
+
+[Illustration: A "Sturgeon-head" at Athabasca]
+
+[Illustration: "Farewell, Nistow!"]
+
+June 6th at a quarter of seven saw the whole populace of Athabasca
+Landing on the river bank--dogs, babies, the officials of the Hudson's
+Bay, parson, priest, police, and even the barkeep,--and with the yelping
+of dogs and "Farewell, Nistow!" we are off. We are embarked on a
+2500-mile journey, the longest water route on the continent, down which
+floats each year the food, clothing, and frugal supplies of a country as
+big as Europe.
+
+The river is running five miles an hour and there is no need of the
+oars. The steersman is our admiration, as with that clumsy stern-sweep
+he dodges rocks, runs riffles, and makes bends. The scow is made of
+green wood, and its resilience stands it in good stead as, like a snake,
+it writhes through tight channels or over ugly bits of water. Everybody
+is in good humour; we are dreamers dreaming greatly. Why should we not
+be happy? Mrs. Harding is homeward-bound, Mr. Brabant on a new rung of
+the fur ladder of preferment, Inspector Pelletier and his associates
+starting on a quest of their own seeking. Sitting low among the "pieces"
+of the police boat, with only his head visible in the sunset glow, Dr.
+Sussex builds air-castles of that eleemosynary hospital of his on the
+Arctic Circle. The cook is whistling from the cook-boat. Five years ago
+he graduated from a business college, but the preparation of bannock and
+sow-belly appeals to the blood more insistently than trial balances and
+the petty cash book. As for ourselves, the Kid's smile is almost audible
+as she runs a loving hand over the oilskin cover of the camera. A
+favourite expression of mine in the latitudes below when the world
+smiled was, "Oh, I'm glad I'm alive and white!" On this exclamation I
+start now, but stop at the word "white." North of Athabasca Landing
+white gives place to a tint more tawny.
+
+A hundred yards out, the Policemen are boyish enough to launch those
+shiny Peterboroughs just to try them, and in and out among the big
+sturgeon-heads, debonair dolphins, they dart. Then comes the rain, and
+one by one the clumsy boats turn toward shore. There are some things
+that even the enquiring mind cannot run to ground, things that just
+happen out of the blue. For fifteen successive springs I have tried to
+discover the first boy who brought marbles to school when marble-season
+came in, and I have never yet been able to put my finger on that elusive
+history-maker. So on this voyage, the fleet is started and stopped,
+landings are made, camping-places decided upon, and no ear can detect
+the sound of command.
+
+The scows tie up, and without undressing we sleep on board, pulling a
+tarpaulin over us and letting the rain rain. At 5:30 next morning we
+hear the familiar "Nistow! Nistow!" of the awakened camp. This word
+literally means "brother-in-law," but it is the vocative used by the
+Cree in speaking to anybody he feels kindly toward. The cook makes a
+double entry with bacon and bannock, and there is exulting joy in our
+soul. Who would napkins bear, or finger-bowls? We had put them far
+behind, with the fardels.
+
+It is the season of lengthening days and fading nights. At seven o'clock
+we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first
+one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being
+shouted from boat to boat. Then, in one voice from three boats,
+"Mooswa!" and far beyond white man's vision the boatmen sight a moose.
+There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious
+Peterboroughs which were to make history on the map, and in the delay
+the moose wandered into pleasant pastures. The boatmen were very much
+disgruntled, as the moose is treasure-trove, the chief fresh meat that
+his world offers the Indian. From here to the Arctic are no domestic
+animals, the taste of beef or mutton or pork or chicken is unknown,
+bread gives place to bannock (with its consequent indigestion
+"bannockburn"), and coffee is a beverage discredited. Tobacco to smoke,
+strong, black, sweetened tea to drink from a copper kettle,--this is
+luxury's lap.
+
+The bowsman points to a rude cross on the right bank where a small
+runway makes in, "Gon-sta-wa-bit" (man who was drowned), he volunteers.
+Yesterday a Mounted Policeman buried there the body of an Indian man,
+his wife and his baby, who fell through the ice in a dog-sled this
+spring,--three in one grave, Lamartine's trinity, the Father, the
+Mother, and the Child.
+
+It is Sunday, and we have music from a li'l fiddle made by a squaw at
+Lac Ste. Anne. Lac la Biche River we pass, and Calling River, and at
+five in the evening are at Swift Current, Peachy Pruden's place, and
+then Red Mud. Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all
+night. Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the
+missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I
+draw up a canvas sheet. But it is too wonderful a night to sleep. Lying
+flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full
+of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up
+and pluck them. Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is
+the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the
+shadow of the cut-banks. At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in
+his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these
+human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or
+two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from
+high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant
+blood--the "unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go." It is
+the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. In
+imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that
+long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back raucous encouragement to
+his long, sky-clinging V.
+
+Floating as we float, it is no longer a marvel to us that this North
+holds so many scientific men and finished scholars--colonial Esaus
+serving as cooks, dog-drivers, packers, trackers, oil-borers. The not
+knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new
+places and untrod ways,--who would exchange all this for the easy ways
+of fatted civilization!
+
+At five in the morning there is a drawing-in of the fleet to Pelican
+Portage. Before two hours have passed the grasshopper has become a
+burden, and it is 102° in the shade, and no shade to be had. We are now
+a hundred miles from Athabasca Landing. On the left bank we come across
+a magnificent gas-well with a gush of flame twenty or thirty feet in
+height.
+
+It seems that eleven years ago, seeking for petroleum, the Dominion
+Government had a shaft sunk here; their boring apparatus was heavy, the
+plunger with its attachment weighing nearly a ton. At eight hundred feet
+the operator broke into an ocean of gas, and the pressure blew him with
+plunger and appliances into the air as a ball comes from a cannon-bore.
+The flow of gas was so heavy that it clogged his drills with maltha and
+sand, and from then to now the gas has been escaping. To-day the sound
+of the escape ricochets up and down the palisaded channel so that we
+cannot hear each other speak. There is gas enough here, if we could pipe
+it and bring it under control, to supply with free illumination every
+city of prairie Canada. It has destroyed all vegetation for a radius of
+twenty yards; but, oddly enough, outside this range of demarcation the
+growth is more luxuriant and comes earlier and stays later than that of
+the surrounding country. One redheaded Klondiker, ignorant of gas and
+its ways, ten years ago struck a match to this escaping stream, was
+blown into the bushes beyond, and came out minus hair, eye-brows and red
+beard--the quickest and closest shave he ever had. The shells of birds'
+eggs, tea-leaves from many a cheering copper-kettle, tufts of
+rabbit-hair, and cracked shin-bones of the moose, with here a greasy
+nine of diamonds, show, this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the
+gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or
+broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no
+thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a
+patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has
+consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills
+and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have
+eased the mind of poor Lo, around whose dying bunk we hear the relatives
+scrapping over his residuary estate of rusty rifle, much-mended
+fishing-net, and three gaunt dogs.
+
+We pass House River, and the devout cross themselves and murmur a
+prayer. The point is marked by a group of graves covered with canvas.
+Here years ago a family of four, travelling alone, contracted
+diphtheria, and died before help could reach them. There is another
+legend of which the boatmen unwillingly speak, the story of the
+_Wetigo_, or Indian turned cannibal, who murdered a priest on this
+lonely point, and ate the body of his victim. The taste for human flesh,
+Philip Atkinson assures us, grows with the using, and this lunatic of
+long ago went back to the camps, secured an Indian girl as bride,
+carried her to this point, took her life, and ate of her flesh. It is a
+gruesome story.
+
+[Illustration: Grand Rapids on the Athabasca River]
+
+Now begin the rapids, ninety miles of which we are to run. This rough
+water on the Athabasca is one of the only two impediments to navigation
+on the long course between Athabasca Landing and the Polar Ocean. These
+first rapids, frankly, are a disappointment. The water is high, higher
+than it has been for ten years, so the boiling over the boulders is not
+very noticeable. The Pelican Rapid and the Stony we shoot without
+turning a hair; the Joli Fou is a bit more insistent, but, as the cook
+says, "nothing to write home about."
+
+We drift in a drowsy dream of delight, and in the evening arrive at the
+head of Grand Rapids. If we had looked slightingly on the rough water
+passed, what we now see would satisfy the greediest. We tie up and get a
+good view of what lies ahead, and get also our first real introduction
+to the mosquito. In mid-stream he had not bothered us much, but after
+supper it rained a little, the day had been warm, and with cymbals,
+banners, and brass-bands, he comes in cohorts to greet us. The scows
+have their noses poked into the bank, the men have built smudge fires in
+front, but we decide that the best way to escape the mosquito is to go
+to bed. We lie down in the stern-sheets with our clothes on, make
+night-caps of our Stetson hats, pull the veils down over our necks, and
+try to sleep, but it is no avail. Each one of these mosquitoes is a
+Presbyterian mosquito and it has been ordained that this night he is to
+taste of white blood. It rains incessantly, and that hot hole in which
+we lie is one brown cloud of mosquitoes. The men on the bank have
+finally given it up as a bad job, and they set round the fires smoking
+and slapping different parts of their persons, swearing volubly in
+English. For the Cree language is devoid of invective. In the morning we
+are a sorry crowd, conversation is monosyllabic and very much to the
+point. It is the first serious trial to individual good-humour. When
+each one of your four million pores is an irritation-channel of
+mosquito-virus it would be a relief to growl at somebody about
+something. But the sun and smiles come out at the same time, and, having
+bled together, we cement bonds of friendship. What did Henry the Fifth
+say on the eve of Agincourt,--"For he to-day who sheds his blood with me
+shall be my brother"?
+
+Who would worry about mosquitoes with that splendid spectacular of the
+Grand Rapids at our feet? The great flood (Kitchee Abowstik) is divided
+into two channels by an island probably half a mile in length, with its
+long axis parallel to the flow of the river, and this island solves the
+question of progress. The main channel to the left is impassable; it is
+certain death that way. Between the island and the right shore is a
+passage which on its island side, with nice manipulation, is practicable
+for empty boats. Then the problem before us is to run the rough water at
+the near end of the island, tie up there, unload, transfer the pieces by
+hand-car over the island to its other end, let the empty scows down
+carefully through the channel by ropes, and reload at the other end.
+
+Between the bank where we are and the island ahead is a stretch of
+roaring water dangerous enough looking. We have learned ere this,
+however, to sit tight and watch for events. The careless Indians have
+straightened into keen-eyed, responsible voyageurs, each muscle taut,
+every sense alert. Our boat goes first, one half-breed with huge pole
+braces himself as bowsman, the most able man takes the stern sweep, the
+others stand at the oars. Fifteen minutes of good head-work brings us to
+the island and we step out with relief. The other boats follow and
+anchor, and we have opportunity at close range to inspect these worst
+rapids of the Athabascan chain. The current on the west side of the
+dividing island looks innocent, and we understand how the greenhorn
+would choose this passage-way, to his destruction.
+
+[Illustration: Portage at Grand Rapids Island]
+
+The transportation of pieces occupied four days, every moment of which
+we enjoyed. Grand Rapids Island is prodigal in wild flowers,--vetches,
+woodbine, purple and pink columbines, wild roses, several varieties of
+false Solomon's seal, our persisting friend dwarf cornel, and,
+treasure-trove, our first anemone,--that beautiful buttercup springing
+from its silvered sheath--
+
+"And where a tear has dropt a wind-flower blows."
+
+I measured a grass-stem and found it two feet three inches high, rising
+amid last year's prostrate growth.
+
+[Illustration: Our transport at Grand Rapids Island]
+
+At Grand Rapids Island we overtook two scows which had preceded us from
+The Landing and whose crews had waited here to assist in the transport.
+It gave us opportunity to observe these sixty representative half-breeds
+from Lac la Biche. Tall, strong, happy-go-lucky, with no sordid strain
+in their make-up, they are fellows that one cannot help feeling sympathy
+for. A natural link between the East and the West, the South of Canada
+and the North, they have bridged over the animosity and awkwardness
+with which the Red race elsewhere has approached the White.
+
+[Illustration: Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island]
+
+In a glade our camp is made, inside our tents we arrange the
+mosquito-bar (a tent within a tent looking something like a good-sized
+dog-kennel), and here we lie in our blankets. The hum of the foiled
+mosquito is unction to our souls. It is a relief, too, to remove the
+day's clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.
+
+The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,--soft,
+yellowish, homogeneous. In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of
+ninety feet. The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four
+or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped
+nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones. The
+river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift
+current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as
+spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite
+the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet
+thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil
+trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great
+wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this
+strange page of history in stone.
+
+Timber along the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we
+see is largely second growth,--Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and
+aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender,
+delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery
+branches seem to float in air.
+
+Across the roaring water swallows are nesting in the clayey cliffs:--
+
+"This guest of summer,
+The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
+By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
+Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
+Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
+Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:
+Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
+The air is delicate."
+
+We learn that half-breeds share the Scottish superstition that it is
+unlucky to disturb bank-swallows.
+
+Others of the migrant host travel in upper air more quickly than we on
+water, and have left us far behind,--swans, the Canada goose, great
+flocks of brant, waveys by the millions, followed by their cousins of
+the duck tribe,--spoon-bill, canvas-back, mallard, pin-tail, ring-neck,
+wood duck, and merganser. The geese will not stop until they have passed
+the Arctic Circle. Why people use the word "goose" as synonym for
+stupidity is beyond the ken of the ordinary observer. The text-books
+tell us tritely that the goose lives to be a hundred years. If she does,
+she may exclaim with the Churchmen, "Yet are my years but labour and
+sorrow." The little chaps who have their birthday parties among
+sub-Arctic reeds are surrounded with enemies from the first day they
+crack their baby shells. Lynx and raccoon prey upon them by land, eagles
+and owls swoop upon them as they swim; and as with one eye they scan the
+sky above them, a greedy pike is apt to snap their web-feet from under
+them and draw them to a watery grave.
+
+The cadets of the Hudson's Bay Company exchange courtesies with the
+Mounted Police, each considering himself a distinct cut above the other.
+One Mounted Policeman, whose duty it had been to escort the crazed
+Russian Doukhobortsi on one of their "altogether" pilgrimages, is hailed
+across the circle, "Here, lend us your knife, you nursemaid to the
+Douks." "Who spoke?" yawned the Policeman. "Was it that fur-pup of the
+Hudson's Bay?" "Yes," retorted the first, "and I'm glad I'm it; you
+couldn't pay me to wear a red coat and say 'Sir' to a damned little
+Frenchman, even if you are going to blaze a trail to Hudson Bay."
+
+Some one asks Sergeant Joyce to tell his Bible story. He says, "Oh,
+about Coal-Oil Johnnie! It was the cub's first year in the service, and
+he got off with some civilians and was drunk for a week. When he was in
+the Guard Room awaiting court-martial he had lots of time 'to sit in
+clink, admirin' 'ow the world was made.' Likewise he was very dry. There
+was nothing for him to amuse himself with but a paper of pins. He took
+the pillow of his cot and used the whole bunch of pins in working on it
+the one word 'Hagar,' in letters six inches high. The inspecting officer
+came in and the pin sign caught his eye. He spelled it out letter by
+letter, 'H-a-g-a-r,--what was the matter with him?' Johnnie retorted,
+'The him was a her, and she died of thirst in the wilderness.' The
+inspecting officer says to Johnnie, 'Well, that would never happen to
+you.'"
+
+A peculiar drumming wafts from the shore-line. "Pa-pas-ku," says one of
+the Cree lads, pulling his pipe from his mouth and listening. Young
+Hudson's Bay to my enquiring look returns, "The Canadian ruffed grouse,"
+which Sussex elucidated, "_Bonasa umbellus logata_," at which we all
+feel very much relieved.
+
+The Kid was pressing specimens, and, holding up a branch, the Mounted
+Policeman next her said, "Young jackpine, I think." "It belongs to the
+Conifer family," corrects the Doctor. "Oh!" says the Mounted Policeman,
+with a sniff, "then we'll give it back to 'em the next time one of the
+Conifer boys comes round." The man of the river and the woods hates a
+Latin name, and any stray classic knowledge you have is best hidden
+under a napkin. The descriptive terms men use here are crisp and to the
+point. The vicious habit of giving birds bad names is one that grows,
+and you never know when the scientific have come to a finality. For
+instance, little Robin Red-Breast _("the pious bird with scarlet
+breast_" whose nest with four eggs the Kid discovered to-day), has
+successively lived through three tags, "_Turdus migratorius_,"
+"_Planesticus migratorius_," and "_Turdus canadensis_." If he had not
+been an especially plucky little beggar he would have died under the
+libels long ago. For my own part I cannot conceive how a man with good
+red blood in his veins could look a chirky little robin in the eye and
+call him to his face a "_Planesticus migratorius_," when as chubby
+youngster he had known the bird and loved him as Robin Red-Breast. One
+is inclined to ask with suspicion, "Is naming a lost art?" Any new
+flower discovered these days, every clever invention in the realm of
+machinery, is forthwith saddled with an impossible name. If it had not
+been easy to clip the term "automobile" down to the working stub "auto,"
+the machine would never have run our streets. Again, the decimal system
+is conceded to be far ahead of the asinine "five and one-half yards make
+one rod, pole or perch"; the only reason why the commonsense thing does
+not supersede the foolish one is that the sensible measurement has the
+fool tag on it. Who could imagine ever going into a store and asking for
+seven decimetres and nine centimetres of picture-moulding, or dropping
+into the corner grocery to buy a hectolitre of green onions? When man
+dug gold and iron and tin out of the earth he made things with them. Now
+when we discover a new mineral we dub it "molybdenum" and let it rust in
+innocuous ease. When man loses the art of nervous speech, his power of
+action goes with it. And as we ruminate, the _Bonasa umbellus togata_
+drums on.
+
+When we pass the parallel of 55°N. we come into a very wealth of new
+words, a vocabulary that has found its way into no dictionary but which
+is accepted of all men. The steep bank opposite us is a "cut bank," an
+island or sandbar in a river is a "batture." A narrow channel is called
+a "she-ny," evidently a corruption of the French _chenal_. When it leads
+nowhere and you have to back down to get out, you have encountered a
+"blind she-ny." The land we have come from is known as "Outside" or "_Le
+Grand Pays_." Anywhere other than where we sit is "that side," evidently
+originating from the viewpoint of a man to whom all the world lay either
+on this side or that side of the river that stretched before him. When
+you obtain credit from a Hudson's Bay store, you "get debt." A Factor's
+unwillingness to advance you goods on credit would be expressed thus,
+"The Company will give me no debt this winter." From here northward the
+terms "dollars" and "cents" are unheard. An article is valued at "three
+skins" or "eight skins" or "five skins," harking back to the time when a
+beaver-skin was the unit of money. The rate of exchange to-day is from
+four skins to two skins for a dollar. Trapping animals is "making fur."
+"I made no fur last winter and The Company would give me no debt," is a
+painful picture of hard times. Whenever an Indian has a scanty larder,
+he is "starving," and you may be "starving" many moons without dying or
+thinking of dying. "Babiche" in the North is the tie that binds, and
+"sinew" is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or
+caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of
+the spinal column of the same animals.
+
+[Illustration: Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police]
+
+There is but one thing on this planet longer than the equator, and that
+is the arm of British justice, and the Mounted Police, these chaps
+sprawling at our feet, are the men who enforce it. The history of other
+lands shows a determined fight for the frontier, inch by inch
+advancement where an older civilization pushes back the native,--there
+are wars and feuds and bloody raids. Not so here. When the homesteader
+comes down the river we are threading and, in a flood, colonization
+follows him, he will find British law established and his home ready.
+The most compelling factor making for dignity and decency in this
+border-country is the little band of red-coated riders, scarcely a
+thousand in number. Spurring singly across the plains that we have
+traversed since leaving Winnipeg, they turn up on lone riverway or
+lakeside in the North just when most wanted.
+
+Varied indeed is this man's duty,--"nursemaid to the Doukhobor" was a
+thrust literally true. His, too, was the task on the plains of seeing
+that the Mormon doesn't marry overmuch. He brands stray cattle,
+interrogates each new arrival in a prairie-waggon, dips every doubtful
+head of stock, prevents forest-fires, keeps weather records, escorts a
+lunatic to an asylum eight hundred miles away, herds wood bison on the
+Slave, makes a cross-continent dash from Great Slave Lake to Hudson Bay,
+preserves the balance of power between American whaler and Eskimo on the
+Arctic edge!
+
+At one time the roll-call of one troup of Mounted Police included in its
+rank and file three men who had held commissions in the British service,
+an ex-midshipman, a son of a Colonial Governor, a grandson of a
+Major-General, a medical student from Dublin, two troopers of the Life
+Guards, an Oxford M.A., and half a dozen ubiquitous Scots. Recently an
+ex-despatch-bearer from De Wet joined the force at Regina, and although
+the cold shoulder was turned on him for a day or two, he soon made good.
+One of the young fellows stretched before us, now going to Fort Smith to
+round up wood bison, was born in Tasmania, ran away from school at
+fourteen, sheared sheep and hunted the wallaby, stoked a steamer from
+Australia to England and from England to Africa, and in the early days
+of bicycles was a professional racer.
+
+Constable Walker, lying lazily on his back blowing blue spirals into
+the air, has in the long winter night made more than once, with dogs,
+that perilous journey from the Yukon to the Mackenzie mouth (one
+thousand miles over an unknown trail), carrying to the shut-in whalers
+their winter mail. On one of these overland journeys he cut off the tips
+of his four toes. His guide fainted, but Walker took babiche and,
+without a needle, sewed up the wound. On this trip he was fifty-seven
+days on the trail, during five days of which the thermometer hovered
+between sixty-two and sixty-eight degrees below.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
+
+
+"On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,
+  De win' she blow, blow, blow,
+An' de crew of de wood scow '_Julie Plante_'
+  Got scar't an' run below--
+For de win' she blow lak hurricane
+  Bimeby she blow some more,
+An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre
+  Wan arpent from de shore."
+
+--_Dr. Drummond_.
+
+This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The
+daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten
+underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to
+thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes
+behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive laundry. At
+dusk we had seen an empty scow floating down river, adrift from
+Athabasca Landing. In the middle of Grand Rapids she broke amidships,
+but held together until in the darkness she floated beyond our ken.
+
+Trouble of our own awaits us. With no one noting, an adventurous scow,
+with all her precious cargo, has pulled loose from her moorings. By the
+time the Cree watchman discovers that the "_Go-Quick-Her_" has taken the
+bit in her teeth, the runaway with tail-sweep set has turned the next
+corner of the Athabasca. Great excitement! Billy Loutit and Emile
+Fosseneuve borrow the Police canoe and go in chase. It is such a rough
+bit of water that we hold our breaths, for a false stroke means death to
+both; but that false stroke does not come. Billy Loutit knows this river
+as we know the borders and shrubs in our garden-bed.
+
+[Illustration: Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore]
+
+This accident causes everyone to look grave. The Edmonton value of the
+cargo is over two thousand dollars, but it is a loss that cannot be
+measured in dollars and cents. These wrecked goods, gaily sailing down
+the Athabasca, cannot be duplicated at some convenient grocery around
+the corner.
+
+We have learned that any untoward happening means a half day's delay.
+Philip Atkinson calls me to one side to suggest that it would be a
+"clear waste" to leave behind the eggs of "that duck's nest I showed you
+the day we came." Atkinson is a half-breed with a Hercules-build who
+looks forty-five and owns up to sixty. He and I chatted over the mallard
+eggs and my collection of wild flowers, he respecting the preservative
+art and I in full awe of that art gastronomic of his which gulps the
+Mallards-in-embryo, sans fourchette, sans salt, sans ceremony.
+
+They are an interesting study, these half-breeds; it means much to each
+on which side of the English Channel his father had birth. When a
+Frenchman marries an Indian woman he reverts to her scale of
+civilization; when a Scot takes a native to wife he draws her up to his.
+Our crew live at Lac la Biche and were engaged last winter for their
+season's work at from twenty to forty dollars a month, with board and
+moccasins. They walked a hundred miles to Athabasca Landing to connect
+with their summer's job, and the absolute certainty of regular meals
+just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and
+four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual
+happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic
+term "the law of heredity" works out with these people, cut off from the
+lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the
+pre-civilization Indian.
+
+Philip, duck-stuffed but untroubled by "that full feeling after eating,"
+lights his pipe and looks back through the years. "My father belonged to
+The Company, my mother was an Ojibway from the Lake of the Woods
+country. My father went back to the Old Country when I was seven,
+leaving me to an uncle to be educated, and I don't know 'B' from a
+bull's foot. He put me to work on the woodpile from morning till night.
+When my father came back after twelve years and found me ignorant, he
+cried like a baby. I have no education, but," with a contemplative
+puff, "I have friends wherever I go." Philip is good to look at and he
+is a linguist, speaking Cree, French, and excellent English with a
+delightful Scotch accent. He is an ardent admirer of the H.B. Company.
+"They always kept their word with a man, and when they had done with
+him, returned him without cost to his old home." Philip and his two sons
+were the first to shoot the Grand Rapids, and he tells us that this
+stretch of the Athabasca River has been used only twenty years. Before
+that time people from the North reached Winnipeg by the Clearwater.
+Philip is a Loyalist. During the half-breed rebellion of 1885 he carried
+dispatches to Middleton and Otter, going seventy-five miles one day on
+foot. He had his horse, "a draught-horse as black as a crow," taken from
+him twice, got through the lines and stole another, and tells proudly
+how for his deed of valor he was presented with an Assomption belt.
+
+At last we are off, keeping sharp look-out for the lost scow. Buffalo
+River, where we pull up for the night, is a recognized camping-place.
+The men know where to put their hands on old-time tent-poles, the boys
+dig out shin-bones of the moose,--the relics of some former
+feast,--which they gnaw as a puppy mumbles an old bone.
+
+Another manifestation of gas is here. It bubbles up on the shore and
+through the water at the boat's bow, and as we strike a match the whole
+surface flames like the brandy on a Christmas plum-pudding. On the
+opposite side of the river are "lobsticks," a new word to us and a new
+thing. To stand as a living totem-pole, the Indians select on a striking
+promontory a tall spruce and from a section of the trunk lop all the
+branches except two, which are left as wings. If the lobstick is to
+stand a monument to a certain man or party, the names of those to be
+honored are written in Cree on an attached slab. We were to notice
+lobsticks from point to point along the rest of our journey, some of
+them indicating good hunting-grounds or fishing-places back from the
+shore, but most of them memorials of happenings on the river.
+
+The Little Buffalo carries to the Athabasca its noisy current between
+two high escarpments, and on the shelf leading back from the banks of
+the main stream is a far-reaching plateau of splendidly-fertile land. In
+the scow next us the two young Crees who are preparing the food for our
+evening "meat-su" carry on a religious controversy as they slice the
+sow-belly. We gather that one has been taken into the Protestant fold
+and that the other follows the priests. Duncan Tremblé comes down and
+cuffs them both soundly, putting an end to the argument with, "It's all
+the same as the other, just like the Hudson's Bay Company and the free
+trader. Each one tells you his goods is the best and the other is
+_nee-moy-yuh mee-wah-sin_ (no good). It's that way with the God-goods of
+the white men. Each church tells you that his is the best, but they all
+come down to us in the same scow, both the priest and the missionary."
+
+Next morning we are all keyed-up for the rapids, and about six miles
+down we encounter the Brulé, the first one, and take it square in
+mid-channel. We ship a little water, but pass through it all too soon,
+for the compelling grandeur of the Brulé grips one. The river here is
+held between vertical walls of the reddest of red sandstone against
+which the lush greenery makes a striking contrast. Twenty miles below is
+the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but
+because the boiler of the steamer _Wrigley_ was lost here and still
+remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as
+clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The
+tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes
+the Long Rapid _(Kawkinwalk Abowstick_), which we run close to its right
+bank.
+
+From the distance sounds the ominous roar of the Big Cascade. At quarter
+past four we reach the head of the swirling fall. The underlying cause
+of the Big Cascade is a limestone ledge which cuts the channel
+diagonally and makes ugly-looking water. We plan to run the rapid one
+boat at a time. The crews are doubled. Our steersman is alert,
+expectant, and as agile as a cat, his black hair switching in the wind.
+Sitting in the centre of the scow, as we do, the sensation is very
+different to that which one experiences in running rapids in a canoe.
+Then it is all swiftness and dexterity, for your craft is light, and, in
+expert hands, easily dirigible with one clever turn of the wrist. With a
+ten-ton scow the conditions change and you feel correspondingly more
+helpless.
+
+The great rapid stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer.
+With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to
+him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up
+for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a
+water-fence. For all we own in the world we wouldn't be anywhere but
+just where we sit. If it is going to be our last minute, well, Kismet!
+let it come. At least it will not be a tame way of going out. For the
+life of me I cannot forbear a cry of exultation. Then there is the
+feeling below one's feet which you experienced when you were a kiddie
+lying flat on your stomach coasting down a side-hill and your little red
+sled struck a stone. We, too, have struck something, but do not stop to
+ask what the obstruction is.
+
+[Illustration: The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills]
+
+At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to
+photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good
+vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just
+time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr.
+Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as
+we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it
+was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.
+
+The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Tremblé, the pilot, dances in the
+sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the
+top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the
+men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way
+through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The
+Inspector says, "Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste." The
+native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis,
+"After you, Inspector." Then Pelletier says, sharply, "Jump, I tell you,
+jump; there's no time for--Gaston-and-Alphonse business here."
+
+As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly
+things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows
+discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged
+goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has
+been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on
+the bank,--five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three
+minutes!
+
+A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward
+McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an
+hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden
+alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening
+swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along
+the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before
+we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the
+enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.
+
+The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks
+into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded
+island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in;
+so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back
+forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and
+Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful
+site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of
+Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.
+
+Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would
+expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their
+world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of
+the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition
+of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr.
+Brabant says, "Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for
+you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?" "Never mind,"
+says Bob, "I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?"
+
+It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the
+water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation.
+Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her "special
+orders" are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North
+not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of
+the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for
+hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes.
+Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of
+the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting,
+and, turning it over, says bravely, "I think it will dry." Mathematical
+and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic
+edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are
+miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and
+Hudson's Bay blankets!
+
+In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the
+Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding
+to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put
+up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little
+pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of
+effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted
+together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly
+Sand-boys "all in one delicious gravy." The Doctor is dazed, and offers
+to white and brown alike a tin box with "Have a pastile, do." He wanders
+among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they
+accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially
+appreciates,--something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the
+Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on
+each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. "Here are some
+authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and
+I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian
+Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I
+shall never be able to tell which it is." One by one the Doctor digs out
+from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,--a presentation "Life of the
+Countess of Munster," also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved
+holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be "as old as the
+Conqueror." There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which
+carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows
+the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under
+a side of bacon, is a print of "my great-grandfather who discovered a
+cure for scurvy." A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in
+Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead
+along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.
+
+[Illustration: Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader]
+
+Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad
+one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort
+McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and
+a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition
+to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a
+five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years
+with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their
+migrations and tribal feasts. We question, "Are you not lonely,
+especially in the winter?" But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as
+heroic. "Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians
+are always coming and going, and they are full of interest."
+
+We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees
+when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness
+consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is
+divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the
+black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox
+would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but
+varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral
+alpacas, all of us,--something between a sheep and a goat. But no less
+are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of
+his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the
+self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.
+
+As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home.
+The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind
+Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow
+from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that
+she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and
+depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an
+assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due
+to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss
+Gordon translates. "I am delighted that ladies have come such a long
+distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all
+white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to
+old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water,
+the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children," and
+the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. "Be
+glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it." It is the
+advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the
+Winnipeg Hospital.
+
+We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair
+of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle--merely for effect,
+for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In
+one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church
+to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the
+hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured
+hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that
+twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store
+to go across and dress this wound.
+
+When a schoolboy takes to his bosom a _fidus Achates_, the first thing
+he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces
+us to her find,--nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of
+a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.
+
+During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as
+they had "made little fur," entertaining them as courteously as you
+would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink
+thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden,
+bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman
+passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a
+Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just
+about three days.
+
+A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,--the reading of the
+rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a
+peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the
+latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern
+contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full
+fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the
+future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort
+McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the
+mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said,
+"Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn
+medicine so that I could help these poor creatures." Her tone of
+unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the
+scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden,
+radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.
+
+Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of
+pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for--a
+Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any
+one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of
+the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another
+guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a
+stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the
+potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally
+an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the
+wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of
+growing things.
+
+[Illustration: The Steamer _Grahame_]
+
+Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay
+Company's steamer _Grahame_ meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going
+passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort
+McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the
+easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers
+are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats,
+weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen
+scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden
+craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written
+word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out
+to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The _Grahame_
+has its advantages,--clean beds, white men's meals served in real
+dishes, and best of all, a bath!
+
+On the _Grahame_ we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus
+far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it.
+Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of
+Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have
+ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to
+rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole
+chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a
+resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as
+faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr.
+Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to
+shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see
+only the surface and have to guess the depths.
+
+As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56°
+40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, "where we
+are at." In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far
+north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and
+the lone Pribilof, "where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and
+the seals they breed for themselves." Crossing the junction of the
+Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of
+Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789
+traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its
+confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters
+of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat
+contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in
+latitude 58° 36' North.
+
+[Illustration: An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca]
+
+In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that
+upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of
+fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank,
+out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein,
+building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much
+time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those
+ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and
+determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant
+derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may
+reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of
+striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while "punching" one of
+his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of
+limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine,
+poplar, and spruce.
+
+[Illustration: Tar Banks on the Athabasca]
+
+At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is
+exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for
+blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these
+banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while
+extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the
+river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are
+medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.
+
+Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at
+every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a
+twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically
+may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is
+a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of
+over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a
+section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and
+twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed
+through the sands.
+
+Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two
+miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles
+up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable
+odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said,
+"Smells are surer than sounds or sights."
+
+We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down
+this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the
+coming of the railroad can bring to light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
+Their humble joys and destiny obscure."
+
+--_Gray's Elegy_.
+
+At seven in the morning of Sunday, June 21st, we enter Lake Athabasca,
+and catch our first glimpse of Fort Chipewyan. An acceptance of the
+invitation, "Come, shake your leg," has kept the men busy half the night
+over a hot sequence of Red River jigs among "pieces" on the lower deck,
+and we have this superb sweep almost to ourselves.
+
+The great lake-scape is blue and green and grey and opaline as the sun
+strikes it and the surface breaks to a south wind. Ours is the one craft
+on this inland sea, but overhead a whole navy of clouds manÂœuvres, the
+ships of the ghostly argosy doubling themselves in the lake. As we draw
+in, the village takes shape. What haunts us as we look at the white
+houses, that crescent beach of pinkest sand? We have it! It is a print,
+an old woodcut of "Russian America" that we used to pore over in the
+days when one wore "pinnies" of flour-sacking, and "hankies" were made
+from meal-bags.
+
+At one end of the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay
+Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the
+other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples
+and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of
+Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little Church of England, and higher
+up and farther back the Barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
+The white-washed homes of the employés of The Company, little
+match-boxes dazzling in the sun, stretch from one end of the beach to
+the other. In among the half-breed populace stalk policeman and priest,
+red jacket keeping the dark-skinned people straight in this world and
+black robe laying out conditions for the world to come. So is Chipewyan
+fate chequered with the _rouge et noir_ of compulsion and expediency.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca]
+
+Fort Chipewyan is the oldest post in the North, and every boulder of red
+gneissic rock, if we could interrogate it, has a story to tell. Peter
+Pond, of the North-West Company, in 1778 built a post on the Athabasca
+River thirty miles to the south of the lake. The far-seeing Alexander
+Mackenzie, in the interests of the same company, sent his cousin
+Roderick ten years later to build Fort Chipewyan on the lake, and for
+over a century this was the entrepôt and emporium of the whole North.
+The Hudson's Bay Company meanwhile were maintaining a post, Fort
+Wedderburne, not far away on Potato Island, and upon the amalgamation of
+the Companies in 1821 they took possession of the present Fort
+Chipewyan.
+
+This metropolis is one hundred and twenty years old. Chipewyan was doing
+business at the same old stand before Toronto was the capital of Upper
+Canada, while Ottawa was still unheard of, and when of Chicago not even
+the Fort Dearborn nucleus had been built. 1788! We wonder if the old ox
+that conveys our "cassette" and "pieces" up to the big gateway of The
+Company's quadrangle was a drawer of wood and drinker of water at that
+date. He looks as if he might have been. George III was reigning in
+England when Fort Chipewyan was built, Arkwright was making his spinning
+jenny, and Watts experimenting with the steam-engine. Sir Joshua
+Reynolds painted his pictures, Burns, a young man of twenty-nine, was
+busy with his ballads. In London a little baby saw the light of day,
+whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron. Three British boys might
+have been seen with arms thrown over each other's shoulders, "dreaming
+greatly"--Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and
+Wordsworth just eighteen. Across the Channel the French Revolution was
+at its height. Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Down on the
+Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had
+gone through the birth-throes of nationhood. It is a far call.
+
+Scraping the yellow lichens off the old sun-dial, we adjust our
+bearings. We are 111° West of Greenwich and in latitude 58° 45' North.
+Our parallel carried eastward would strike the Orkneyan skerries and
+pass through Stromness. All untouched by the development of that busy
+continent to the south which has grown up within its lifetime, Chipewyan
+is a little pearl of the periwigged days of the early Georges. From its
+red sands, tamarack swamps, and mossy muskeg one almost expects to see
+arise the forms of those great of old who outfitted here, making
+Chipewyan the base of their northward explorations. The ghostly company
+is a goodly one--Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Simpson, and Sir
+John Franklin (their honorary prefixes coming to them in the after days
+as reward of their labors), Back and Richardson and Rae, and in later
+days that young stripling curate who was afterwards to be known
+throughout the world of letters as Bishop Bompas, the "Apostle of the
+North." Then there is the great unnamed horde who rested tired limbs at
+Chipewyan on their northward journeys, each on his own
+mission--fur-traders and hunters of big game, devoted nuns and silent
+priests, the infrequent scientist, and the hundreds of Klondikers, their
+hearts hot with the greed for gold. These all through the century have
+enjoyed as we now enjoy the spontaneous hospitality of this little bit
+of Britain which floats the Union Jack from its fort walls, and whose
+people, brown and white, when the belated news of the passing of
+Victoria the Great reached this her northern outpost, gathered on the
+beach and bewailed aloud their personal loss. We seem to hear again the
+far-flung cry "The Queen is dead! The Queen is dead!" from the
+half-breed runners coming in that Christmas Day across the winter ice.
+
+Mackenzie made Chipewyan his headquarters for eight years. It was from
+here he started on his voyage to the Arctic Sea in 1789, and three years
+later on that other history-making journey to the far Pacific. Sir John
+Franklin outfitted here for his two land-journeys--in July, 1820, with
+Dr. Richardson, and again in 1825. Chipewyan is a mine of interest. We
+almost begrudge time given to the dainty meals of our hostess, Mrs.
+William Johnson, and the hours spent between her lavender-scented
+sheets.
+
+In the loft above the office of the H.B. Company, in among old
+flintlock rifles and discarded ox-yokes, we browse through the daily
+records of The Company, old journals written by the Factors at the close
+of their day's work through the years and here preserved for our
+inquisitive eyes. Sitting on the floor, making extracts from these
+tomes, one has the half-guilty feeling of being caught poking into a
+tomb.
+
+On this page the ink is thin and one can see the old writer thawing out
+his frozen ink-pot of stone at the end of a tired day and sitting down
+to write his simple tale. Here are finger-marks where the blood of a
+buffalo gives a marginal note. The journalist had been called away from
+his writing to weigh and pay for some fresh meat. Drops from a tallow
+candle show the light of other days. A pressed mosquito of the vintage
+of 1790 is very suggestive. We picture the trivial round and common task
+of the man who writes, see him exchanging fathoms of tobacco for
+beaver-pelts in those long, cold winters, and eagerly hunger with him
+for the signs presaging the going-out of the ice and the coming-in of
+Spring. We follow out the short Summer with him and revel in its
+perpetual daylight. With him we make the fall fishery and shoot our
+winter's supply of waveys and southward-flying cranes. We wonder, as he
+wondered, what news the next packet will bring from the old folks in the
+Orkneys or the Hebrides. We study, as he studied, the problem of
+governing his servants, placating the Indians, and making enough fur to
+satisfy that inexorable Board of Directors back in London whose motto is
+"Skin for skin."
+
+It has been a grim enough life as the author of this journal records it.
+He is far from those who direct his fate, and recognition and reward are
+slow in coming. Companionship and the gentle arts of "outside" are
+denied him. He must make his own world and rear within it his dusky
+brood, that they in honourable service may follow his round of "work
+done squarely and unwasted days." What made the charm of this life to
+these men? It is hard to see. The master of the post was also master of
+the situation, and an autocrat in his community, a little Fur King, a
+Captain of Industry. A thing was law because he said it. And isn't it
+Caesar himself who declares, "Better be first in a little Iberian
+village than second in Rome?"
+
+We get a delightful picture in an entry under the date of Wednesday,
+23rd May, 1827, when Sir John Franklin was on his way back to England at
+the end of his second journey.
+
+"To-day William McGillivary and Katherine Stewart, daughter
+of Alexander Stewart, Chief Factor, were joined in holy wedlock
+by Captain John Franklin, R.N., Commander of the Land Arctic
+Expedition."
+
+Great is the force of example, for five days later appears the entry
+
+"This evening the ceremonial of marriage took place between
+Robert McVicar, Esq., and Christy McBeath. Captain Franklin
+acted on the occasion as clergyman. The ceremony o'er, the
+evening was agreeably spent in a family assembly."
+
+Looking at these records, we are reminded of a not-very-well-known story
+of international courtesy which connects itself with the third and
+ill-fated journey of Franklin. Old Sir John, then in his sixtieth year,
+had sailed from England in an attempt at the Northwest Passage. Years
+passed and no word came from the explorer, and in 1852 the ice-desert
+was still mute.
+
+In this year, Sir Edward Belcher in the _Resolute_ headed one of the
+many Arctic Relief Expeditions, subsequently abandoning his boat in the
+ice off Melville Island. Next year the American whaler _Henry George_
+met the deserted _Resolute_ in sound condition about forty miles from
+Cape Mercy; she must have drifted through Barrow Strait, Lancaster
+Sound, and Baffin Bay. She was recovered, the Government of the United
+States bought her and with international compliments presented her in
+perfect condition to Queen Victoria in 1856. The old ship was broken up
+about thirty years ago, and from the soundest of her timbers a solid
+desk was made by direction of Queen Victoria, who presented it to the
+then President of the United States. This is the desk which stands in
+President Taft's reception room to-day, and on it the papers of eight
+administrations have been written.
+
+There is living as well as buried history in Chipewyan. A stroll from
+one end of its lacustrine street to the other is lush with interest. We
+call upon Colin Fraser, whose father was piper to Sir George Simpson.
+Colin treats us to a skirl of the very pipes which announced the
+approach of Simpson whenever that little Northern autocrat, during his
+triumphal progress through a bailiwick as big as Europe, made his way
+into a new fort.
+
+With the echo of the "_Gay Gordons_" in our ears we pass into the
+largest convent in the North country, managed by the Grey Nuns of
+Montreal. Sister Brunelle came into the North in 1866. Forty-two years
+in a convent-school of the Northland! It makes one gasp.
+
+These Indian schools, assisted by the Canadian Government, catch the
+little Indians in the camps and hold their prey on school-benches from
+the age of four to fourteen. One boy is dumb, another a hunchback. In a
+corner we came upon a poor old derelict of the camps, a Cree woman,
+paralysed and mentally deranged, who within these quiet walls has found
+harbour. The kiddies are taught one clay in French and the next day in
+English; but when they hide behind their spellers to talk about the
+white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan. What do they learn?
+Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes,
+grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in
+Southern schools. When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their
+skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep
+(young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish
+meals for a twelve-month to come. If fish be brain food, then should
+this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards,
+capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarships _ad lib_.
+
+[Illustration: Three of a Kind]
+
+Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was
+from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their protégés, that the
+sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
+in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This
+wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.
+
+We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and
+immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot,
+with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty
+bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a
+recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these
+good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six
+o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light
+is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. "What in the world do you
+do after six?" I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not
+content to rest in idle laps. "Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to
+give us light." Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through
+the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft
+a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their
+candles like Alfred of old.
+
+Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a
+stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations. At the Church
+of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from
+the leg of an injured Indian. Afterward we learn that the peripatetic
+patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in
+the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome.
+Poor chap, he died in the process! But while he lived he stimulated
+trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale. If
+there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have
+comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably
+fore-ordained.
+
+An interesting family lives next to the English Mission--the Loutits.
+The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company,
+and "for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a
+rabbit-track." There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old
+journals reach. The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree
+and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day's generation is a family of
+striking young people--the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work
+and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding
+the strong men's records of the North.
+
+George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from
+Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids. His
+brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran
+with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in
+three days--a distance of two hundred miles at least. Once, when the
+river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow
+to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling
+upward in the night. The rivermen tell of George Loutit's quarreling
+with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his
+adversary out of the window. When he heard him slump, George immediately
+thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for
+Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away. He arrived there in time for
+noon luncheon next day.
+
+At the H.B. Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge. A
+French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is
+peltries and not souls that Pierre is after. His forebears were Irish
+McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of
+French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs
+it.
+
+Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such
+entries as these:--"Wyllie at the forge," "Wyllie making nails," "Wyllie
+straightening the fowling-pieces," "Wyllie making sled-runners," "This
+day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian." We step into the old man's
+smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a "Good
+mornin'," in richest Doric. The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation
+of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan. He was born
+in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World. Coming out
+to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he
+threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without
+seeing a city in America. Torontonians think the hub of the universe is
+their capital on Lake Ontario. A smart young man from Toronto filtered
+in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, "Came from the
+Old Country, didn't you? What did you think of Toronto?" "Naething, I
+didna see the place."
+
+Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a
+two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone. In the
+forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of
+his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north,
+Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west. To him
+these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into
+luxuriousness with all its weakening influence. "It was much better in
+the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil. Nowadays, when we
+have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are
+coming out!"
+
+No one feels like smiling a smile of superiority in talking with old Mr.
+Wyllie. He has taught himself the gentle arts of gunsmithing and
+blacksmithing. The tools that we see all around us are marvels of
+mechanical skill and would be the joy of a modern Arts and Crafts
+Exhibition. His sledges and augurs, planes and chisels have been made by
+the old man out of pig iron which came as ballast in the holds of those
+old sailing ships which beat their way into Fort Churchill through
+Hudson Strait. The hand-made tools are set into convenient handles of
+moose-horn and bone. Clever indeed is the workmanship that Wyllie has
+done with them. The last triumph from this unique forge was the welding
+of the broken shaft of the little tug _Primrose_. The steamer _Grahame_
+was built at Chipewyan of whipsawn lumber, and much of her steel and
+ironwork was wrought on Wyllie's forge.
+
+Wyllie left the Scottish Isles when a mere lad, but they are still
+"Home" to him and he tells us that this autumn he is going back on a
+visit. It was a prototype of Wyllie's
+
+"From the lone sheiling and the misty island,
+  Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
+But still the heart, the heart is Highland,
+  And we in _dreams_ behold the Hebrides,"
+
+who prayed "O, Lord, we beseech Thee, send down Thy covenanted blessin'
+on the Muckle Hebrides, the Lesser Hebrides, and the adjacent islands
+of Great Britain and Ireland." Talking with the old gentleman, you are
+conscious of the innate moral strength rather than the mechanical skill
+of the craftsman. Instinctively you feel the splendid power of his
+presence and come out from his forge murmuring, "Thank God I have seen a
+_man_ this day." Wyllie belongs to the age of the old journals, to the
+days that bred Joe Gargerys and old Adams in whom appeared "the constant
+service of the antique world."
+
+[Illustration: Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North.
+
+EXPLANATION OF PLATE
+
+A and C--_Muski-moots_, or bags used by the duck-hunter for his game.
+Made by Dog-Rib women, of _babiche_, or rawhide of the moose or caribou.
+
+B--Velvet leggings richly embroidered in violet-coloured bead-work, made
+by Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald, a full-blooded Loucheaux woman.
+
+D--Wall-pocket of white deerskin embroidered in silk. Made by a
+Rabbit-Skin woman at Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.
+
+E--Wall-pocket ornamented with porcupine-quill work, made by a
+Yellow-Knife Indian woman at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.
+
+F--_Fire-bag_, or tobacco-pouch, made of two claws of the black bear.
+The work of a Beaver Indian woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+G--_Fire-bag_ of velvet ornamented with silk-work, made by Chipewyan
+woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.
+
+H--Velvet watch-bag embroidered in silk, made by Slavi Indian woman at
+Fort Providence, at the head of Mackenzie River.
+
+I--Watch-pocket of smoked moose-skin, embroidered in silk-work, made by
+a Cree girl at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca.
+
+J--Armlets ornamented in porcupine quills, made by a half-breed woman on
+the Liard River (a feeder of the Mackenzie).
+
+K--Three hat bands--the first two ornamented with porcupine quills, and
+the last in silk embroidery--made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac,
+Lake Athabasca.
+
+L--Beautiful belt of porcupine work, made by a half-breed woman at Fort
+Nelson on the Liard (a feeder of the Mackenzie).
+
+M--Armlets of porcupine-quill work, made by half-breed girl at Fort
+Chipewyan.]
+
+Mr. and Mrs. William Johnson, with generous courtesy, have made us
+their guests while we stay, and their refined home is a clear delight.
+Mr. Johnson is as clever a man as Mr. Wyllie, but in other lines.
+Without ever having seen an electric light, he learned by study and
+research more about electricity than nine men out of ten know who go
+through Electrical Training Schools. With the knowledge thus gained he
+constructed and put into working use an electric-light plant at Fort
+Simpson on the Mackenzie. Far up here on the map, too, the "Judge," as
+he is lovingly called, taught himself all about watches, and he is now
+Father Time for the whole Mackenzie District, regulating and mending
+every timepiece in the country. The corrected watches are carried to
+their owners by the next obliging person who passes the post, where the
+owner is notching off the days on a piece of stick while he waits. A
+watch, the works of which were extracted from three old ones and
+assembled within one case by this Burbank of Watchdom, found its way
+down to Chicago. The jeweller into whose hands it fell declared that
+among all his workmen there was not one who could have duplicated the
+job.
+
+Chipewyan is a bird paradise; the whole woods are vocal to-day. In the
+autumn, wonderful hunts are made of the southward-flying cranes, geese,
+and waveys, thousands of these great birds being killed and salted and
+put in ice chambers for winter use. If the mosquitoes were not so bad we
+would spend hours in the woods here with "God's jocund little fowls."
+These sweet songsters seem to have left far behind them to the south all
+suspicion of bigger bipeds. We hear the note of the ruby-crowned kinglet
+(_regulus calendula_) which some one says sounds like "Chappie, chappie,
+jackfish." The American red-start comes to our very feet, the yellow
+warbler, the Tennessee warbler, the red-eyed vireo, and the magnolia
+warbler, which last, a young Cree tells us, is
+"High-Chief-of-all-the-small-birds." Rusty blackbirds are here with
+slate-coloured junco, and we see a pair of purple finches. We are
+fortunate in getting a picture of the nest of the Gambel sparrow and two
+of the nesting white-throated, sparrow. They are ferreted out for us by
+the sharp eyes of a girl who says her Cree name is
+"A-wandering-bolt-of-night-lightning!" At our feet blossom cinquefoil,
+immortelles, the dainty flowers of the bed-straw.
+
+It has been a full day, and by the way the "permits" are opening up in
+the settlement when we come back, promises to be a full night. These men
+have waited a whole year for a drink, and now the lids can't come off
+quick enough. "Come, hurry up, Flynn, we're all as dry as wooden gods,
+we're so dry that we're brittle--we'd break if you hit us." "Well, I'm
+hurrying; I'm as much in a rush as any of you; I'm so warped the hoops
+are falling off."
+
+It doesn't take long to polish off the permits proper (or improper). By
+morning all this liquor, imported for "medicinal purposes," is gone.
+Whoever in Chipewyan is thoughtless enough to get ill during the next
+twelve months must fall back on the medicine-chest of the English
+Mission or of the Grey Nuns. Anything strong will do for the creation of
+joyousness during the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days of the
+year--Jamaica ginger, lavender-water, flavouring extracts.
+
+Next morning the bon vivants of Chipewyan are down to essences of lemon,
+vanilla, and ginger, which have been specially imported as stimulating
+beverages. We ask if they are any good. "Good? I should say so, and one
+bottle just makes a drink. Can I offer" (politely) "to exhilarate you
+ladies with vanilla?" The most jovial of the celebrants tells of his
+early imbibition of red ink. "I used to get a gallon of red ink with my
+outfit every year, and it gives you the good feel, but when this new
+Commissioner comes in he writes, 'I don't see how you can use a gallon
+of red ink at your post in one year,' and I writes back, 'What we don't
+use we abuse,' and next year he writes to me, 'It's the abuse we
+complain of,' and, with regretful reminiscence, "I got no more red ink."
+The substitution of red tape for the carmine fluid that inebriates is an
+innovation not appreciated.
+
+The old records fascinate us. We spend every spare moment before the
+coming of the treaty party in transcribing choice bits from them. There
+were drinks and drinkers in these old days.
+
+"_1830, Friday 1st. January_. All hands came as is customary to wish us
+the compliments of the season, and they were treated with cakes each, a
+pipe, and two feet tobacco. In the evening they have the use of the hall
+to dance, and are regaled with a beverage."
+
+"_1830, April 30. Poitras_, a Chipewyan half-breed, arrived, and
+delivered 81 made beavers in prime furs, though he says he has been
+sickly all winter. I therefore presented him with a complete clothing
+and a Feather."
+
+"_1830, May 16th_. One of our Indians having been in company with
+Indians from Isle a la Crosse got married to one of their young women,
+consequently has followed the father-in-law and taken his hunt away from
+us."
+
+"_1830, August 13th_. One Indian, _The Rat_, passed us on the Portage,
+he was treated with a dram for 'Old Acquaintance' sake."
+
+On New Year's Eve the old chronicler drops into verse. In tall thin
+letters in faded ink we read,
+
+"If New Year's Eve the wind blow south,
+It betokeneth warmth and growth;
+If west, much milk, and fish in the sea;
+If north, much storms and cold will be;
+If east, the trees will bear much fruit;
+If northeast, flee it man and beast."
+
+"_1831, January 1_. The thermometer this morning was 29 below cypher."
+
+_1831, May 22_. They bring intelligence that _Mousi-toosese-capo_ is at
+their tent, having lately joined them, without his family of two women
+and two children, who perished during the winter. From his frequent
+prevarication when questioned by the other Crees, they suspect he has
+murdered and eaten them."
+
+"_1831, May 30th._ The fellow has got too large a family for a Fort
+Hunter, he cannot feed them with unlimited Indulgence and supply us at
+the same time." [Would Mr. Roosevelt second this?]
+
+"_1831, June 19th_. Two Chipewyans came from the Long Point informing us
+that _Big Head's_ son is dead, that _Big Head_ has thrown away his
+property in consequence of the loss of his boy, and that he told them to
+beg a shirt and tobacco. The shirt, of course, I did not send, the
+scoundrel is not worthy of it. I merely sent him six inches of tobacco
+with reluctance. That cursed family is a perfect pest to the place, and
+it is my humble opinion that the hand of Providence sends them the
+present calamity for their ill deeds."[!]
+
+"_1834, November 27th._ A party of the Isle à la Crosse Indians with old
+_Nulooh_ and _Gauche_ cast up. They have not come in this direction for
+the sake of running about, some of their relations is dead, and in their
+own words they are travelling on strange lands to kill grief, not an
+unusual custom among the Northern Indians."
+
+"_1865, October 23rd_. We were surprised yesterday at the arrival of a
+Protestant missionary, a Mr. Bompas from England; he came in a canoe
+from the Portage with Sylvestre and _Vadnoit_."
+
+"_1866, January 1st_. The whole Establishment breakfasted in the Hall
+and in the evening a Ball came off with great eclat. Two marriages also
+to-day, Francis Villebrun to Marie Cyre, and Baptiste St. Cyre, Jr., to
+Justine McKay--so that all things considered the New Year was ushered
+in with a tremendous row! Verily, times are improving in the North."
+
+"_1866, January 2nd_. The men are rather seedy to-day after their
+tremendous kick-up of yesterday."
+
+"_1840, January 25th._ The object of sending _Lafleur_ to the Little
+Island is that he may procure a kind of willow that the Canadians call
+'Courmier,' the bark of which scraped and boiled in water has healing
+qualities which they think will be of great service for Hassel's
+complaint. Confidence in anything is half the cure."[!]
+
+"_1840, February 1st_. Hassel is still without much appearance for the
+better, and at his earnest request was bled."
+
+"_1841, December 31st_. The men from the Fishery made their appearance
+as usual at this time, and as usual, too, the best we had (which
+by-the-by is not great as will be seen by this journal) was served out
+to them. The other men had the time to themselves to prepare for the
+holiday of to-morrow, for the _Jour de Tan_ is the greatest day of the
+Canadians in these distant Northern posts. To finish things properly
+there is still wanting the famous aqua vitae, which we are sorry to
+state is not in our means to furnish. Adieu the year one thousand eight
+hundred and forty-one!"
+
+"_1842, February 13th_. The Rev. Mr. Evans proposing to take his
+departure to-morrow for Isle a la Crosse edified us with a farewell
+service, several of the women and children were baptized, and Flett and
+Hassel were married to their wives."
+
+From the records we compile this Chipewyan calendar:--
+
+March 17th, House-flies. April 8th, Grey goose seen. April 11th,
+Catkins. April 12th, Barking crows. April 19th, Blackbirds and
+mosquitoes. April 21st, Plover, two hawks, and a butterfly. April 22nd,
+Gulls, white waveys, robins. April 28th, White cranes. April 30th,
+Frogs, most of snow gone. May 2nd, Dark butterfly, four purple crocuses.
+May 4th, Frogs noisy, bumble bees. May 5th, Nearly clear of ice. May
+8th, Water from Peace River flowing into lake. An Eagle. May 10th, Sand
+martins. Ice drifting in channel in front of fort. May 20th, Swans
+passing north. May 21st, Trees bursting into leaf. July 11th,
+Strawberries and raspberries. August 18th, Cranes passing south. October
+11th, Small birds passing south. October 12th, First ptarmigan seen
+about the fort. October 24th, Lake in front closed up this morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
+
+
+"Afar from stir of streets,
+  The city's dust and din,
+What healing silence meets
+  And greets us gliding in!
+
+"The noisy strife
+  And bitter carpings cease.
+Here is the lap of life,
+  Here are the lips of peace."
+
+--_C.G.D. Roberts_.
+
+For fresh woods and pastures new this Friday, June 26th! Our little
+"bunch" breaks up. Mr. Brabant and Mrs. Harding, of the Hudson's Bay
+Company contingent, go on in the _Grahame_ to Smith's Landing, and with
+them the two detachments of the R.N.W.M.P. As we shake hands with the
+police party, we wonder what Fate has in store for each of us. Breaking
+off at Fort Resolution, Great Slave Lake, and trending eastward by canoe
+over unchartered ways, will they reach salt water on Hudson Bay as they
+hope?
+
+For our two selves, great good fortune is ours. The Canadian Government
+Indian Treaty party, consisting of Mr. Conroy in command, Mr. Laird as
+secretary, Dr. Donald, and Mr. Mooney in charge of the commissariat,
+with Constable Gairdner, R.N.W.M.P., as Escort, has just come down the
+Peace. To-day they pay treaty in Chipewyan, and this afternoon start
+for far Fond du Lac, at the eastern extremity of Lake Athabasca. The
+little H.B. tug _Primrose_ will tow them and their outfit in a York-boat
+and a scow, and the captain has been persuaded to allow us, too, to take
+our blankets and come along, sleeping on the deck. The _Primrose_ from
+stem to stern is not big enough to swing a cat in, but who wants to
+swing a cat? It is blue Lake Athabasca that we long to see; no white
+woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity and we would go if
+we had to work our passage at the sweeps of the scow.
+
+[Illustration: Lake Athabasca in Winter]
+
+Athabasca Lake (whose name means "In Muskeg Abounding"), is two hundred
+miles long, with thirty-five miles at its greatest width. It lies in a
+general easterly and westerly direction. No survey has been made of the
+lake; its height above ocean level is seven hundred feet, and it covers
+perhaps three thousand square miles. Its chief feeder is the Athabasca
+River, down which we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by
+the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake
+Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts
+of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse
+wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation
+being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for
+six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable
+blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace and Athabasca Rivers
+open their icy mouths about May-day, parts ot the lake are not free for
+travel until mid-May. The lake freezes fast at Fort Chipewyan some time
+in November. Lying on the deck of the tug, we look down and take
+inventory of our odd tow. Just behind comes the scow. It holds wood for
+the engine, a long sled, a canoe, a "skift," all this year's trading
+supplies for Fond du Lac, and half a dozen chained husky dogs. Trailing
+the scow is a York-boat carrying the treaty party and Mr. Harris.
+
+It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun
+is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock
+Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at
+the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well
+stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little
+deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the
+typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us
+from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for
+slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican
+Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them
+until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many,
+many hundreds of miles.
+
+[Illustration: Bishop Grouard]
+
+Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On
+board the _Primrose_ the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the
+wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch
+with him. "I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to
+have neither chart nor compass."
+
+"No," assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, "we just go by
+the power o' man," and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches
+us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in
+the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered
+adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.
+
+By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day.
+At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the
+scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five
+dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on
+the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In
+front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended
+midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of
+baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so
+far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of
+reindeer moss (_cladonia rangiferina_?), the _tripe de roche_ of the
+North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its
+gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the
+odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian
+lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and
+acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and
+tonic.
+
+No orders are given when we land, and we study countenances and actions
+to guess the time-limit of our tether. For twenty-four hours we have
+wondered if there were trout in Lake Athabasca and if they would rise to
+the fly. With a borrowed rod we take a canoe and off the shadow of a
+cottonwood point try a cast at random. The gut carries three flies--a
+brown hackle, a coachman, with a Jock Scott at the tail--a rainbow
+aggregation. To the coachman we get a rise and it takes three of us to
+land him. There are no scales; so his weight must forever be unrecorded,
+but as we lay him out he measures just a trifle over twenty-three
+inches, as beautiful a lake trout as ever sent thrill up and down a
+sympathetic spine. Bye-and-bye this road we travel is going to be
+listed on the sporting routes of the world, and tired souls from the
+Seven Seas with rod and gun will here find Nepenthe.
+
+[Illustration: The Modern Note-book]
+
+Clutching our catch, we step gingerly along an outstretched oar and
+climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and
+suggest turf rather than surf. "Kick her up, Mac!" "Give her a kick
+ahead!" "Who-o-oa!" On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac,
+clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All
+unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet us,--bent
+old crones, strong men, and black-eyed babies. For is not the coming of
+the treaty party the one event of the Fond du Lac year?
+
+Half way along the traverse of the lake we had crossed the
+inter-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern
+limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's
+Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak
+English,--Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler
+who would fain shepherd their souls.
+
+These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only
+at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the
+_moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers_ (July) they will press back
+east and north to the land of the caribou. September,
+_the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns_, will find them camping on
+the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the
+_hour-frost-moon,_ or the _ice-moon,_ they will be laying lines of
+traps.
+
+We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians
+by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in
+its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned
+the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of
+Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present
+has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction,
+by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection
+had been loud and eloquent.
+
+[Illustration: Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian]
+
+We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman
+whom he addresses as "Josette." Their three girls are being educated in
+the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the
+grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with
+thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the
+latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter
+nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of
+the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with
+the great world of thought outside. "Stone walls do not a prison make
+nor iron bars a cage." Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under
+birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of
+ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and
+Labrador tea _(Ledum latifolium_), we reach the H.B. garden where the
+potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little
+graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The
+inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father
+Beihler, who comes across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years
+the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in
+the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit
+hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was
+out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself
+wept. White women are a _rara avis_. Father Beihler wants to know how
+old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing
+wisely to the Kid, he assures me, "They are not an-gell (angel) at that
+age," and says, "I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a _woman
+chercher_." The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him,
+and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we
+have in common,--the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond
+du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so
+far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned
+warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.
+
+[Illustration: A Bit of Fond du Lac]
+
+These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the
+trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The
+father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money
+to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served
+The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in
+England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here
+Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the
+tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.
+
+To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more
+interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form
+silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the
+Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and
+makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a
+contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass,
+become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string
+tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who
+used to "make fur" in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the
+extinct product of a past race that never existed.
+
+The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce
+of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the animal's skull
+to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and
+musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on
+sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in
+the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the
+animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her
+side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp
+she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.
+
+The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and
+they are perhaps the least unspoiled of "civilisation," as their range
+is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie.
+To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled
+down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on
+the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have
+not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and
+sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the
+germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in
+the graves by the wayside.
+
+[Illustration: Birch-barks at Fond du Lac]
+
+Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two
+canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs
+following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary
+weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence
+the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind
+of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for
+moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are _cached_, and the trail strikes into
+the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and
+eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge
+wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his
+journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting
+incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps
+flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie
+Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.
+
+Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart
+of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral
+fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are
+lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his
+traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line
+of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an
+accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of
+the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small
+hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights
+come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far
+trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent streams, the
+Chipewyan trudges from trap to trap; if he finds fifty dollars worth of
+fur along the whole line he is content. It is not this lonely man who
+gets the high price, madame, for your marten stole or opera-cloak of
+ermine.
+
+On the trail the hunter may go hungry for two days and no word of
+complaint, just a tightening of the lips and L'Assumption belt, and a
+firm set to the jaw; but when a moose is killed life is one long supper.
+A jolly priest whispers of this confession from a son of the Church, a
+recent brand from the burning, "O Father, I know that Christianity is
+true, the great, the strong religion. When I was a heathen Chipewyan and
+trapped with my mother's tribe I ate ten rabbits a day. But now I am a
+Christian, a good Catholic, seven rabbits are enough for me--I will eat
+no more!"
+
+In the early days the H.B. Company allowed its men _en voyage_ five
+pounds of meat a day, and each kiddie three pounds. In British Columbia
+and the Yukon the ration was one salmon; up here on the Athabasca one
+wild goose or three big whitefish; on the Arctic foreshore two fish and
+three pounds of reindeer meat. This was the scheduled fare, but the
+grimness of the joke appears in the fact that each man had to run his
+breakfast to earth before he ate it.
+
+Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when
+the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt. The
+whole thing is a Louisiana lottery. The very next trap may hold a
+silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and
+a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr.
+Harris. As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the
+starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so
+long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond
+du Lac. In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating
+caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake. Caribou skins are in
+prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh
+or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk.
+About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance
+from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs
+with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother
+Church. Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear,
+and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty
+money and annual reunion in July.
+
+Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou
+(_rangifer articus_), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the
+bands of the dead and gone buffalo. Caribou go north in spring and south
+in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou
+form the advance line. They drop their young far out toward the seacoast
+in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow.
+The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make
+the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July. From this time they
+stay together till the rutting season is over late in October. Then the
+great herds of caribou,--"la foule,"--gather on the edge of the woods
+and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food
+afforded by the country of the larger pine trees. A month later the
+females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the
+uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the
+end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.
+
+This is the general rule. Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca
+Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the
+Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and
+westward branches of the caribou family. But the trend of this mighty
+migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and
+the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and
+divert them from their line of march. Individuals and scattered bands,
+indeed, have been known not to migrate at all. Fifteen years ago in the
+last days of July, in latitude 62° 15' North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a
+herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand
+individuals. In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near
+Fort Rae on the ice. It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in
+the words of an eye-witness, "daylight could not be seen through the
+column."
+
+A priest, on the winter trail between Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a
+few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail
+crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till
+they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass
+through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat
+bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.
+
+Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, "At
+Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't
+think they will ever die out." Rae was the old meat-station for the Far
+North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three
+thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a
+caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without
+any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the
+wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.
+
+When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink
+teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will
+cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would
+be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish
+(_coregonus clupeiformis_) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to
+spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern
+waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are
+always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying
+with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the
+Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good
+fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some
+of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their
+chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The
+whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it
+is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live
+for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual
+mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is
+the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes
+daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our
+sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of _de
+gustibus_, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon
+the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping
+the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one
+would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear
+dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after
+all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had
+overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they
+broached cargo. "Do you like these?" "Yes." "You're a liar!" On the
+Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his
+first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of
+Kennedy. He coveted one of the "plums" from our lunch-basket, and was
+much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. "What are them?"
+"Olives," we elucidated; "they come from Southern Europe by steamer."
+"Do they?" (slightingly). "The one I et must have come steerage."
+
+We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern
+delicacies,--beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys,
+caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of
+these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest
+here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery,
+whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and
+freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish
+hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh
+firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the
+fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly
+gamy. This is the "Fall Fishery." Winter fishing is done through holes
+in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The
+handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.
+
+As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the
+United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in
+Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an
+Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada
+from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was
+$1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its
+Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or
+ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game
+off his own bat.
+
+Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look,
+seeking in vain any trace of "the wild Red Man." The _raison d'être_ of
+these annual "treaty-payment parties" is merely the acknowledgment on
+one side and the recognition on the other that the Northern Indian is a
+British subject protected by and amenable to British law. In addition to
+the present of five dollars per head each year, the Canadian Government
+sends in by the Indian Agent presents of fishing twine and ammunition,
+with eleemosynary bacon for the indigent and old. The chiefs strut
+around in official coats enriched with yellow braid, wearing medals as
+big as dinner-plates.
+
+From Edmonton northward to Fort Chipewyan the Indians are all Crees. At
+Fort Chipewyan the northern limit of the Crees impinges on the southern
+limit of the Chipewyan, but here at Fond du Lac the Indians are all true
+Chipewyans. The Chipewyan wife is the New Red Woman. We see in her the
+essential head of the household. No fur is sold to the trader, no yard
+or pound of goods bought, without her expressed consent. Indeed, the
+traders refuse to make a bargain of any kind with a Chipewyan man
+without the active approbation of the wife. When a Chipewyan family
+moves camp, it is Mrs. Chipewyan who directs the line of march. How did
+she happen to break away from the bonds that limit and restrain most Red
+brides? This is the question that has troubled ethnologists since the
+North was first invaded by the, scientific. We think we have found the
+answer. Along the shores of Fond du Lac we descry a long-legged wader,
+the phalarope. This is the militant suffragette of all bird-dom. Madame
+Phalarope lays her own eggs (this depository act could scarcely be done
+by proxy), but in this culminates and terminates all her
+responsibilities connubial and maternal,--"this, no more." Father
+Phalarope builds the house, the one hen-pecked husband of all feathered
+families who does. He alone incubates the eggs, and when the little
+Phalaropes are ushered into the vale, it is Papa who tucks their bibs
+under their chins and teaches them to peep their morning grace and to
+eat nicely. Mamma, meanwhile, contrary to all laws of the game, wears
+the brilliant plumage. When evening shadows fall where rolls the
+Athabasca, she struts long-leggedly with other female phalaropes, and
+together they discuss the upward struggles toward freedom of their
+unfeathered prototypes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
+
+
+"On we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
+  And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as swinging heel and toe,
+We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to anywhere,
+  The tragic road to Anywhere but one dear year ago."
+
+--_Service_.
+
+Everybody is to say farewell to Fond du Lac to-day, June 29th, so there
+is a hurried finishing up of loose ends. A loud yowl as of a lost soul
+letting go of life starts the lake echoes! No hand is staining itself in
+brother's blood. The treaty doctor, who visits these people, to use
+their own word, "as a bird on the wing," has just succeeded in
+extracting a tooth for a Chipewyan bride, Misère Bonnet Rouge. Misère
+looks ashamed of her howl when the operation is over, and lisping,
+"Merci very," bears off in expansive triumph the detached molar.
+
+[Illustration: Fond du Lac]
+
+Down at the lake edge, belly prone, men and women lap the water as dogs
+do, while the festive small boy from the Government bags of poor-house
+bacon is slyly licking the oozing fat. Of the taste of red-cheeked
+apples and chewing-gum he is guiltless; popcorn, bananas, and the
+succulent peanut are alike alien. This _pee-mee_ or oil of bacon is
+delicious morsel enough for his red palate. We trade a brier pipe with
+young McDonald, a full-blood, for his beautiful hat-band of porcupine
+quills, and in the French of the North he confides to us, "I have two
+boys. The mother can have the younger one to help her in the house, and
+the priest can teach him to be a white man if he likes; but the other
+one goes with me, no school for him. I will make him a hunter like
+myself." Last year McDonald went into the woods on New Year's Day and
+didn't return until June, when he came back with three hundred caribou.
+
+Father Beibler is carrying a cup of water up to a tepee where an old
+Indian lies dying, to whom he is giving extreme unction. The slanting
+sun strikes the tin cup and the big crucifix of the good Father, and so
+we leave Fond du Lac.
+
+[Illustration: Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian]
+
+The man who tells the story crosses himself piously and immediately
+begins a bit of rag-time of the vintage of '08. We ask him where he
+heard the tune. "O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the
+Mission." Canned culture even here! It is light enough to read on the
+deck at quarter past eleven. We chunk along through a lake of amethyst
+and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep. On the
+scow astern, sprawled on the season's output of fur, the men smoke and
+argue. In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast
+about their dogs, and discuss food. Two kindred souls may hark back to
+boyhood days and quote a page of Virgil or demonstrate on a bit of
+birchbark the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, but you overheard no
+discussion of elections or ward-politics, no chatter of the marketplace.
+That is all "long ago and far away." To-night it is "You know there are
+fellows in here who can run like hell. The world's record is beaten
+every winter." "The world's record in lying, do you mean?" "No,
+running--a man can run one hundred miles a day in this country." "Well,
+what makes a day?" "Twelve hours,--that is what I learned at school."
+"No: there's twenty-four hours in a day." "Well, a day, _I_ take it, is
+as far as you can go without stoppin'--it never gets dark, so how is a
+man to know what's a day?"
+
+We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a
+whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada's national
+holiday. For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley,
+radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten
+inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter. Wild
+gooseberries are big enough to make delectable "gooseberry fool." Who
+hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?
+
+Early in the morning we start north in the _Primrose_, cross Athabasca
+Lake, and enter the Rocher River. Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the
+Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant
+stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer
+day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living. Poplars
+and willows alternate with white spruce (_Picea canadensis_) fully one
+hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter. It is an ideal
+run,--this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith's Landing, and
+we make it in twelve hours.
+
+[Illustration: Smith's Landing]
+
+"How did Smith's Landing get its name?" I ask the _Primrose_ Captain.
+"Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay," from the tightly-bitten black pipe
+leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At
+Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation
+in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort
+McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith
+the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total
+drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce
+of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this
+turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The "free
+trader" still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the
+H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.
+
+We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging
+swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had
+been in the North for years and was "going out," the other had come from
+Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the
+beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the
+"Rapid of the Drowned," and canoe and men went down. An old Indian
+woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, "One arm lifted out of the
+river, the paddle pointing to the sky--a cry came over the water, and
+that was all." Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France
+where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the
+unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that
+remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who
+wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny
+which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves
+dotards dozing in the sun.
+
+At Smith's Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones,
+among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North
+and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a
+winter's study. Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates,
+R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass
+tacks. With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and
+making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a
+barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as
+coadjutor. Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head
+of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck,
+an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since.
+Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a
+prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to
+take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the
+Mosquito Portage and we do not.
+
+We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca
+mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's
+Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the
+mosquito. He tells us that they are "of the order _Diptera_," "sub-order
+_Nemocera_," and chiefly "of the family _Culicidae_," and he also goes
+so far as to tell us that they "annoy man." As we bump along in the
+muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert
+that "the life of the adult insect is very short" and that it is the
+female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that "the
+natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant."
+We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on "Mosquito" out of some convent
+dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac. He is like the parson
+introduced by his friend of the cloth. "Brother Jones will now give an
+address on Satan. I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the
+reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes
+to you _full of his subject."_
+
+The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full
+of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a
+pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their
+digestion on an unnatural commissariat. And if the female mosquitoes do
+all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on
+Smith's portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into
+her own. We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a
+Slave River priest had said to us, "These have not delicate
+sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper
+appreciation of _material things_."
+
+Opposition is the life of trade. For every vantage-point as big as a
+match-head on our face and hands the "bull-dog" contests with the
+mosquito. An interesting study is the "bull-dog." He looks like a cross
+between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we
+went along to examine the different parts of his person under a
+microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm. The head of the
+insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he
+makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman
+enough to keep his tools always well sharpened. The Doctor was not
+"long" on the "bull-dog." He told us that his Sunday name was
+"_Tabanus_," and that was about all he could impart. The rest we could
+learn for ourselves by direct contact.
+
+Personally I have very little rancour against the "bull-dog." He looks
+worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel
+him. Four-legged brutes find it different. On the Bloody Portage we
+overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying
+to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites.
+Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from
+Fort Smith. Moose in the North, maddened by the "bull-dogs," often jump
+over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when _they_
+were possessed of devils.
+
+Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, "The
+deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs," ruminates audibly,
+"Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs! How interesting! Jolly
+resourceful beggars, these Colonials." A literary scientist sending out
+copy from the North wrote, "My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and
+bull-dogs," which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, "My two
+greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs."
+
+Bringing in our daily treasure-trove of flowers we can scarcely realise
+that at Fort Smith we are in latitude 60° North, the northern boundary
+of the Province of Alberta and in the same latitude as St. Petersburg.
+One day we gathered careopsis, pretty painted-cups, the dandelion in
+seed, shinleaf (_Pyrola elliptica_), our old friend yarrow, and
+golden-rod. Another day brought to the blotting-pads great bunches of
+goldenrod, a pink anemone, harebells of a more delicate blue than we had
+ever seen before, the flower of the wolf-berry, fireweed, and
+ladies'-tresses. The third day we identified the bear-berry or
+kinnikinic-tobacco (_Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)_ with its astringent
+leaves, and that dear friend of lower latitudes and far-away days, the
+pink lady-slipper. The last time we had seen it was in a school-room in
+far-off Vancouver Island where in early April the children had brought
+it in, drooping in their hot little fists. This same evening, watching a
+night-hawk careering in mid-air by the rapids of the Slave and enjoying
+its easy grace in twisting and doubling as with hoarse cry it fell and
+rose again, we were fortunate in literally running to ground its nest.
+
+[Illustration: A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing]
+
+[Illustration: Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company]
+
+Fort Smith, as places go in this country, is an infant in age, having
+been established only thirty-four years. Resting on the edge of the high
+bank of the Slave, it enjoys an eternal outlook on those wonderful
+rapids. The river here is a mile wide. The sweep and eddy-wash of ages
+have cut out a deep bay, on the inner shore of which stand the buildings
+of The Company, the little Roman Church, the houses of the priests. Back
+of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of
+the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the
+hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being
+more "dead" than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great
+things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort
+Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality
+will soon send unction into the dry bones of the valley.
+
+At the foot of the high hill looms a monument to the initiative and
+commercial enterprise of the H.B. Company,--a modern steamship in the
+waters of a wilderness-country. Ours is to be the honor of making in her
+the initial journey to the Mackenzie mouth. It is impossible coming from
+the South to navigate the Slave River rapids by steam. Any boat
+ambitious to ply on the waters lying northward between Fort Smith and
+the Arctic must be either taken in in sections or built on the ground.
+With enterprise and pluck, the Hudson's Bay Company has just completed
+the construction at Fort Smith of the steamship, _The Mackenzie River_.
+Its great boilers and engines made in far factories of the south came in
+over the Athabasca trail on sleighs in winter. Down that whole distance
+of ninety miles of Athabascan rapids they floated on scows as we
+floated, and while human ingenuity is bringing north the iron bowels,
+skilful hands out of native timber are framing the staunch body to
+receive them.
+
+The builders of the big boat have had disasters which would have daunted
+any but the dogged Company of Fur-Traders. Two land-slides threatened to
+slice off and carry into the river the partially-made boat, a fire
+burned up the blacksmith shop and with it all the imported doors,
+window-sashes and interior finishings, so that she sails to-morrow with
+carpenters still at work. While the hull of this carefully modelled
+vessel is necessarily of light construction, with special steel to
+enable her to navigate safely the waters of the Mackenzie River,
+longitudinal strength has been adequately provided in the form of five
+lattice girders and by numerous hog-posts and ties, and the diagonal
+bracing of the bulkheads will provide ample transverse strength. The bow
+also has been made especially strong to resist the impact of ice, snags,
+etc. The hull is one hundred and twenty-five feet in length, twenty-six
+feet broad at the water-line, and five and one-third feet deep to the
+structural deck. The strength and safety of the hull are increased by
+five water-tight compartments. Propulsion is effected by a pair of
+modern stern paddle-wheel engines capable of being worked up to over two
+hundred and fifty horse power, giving her a speed of ten miles an hour.
+She has stateroom accommodation for twenty-two passengers, draws three
+and a half feet of water aft, and eats up half a cord of wood an hour.
+She will carry to the northern posts their trading-goods for the year.
+
+Within a day's ride of Fort Smith grazes a herd of four to five hundred
+wood bison, the last unconfined herd of buffalo in the world. Doubtless
+the wood buffalo were originally buffalo of the plains. Their wandering
+northward from the scoured and hunted prairies has not only saved them
+from extinction but has developed in them resistance and robust
+vitality. These bison appear darker and larger than their pictured
+cousins of the past. Probably the inner hair of these is finer and of
+thicker texture, a difference which the change of habitat to more
+northern latitudes would easily account for. The bison have two
+enemies: the grey wolf and the Indian, one an enemy _in esse_, the other
+_in posse_. The Government of Canada has prohibited the killing of the
+buffalo, and my opinion is that this law, as all other Canadian laws, is
+obeyed in the North. I questioned every one I talked with who lives on
+the rim of the buffalo-habitat, and the concensus of testimony of
+priests, H.B. men, settlers, traders, and Mounted Police, is that the
+Indians do not molest these animals. The arch-enemy of the wood buffalo
+is the timber wolf.
+
+[Illustration: The World's Last Buffalo]
+
+Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to
+laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable
+mosquito-infested muskeg. An untoward frost is more to be feared by
+these great brutes than the attacks of any insect. Thirty-eight years
+ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a
+subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do
+not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated.
+In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North
+country. In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River
+and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay
+Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them
+for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort
+hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.
+
+In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past
+were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's
+first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake
+"observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the
+river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind."
+In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance
+into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on
+the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated
+by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which
+occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.
+
+One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd
+of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has
+shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the
+buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now
+ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well
+as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning,
+conclusively prove.
+
+Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his
+magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of
+Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the
+flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he
+assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
+pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout
+to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the
+timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the
+native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's
+belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole
+season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but
+if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although
+always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith
+while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, "There, it
+had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more." Shortly
+afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was
+held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a
+litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in
+both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.
+It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama
+as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison
+host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of
+the wolf. Archbishop Taché tells of the persevering fortitude of a big
+wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle â la Crosse. Thirty days
+afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with
+trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through
+the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those
+weary miles.
+
+With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and
+a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are
+extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the
+stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise.
+There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no
+means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find
+their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap.
+Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as
+manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in
+1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the
+same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than
+doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to
+France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173
+worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.
+
+More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox
+and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver,
+seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw
+furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother
+Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred
+thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that
+number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured
+article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur
+clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole
+or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by
+snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half
+round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and
+pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who
+declared, "I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow
+proud," would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this
+age.
+
+In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the
+fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are
+carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the
+scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the
+undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the
+nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big
+enough to market, it is "heads I win, tails you lose." The United
+States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild
+animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on
+coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.
+
+What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the
+harmless fur-bearers. Several causes make against the extermination of
+these in Canada. The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the
+animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures.
+Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and
+putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of
+active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The
+fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of
+personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur
+popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its
+original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.
+
+What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in
+showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of
+the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function,
+and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a
+wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to
+the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little
+minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the
+last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end
+no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The
+exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This
+truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of
+reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove
+to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.
+
+The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away
+with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables
+inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape
+the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For
+lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk
+rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the
+horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with
+cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and
+incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and
+Northern travellers drink boiled tea _au natural_. Cows are the eternal
+feminine and will not be explained by logic.
+
+But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most
+valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is
+the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the
+bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies.
+"How old is Ann?" pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves
+patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes
+and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip
+or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits
+often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a
+cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his
+shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to
+the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox
+for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at
+Isle â la Crosse in latitude 55° 30', about twenty years ago, an
+experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary--Burbanks
+got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were
+mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and
+black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was
+son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!
+
+We are told that Messrs. McDougall & Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the
+distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt
+ever paid on the London market,--$1700, that it was one of the most
+beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to
+the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state,
+"Of the American silver-fox (_Canis vulpes argentatus_) black skins have
+a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and
+by the nobles."
+
+[Illustration: Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage]
+
+And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter
+he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the
+London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased
+finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one
+cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds
+with keen discriminating sight, "Black's not so black nor white so very
+white." Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, "The silver-fox is but a
+phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a
+difference--!" Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we
+must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms,
+and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises
+greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative,
+the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat,
+Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.
+
+I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by
+the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the
+Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the
+river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game.
+He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without
+moving an eye-brow.
+
+At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican
+_(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)_ which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave
+finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of
+continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came
+across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in
+the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island
+in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we
+were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found
+something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The
+plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are
+slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid
+matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so
+far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the
+illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without
+shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight
+sepulture and was not "darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our
+bayonets turning." There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with
+conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and
+his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist
+robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on
+Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and
+neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified
+silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River
+pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest
+attempt to "open to her young her tender breast." It is rank libel for
+Byron to state
+
+"Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream
+To still her famished nestling's scream."
+
+And, when Keats states so sententiously in _Endymion_, "We are nurtured
+like a pelican brood," he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
+
+
+"Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use
+  Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,
+Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,
+  And the weird magic of old Indian tales."
+
+--_Archibald Lampman_.
+
+A double cabin is assigned us on _The Mackenzie River_ and the nightmare
+that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films
+vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water.
+Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg,
+still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction
+stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues
+into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the
+bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of
+sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the
+fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged
+race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated,
+and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having
+no popcorn, fizz, or Coney-Island red-hots to distribute, we did the
+next best thing,--became barkers and gave the calls that go with
+festivities. So now, as the boat swings out from the soft bank, it is a
+gay company of urchins who wave their caps and yell, "R-r-r-red
+lemol-lade, everybody drinks it!"
+
+There is only one Fort Smith! Established for three decades, it has as
+yet seen no wells dug. The people still climb that steep bank, carrying
+in pendant buckets from wooden shoulder-yokes water for the daily
+drinking and ablutions. At four o'clock in the afternoon, should you
+visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily
+procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,--the Aquarius sign of
+the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, "Why should they
+bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats
+from Scotland to tote their water up the banks."
+
+[Illustration: The "Red Lemol-lade" Boys]
+
+At noon we reach the Salt River, twenty-two miles up, which is one of
+the most marvellous salt deposits in the world. The Salt River winds in
+crescent curves through a valley wooded with aspen and spruce, and the
+Salt Plains six miles in extent stretch at the base of hills six or
+seven hundred feet high. The salt lies all over the ground in beautiful
+cubes,--pure crystal salt. It is anybody's salt plain; you can come here
+when you will and scoop up all you want. These plains have supplied the
+North country with salt since first white men penetrated the country. At
+the mouth of the Salt River are the shacks of the present
+representatives of the Beaulieus,--a family which has acted as guides
+for all the great men who ever trended northward. They have been
+interesting characters always, and as we look in upon them to-day
+neither Beaulieu nor salt has lost his savour.
+
+[Illustration: Salt Beds]
+
+The Slave River from where it leaves Fort Smith to its embouchure in
+Great Slave Lake is about two hundred miles long, with an average width
+of half a mile, except where it expands in its course to enclose
+islands. The big boat behaves beautifully in the water, and on we slip
+with no excitement until about five o'clock, when a moose and her calf
+are espied, well out of range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the
+sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The
+captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at
+the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of
+Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach Fort Resolution.
+
+To Samuel Hearne, the Mungo Park of Canada, belongs the double honour of
+tracing the Coppermine River and discovering Great Slave Lake. Just one
+hundred and thirty-seven years ago on Christmas Eve, Hearne got his
+first glimpse of this magnificent inland sea which is cut through the
+centre by the parallel of 62°, and which lies east and west between the
+meridians of 109° and 117°. No survey of Great Slave Lake has been made,
+but it is estimated to have a superficial area of 10,500 square
+miles--just one-third the size of troubled Ireland, and as great as
+Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.
+
+Great Slave Lake, lying wholly within the forested region, is three
+hundred miles long, and its width at one point exceeds sixty miles. At
+every place on its banks where the fur-traders have their stations
+ordinary farm-crops are grown. Barley sown at Fort Resolution in mid-May
+reaches maturity in a hundred days; potatoes planted at the same time
+are dug in mid-September. The gardens of Fort Rae on the North Arm of
+the Lake produce beets, peas, cabbages, onions, carrots, and turnips. As
+Fort Rae is built on a rocky island with a bleak exposure, this would
+seem to promise in some future day generous harvests for the more
+favoured lands on the south and west.
+
+The names given by the old fur-traders to their posts make the
+traveller think that in these North lands he, a second Christian, is
+essaying a new Pilgrim's Progress. At the south entry to the Lake we are
+at Resolution; when we cross it we arrive at Providence; away off at the
+eastern extremity is Reliance; Confidence takes us to Great Bear Lake;
+and Good Hope stretches far ahead down the lower reaches of the
+Mackenzie. Fort Resolution on the south side of Great Slave Lake, a
+little west of the mouth of the Slave, lies back of an island-sheltered
+entrance.
+
+[Illustration: Unloading at Fort Resolution]
+
+The striking feature as we enter is an immense Roman Catholic Mission
+school in process of construction, to supplement the existing church and
+school of that faith. There is neither station of the Mounted Police nor
+Church of England here; their places are taken by two independent
+fur-trading concerns operating in opposition to the Ancient Company.
+
+We had been told that the children down North had the kiddies at Fort
+Smith and Chipewyan "all skinned" for politeness, and we find it even
+so. The good nuns are trying to make reputable citizens of the young
+scions of the Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife nations and are succeeding
+admirably as far as surface indications go. We approach a group of
+smiling boys arrayed in their Sunday clothes, awaiting a visit of the
+Bishop. With one accord come off their Glengarry bonnets, smoking caps,
+and Christie stiffs, and a row of brown hands is extended to greet us.
+Very trim the laddies look in their convent-made cadet-uniforms, as,
+standing at "'Shun!" they answered our every question with, "Yes,
+missus," "No, missus." When we ask their names, without tittering or
+looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens. Here
+they have once more their white brothers "skinned"; no civilised man,
+woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal
+name in an audible tone without feeling a fool. I have seen grizzled
+judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses,
+squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed
+them "Archer Martin" or "Peter Secord" or whatever it might be.
+
+It is certainly Old Worldish. We speak with Father Laity who, all
+unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail
+and reads his breviary. He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age
+that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war. The Father
+came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.
+
+Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of
+the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow. The
+Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel.
+The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and
+shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole
+family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the
+pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this
+tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come
+across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. Afterward
+we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien
+Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to
+live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him
+by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means "_A
+man born_."
+
+Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the
+five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of
+His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh. The Yellow-Knives were so named
+by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons
+of native copper. Each head of a family is issued an
+identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to
+year. A father "draws treaty" for his olive-skinned branches until each
+marries and erects a tepee for himself. Government Agent Conroy, big
+bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and
+gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book.
+Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun. There
+are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation. The _Fiddler Anns,
+Waggon-box Julias_, and _Mrs. Turkeylegs_ of the Plains country are
+absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither
+waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.
+
+[Illustration: Coming to "Take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake]
+
+_Mary Catholic_ comes along hand-in-hand with _Samuel the Worm_. Full of
+animal spirits is a group of four--_Antoine Gullsmouth,
+Tongue-of-the-Jackfish, Baptiste Wolftail,_ and _The Cat's Son_. A
+little chap who announces himself as _T'tum_ turns out to be _Petite
+Homme_, the squat mate of _The Beloved_. It would be interesting to know
+just how each of the next couple acquired his name, for neither
+_Trois-Pouces_ and _Owl-Plucked-Out-His-Eye_ bears evidence of abnormal
+conditions. On a whole the names are more striking than our John Smiths;
+Richard Roes, and Tom Browns, as for instance the next three--_Le Père
+des Carriboux, Geroux the Eldest, Alixi To-rong-jo.
+The-man-who-stands-still_ is evidently a stand-patter, while one wonders
+if it would be right to call _The-Man-Who-Walks-With-The-Red-Hair,_ a
+Crimson Rambler.
+
+_Carry-the-Kettle_ appears with _Star Blanket_ and _The Mosquito,_ and
+the next man in line, who has the tongs from a bon-bon box stuck in the
+band of his hat, rejoices in the name of _Strike-Him-on-the-Back,_ which
+somehow suggests the match-box in the hotel hall-way. As the dignified
+father, _Having-Passed-Many-Birthdays,_ claims five dollars each for his
+four daughters, _Smiling Martin, My-Wigwam-is-White,_ and the twins
+_Make-Daylight-Appear_ and _Red-Sky-of-the-Morning,_ we acknowledge that
+here again, in the art of naming, the Yellow-Knife has his white brother
+"skinned."
+
+Birth, dowry, divorce, death, each must be noted on the treaty ticket,
+with a corresponding adjustment of the number of dollar-bills to be
+drawn from the coffer. If a man between treaty-paying and treaty-paying
+marries a widow with a family, he draws five dollars each for the new
+people he has annexed. If there is an exchange of wives (a
+not-infrequent thing), the babies have to be newly parcelled out.
+Through all the family intricacies Mr. Conroy follows the interpreter
+with infinite patience and bonhomie. To the listener it sounds startling
+as the interpreter, presenting two tickets says, "He married these three
+people--this fellow." "O, he give dat baby away to Charles." When we
+hear in a dazed way that "_Mary Catholic's_ son married his dead woman's
+sister who was the widow of _Anton Larucom_ and the mother of two boys,"
+we take a long breath and murmur, "If the angle ACB is not equal to the
+angle ABC, then how can the angle DEF be equal to the angle DFE?" A
+young couple, looking neither of them more than sixteen or seventeen,
+return with a shake of the head five of the fifteen dollars proffered
+them, and the interpreter explains, "Their little boy died--there's only
+two of them."
+
+Gregory Daniels in a Scottish voice, which cannot quite hide its
+triumphant ring, pushes back his five dollars and demands forty-five. "I
+got a wife and siven since last year, she's a Cree wumman." Another
+half-breed asks anxiously if he would be allowed to send for a "permit"
+like a white man if he refused to take treaty.
+
+One man with long black hair and a cheese-cutter cap creates
+consternation at the tent-door by claiming treaty for two wives and
+seventeen children. Mr. Conroy, scenting an attempt to stuff the
+ballot-box, produces seventeen matches, lays them at my feet on the
+tent-floor and asks _The-Lean-Man_ to name them. He starts in all right.
+We hear, "_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish, Birdtail, Little Bone,
+Sweet Grass, Ermine Skin_," and then in a monotone he begins over again,
+"_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish_," and finally gives it up, eagerly
+asking the interpreter to wait "a-little-sun." The drama of paying and
+recording has gone on for half an hour and we have quite forgotten
+_The-Lean-Man_, when back he comes with _Mrs. Lean-Man, Sr._, and _Mrs.
+Lean-Man, Jr_. Each spouse leads her own progeny. Seeing is believing,
+and off _Lean-Man_ goes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to
+see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at
+a box of stogies, and the clerk says, "He can afford to blow in his wad
+on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter."
+They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put
+his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year
+because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he
+wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.
+
+Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly
+the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two
+young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton
+with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed
+figures at ten shies for a quarter. "Every time you hit 'em, you get a
+see-gar!" They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it
+took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break
+the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, "Them
+chaps pinked them dolls every time."
+
+As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a
+glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy's head. It is
+the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or "De-deed." The
+lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kisses her
+gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The
+whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother
+at the open door.
+
+Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves
+down for an hour's rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light
+effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting
+sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued
+night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness.
+Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high
+point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts.
+The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over
+all a measureless silence. At three o'clock in the morning we haul into
+the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at
+the landing.
+
+[Illustration: On the Slave]
+
+This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole
+North--although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay
+River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls
+and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission,
+learning how to play the white man's game--jolly and clean little bodies
+they are. It looks like Christmas time. Parcels are being done up, there
+is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black
+eyes. Would you like to see the letters that _The Teaser, The Twin,
+Johnny Little Hunter_, and _Mary Blue Quill_ are sending out to their
+parents? For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented
+soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are
+writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father's and
+mother's name. The soap has been bought with the children's pennies
+earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights.
+The parcels will be passed from one trapper's jerkin to another, and
+when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or
+lodge of the deerskin, _Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-Foam_ and _Mr.
+Kee-noo-shay-o_, or _The Fish_, will know their boys and girls "still
+remember."
+
+One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten
+years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his
+quest here, and lived happily ever after. Their children are the most
+fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint
+at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and
+sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness,
+letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover
+the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in
+evergreen boughs for their summer bedding--a delightful Ostermoor
+mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in
+summer, and in the winter they haul hay. The hay causes our enquiry, and
+we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by
+some glacial drift of the long ago. And thereby hangs a tale. Charlie,
+an attaché of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day. As
+man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked,
+"Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?" "Bill balked," was the laconic
+reply. Tuesday's question would bring the same response, "Bill balked."
+And "Bill balked," on Wednesday. Thursday it is--"Bill didn't balk"; and
+so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter
+days.
+
+[Illustration: Dogs Cultivating Potatoes]
+
+The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60° Fahrenheit, and the
+monthly mean for January, 18° below zero. Vegetables of their own
+growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food
+supply of this thrifty Mission, one season's harvest giving them a
+thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of
+beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten
+thousand whitefish.
+
+Hay River has never been explored. It is supposed to head near the
+source of the Nelson and to flow northeast for three hundred miles
+before emptying, as we see it, into Great Slave Lake. This river marks
+the limit of those grassy plains which extend at intervals all the way
+from Mexico northward. Bishop Bompas, years ago, descended a long
+stretch of the river, discovering not far back from where we stand a
+majestic cataract, which he named the "Alexandra Falls" after the then
+Princess of Wales. He describes it as a perpendicular fall one hundred
+feet high, five hundred feet wide, and of surpassing beauty. "The amber
+colour of the falling water gives the appearance of golden tresses
+twined with pearls."
+
+Crossing Great Slave Lake, we think of Chant-la, Chief of the Slavis at
+Hay River. Bishop Reeves was anxious to convert him to the Christian
+faith, but had great difficulty in giving Chant-la a proper conception
+of the Trinity. The old man would not say he believed or understood what
+was inexplicable to him. Setting out once on a long journey, the cleric
+adjured the Chief to struggle with the problem during his absence. The
+Bishop returning, Chant-la came out in his canoe to meet him, eagerly
+reporting that all now was clear. "It is like Great Slave Lake," said
+the old man. "It is all water now, just like the Father. When winter
+comes it will be frozen over, but Great Slave Lake just the same; that
+is like the Son. In the spring when the ice breaks and the rain makes
+the snow into slush, it is still Great Slave Lake; and that is like the
+Holy Ghost."
+
+Beyond Great Slave Lake, forty-five miles down the Mackenzie, we reach
+Fort Providence, as strongly French in its atmosphere as Hay River is
+British. Our coming is a gala day. The hamlet flies three flags, the
+free trader sports his own initials "H.N.," the Hudson's Bay Company
+loyally runs the Union Jack to the masthead, over the convent floats the
+tri-colour of France. Fort Providence is hot. We walk to the convent and
+are hospitably received by the nuns. They call their Red flock together
+for us to inspect and show us marvellous handwork of silk embroidery on
+white deerskin. The daintiest of dainty slippers calls forth the
+question, "Where are you going to find the Cinderella for these?" A
+blank look is my answer, for no one in Providence Convent has ever heard
+of Cinderella! But then, convents are not supposed to be the
+repositories of man-knowledge (although a half-breed, on our passage
+across the lake, did whisper a romantic story of a Klondiker who
+assailed this very fortress and tried to carry off the prettiest nun of
+the north). The garden of the Sisters is a bower of all the
+old-fashioned flowers--hollyhocks, wall-flower, Canterbury bells, and
+sweet-William--and down in the corner a young girl of the Dog-Ribs
+discovers to us a nest of fledgling chipping sparrows.
+
+As we landed from the boat, Tenny Gouley dressed in his Sunday best had
+beamed, "Nice day--go veesit." And "veesit" we did. Mrs. Herron, of the
+H.B. Company, has spent many years at Old Fort Rae, and her thoughts
+hark back to one severe winter spent there. She turns to the wife of our
+good Captain with, "Hard living, Mrs. Mills, dry suckers." It is a short
+speech, but fraught with meaning. I honestly think a dry sucker (well
+sanded) the least succulent of all the impossible fish-dishes of the
+North. There are many young Herrons all as neat as new pins, the
+last--no, the latest, enshrined in a moss-bag. Tradition tells that
+once, when they were fewer in number, the father took the flock out to
+Winnipeg to school. The children cried so at the parting that Mr. Herron
+turned and brought them all back with him to the Mackenzie!
+
+[Illustration: David Villeneuve]
+
+The most interesting man in all Fort Providence is David Villeneuve, one
+of the Company's Old Guard. He was anxious to be "tooken" with his wife
+and grandchild, and over the camera we chatted. David goes through life
+on one leg--fishes through the ice in winter, traps, mends nets, drives
+dogs, and does it all with the dexterity and cheerfulness of a young
+strong man. He tells of his accident. "I was young fellow, me, when a
+fish-stage fell on me. I didn't pay no notice to my leg until it began
+to go bad, den I take it to the English Church to Bishop Bompas. He tole
+me de leg must come off, an' ax me to get a letter from de priest (I'm
+Cat-o-lic, me) telling it was all right to cut him. I get de letter and
+bring my leg to Bompas. He cut 'im off wid meat-saw. No, I tak' not'in',
+me. I chew tobacco and tak' one big drink of Pain-killer. Yas, it hurt
+wen he strike de marrow."
+
+"Heavens! Didn't you faint with the awful pain?"
+
+"What? Faint, me? No. I say, 'Get me my fire-bag, I want to have a
+smok'.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
+
+
+"Never the Spirit was born: the Spirit shall cease to be never.
+  Never was time, it was not; end and beginning are dreams.
+Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the Spirit,
+  Death hath not touched it at all, though dead the house of it seems."
+
+We have just finished supper and are sitting reading on the upper deck
+about seven o'clock, when a cry comes from below, followed by the
+rushing back and forth of moccasined feet. In a flash Bunny Langford,
+one of the engineers, has grabbed a lifebuoy, runs past us to the stern,
+and throws it well out toward a floating figure.
+
+It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution
+just twenty-four hours before. Finishing his turn at stoking, he had
+gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen,
+carrying the hatch with him. At first we think nothing of the incident,
+as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him. As soon as the
+startled people realise what has happened the steamer's engines are
+reversed and a boat is lowered. We call out to De-deed to swim to the
+buoy, but he doesn't see it or doesn't understand. The black head gets
+smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again. Down it goes
+for the second time. A strange, constricted feeling comes into our
+throats as we cry out, "Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming! They are
+almost up to you!" The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but
+a dozen yards away. Will he hold up? As we look, the head sinks, _and it
+does not come up_. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of
+De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with
+grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles
+down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before
+us--the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the
+rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is
+well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the
+Mackenzie, goes out with the current.
+
+The Mackenzie River, "La Grande Rivière en Bas," as the people of
+Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the
+greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers
+the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of
+either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the
+Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little
+Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight
+miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion
+of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from
+source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep
+to two and a half to three miles.
+
+From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom
+exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as
+"The Head of the Line." Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie,
+when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was
+at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains
+bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with
+muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of
+water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second.
+No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard
+a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for
+commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough "white coal"
+rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The
+Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range.
+The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the
+Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main
+river through passes in that range.
+
+At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated
+on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on
+their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course
+the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.
+
+We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River
+and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o'clock we are at
+Fort Simpson in latitude 62°, the old metropolis of the North. Fort
+Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie,
+the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of
+the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it
+was known in fur annals as "The Forks of the Mackenzie."
+
+Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its
+quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and
+try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In
+those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were
+received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes
+with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold
+stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front
+of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums
+have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in
+fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall
+unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a
+rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across
+the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the
+life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry
+feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and
+exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while
+the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history
+so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of
+the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent
+to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,
+
+[Illustration: Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson]
+
+"I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice,
+bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or
+reptiles would be acceptable. They may either be skinned or placed in
+rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of
+the body to admit the spirits to the intestines."
+
+Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most
+tickles my fancy.
+
+I think of the little group that we had forgathered with at Chipewyan,
+driven even in this year of grace to lavender-water and red ink, when
+permits run dry. One turns back the clock to the time of the Chartists
+and the year of the nuptials of the young Queen in England. We see up
+here on the fringe of things the dour and canny but exceedingly humorous
+Adam McBeaths, John Lee Lewises, and George Simpsons, the outer vedette
+of the British Empire; and, seeing them, get some half-way adequate
+conception of what a modicum of rum or "strong spirits of any kind"
+meant in the way of cheer at old Fort Simpson in those days. When we try
+to get a picture of one of these Hudson's Bay men gravely opening a
+shrew-mouse, mole, or "other small quadruped," while his chum pours in
+the _aqua vitae_ or precious conversation water, we declare that science
+asks too much.
+
+An outer stairway leading to the second story of a big building invites
+us. Opening the door, we find ourselves in the midst of an old library,
+and moth and rust, too, here corrupt. We close the door softly behind us
+and try to realise what it meant to bring a library from England to Fort
+Simpson a generation ago. First, there arose the desire in the mind of
+some man for something beyond dried meat and bales of fur. He had to
+persuade the authorities in England to send out the books.
+Leather-covered books cost something six or seven decades ago, and the
+London shareholders liked better to get money than to spend it. We see
+the precious volumes finally coming across the Atlantic in wooden
+sailing-ships to Hudson Bay, follow them on the long portages, watch
+them shoot rapids and make journeys by winter dog-sled, to reach Simpson
+at last on the backs of men. The old journals reveal stories of the
+discussion evoked by the reading of these books afterward as, along with
+the dried fish, deer-meat, and other inter-fort courtesies, they passed
+from post to post. Was never a circulating library like this one. And
+now the old books, broken-backed and disembowelled, lie under foot, and
+none so poor to do them reverence. Everything is so old in this North
+that there is no veneration for old things.
+
+It is but a few years since the founder of this library died, and his
+son now sits in his saddle at Fort Simpson. If you were to wander across
+the court, as I did to-day, and look into the Sales Shop, you would see
+the presentation sword of this last-generation Carnegie, ignobly slicing
+bacon for an Indian customer. _Sic transit gloria mundi_!
+
+What are the books which this sub-Arctic library sent out? We get down
+on the floor and gently touch the historic old things. Isn't it Johnson
+who says, "I love to browse in a library"? Judging by the dust and
+cobwebs, there hasn't been much browsing done among these volumes for
+years. Present-day Simpson has seldom "fed on the dainties that are bred
+in a book." Here is a first edition of _The Spectator_, and next it a
+_Life of Garrick_, with copies of _Virgil_, and all _Voltaire_ and
+_Corneille_ in the original. A set of Shakespeare with exquisite line
+drawings by Howard shows signs of hard reading, and so does the _Apology
+for the Life of Mr. Colly Cibber_. One wonders how a man embedded in
+Fort Simpson, as a fly in amber, would ever think of sending to the
+_Grand Pays_ for _Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy_, yet we find it here,
+cheek by jowl with _The Philosophy of Living or the Way to Enjoy Life
+and Its Comforts. The Annual Register of History, Politics, and
+Literature of the Year 1764_ looks plummy, but we have to forego it. The
+lengthy titles of the books of this vintage, as for instance, _Death-Bed
+Triumphs of Eminent Christians, Exemplifying the Power of Religion in a
+Dying Hour_, bring to mind the small boy's definition of
+porridge--"fillin', but not satis-fyin'." Two more little books with big
+titles are _Actors' Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of
+Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues_, and _The London Prisons, with an
+Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in
+Them_.
+
+But the book that most tempts our cupidity is _Memoirs of Miss A---- n,
+Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars_. We want
+that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the
+Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its
+silver mouths. We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we
+hunger to steal it. Jekyll struggles with Hyde. At last the Shorter
+Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it
+down and softly close the door behind us. And ever since we have
+regretted our Presbyterian training.
+
+At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an
+old cathedral. Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their
+kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic. We walk along the
+shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in
+washing clothes with washboards--the old order and the new. A little
+dive into the mosquito-ridden woods discloses a wonderful patch of
+Pyrola and a nest of Traills' flycatcher, and makes us wish that the
+minutes were longer and the mosquitoes fewer. What a beautiful tiling
+this Pyrola is, with its inverted anthers and the cobwebby margins of
+its capsule! Its bracted, nodding flowers run through all shades of
+white, pale yellow, and dark yellow.
+
+Down on the beach we chat with a prospector and his son, a lad of
+fifteen, who are building a skiff in which to ascend the Liard, hunting
+gold. Yesterday a Mr. and Mrs. Carl and a Mr. and Mrs. Hall passed us on
+the river. Outfitted for two years, they will prospect for gold in the
+Nahanni Mountains and toward the headwaters of the Liard. One of the
+couples has just come out from Glasgow and this is their honeymoon. We
+half envy them their journey. Can anything compare with the dear
+delights of travelling when you do not know and nobody knows just what
+lies round the next corner?
+
+[Illustration: A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson]
+
+The dogs at Simpson are "wicked." Picking our way among them, I
+particularly approve this term of the natives, attributing as it does a
+human conception and malice aforethought to these long-legged wraiths.
+The first articulate sound an Indian child of the Mackenzie learns to
+make is "Mash!" an evident corruption of the French "_Marche_." This is
+what Shakespeare meant when he speaks of "a word to throw at a dog." A
+brown baby just emerged from the cocoon stage of the moss-bag toddles
+with uplifted pole into a bunch of these hungry mongrels and disperses
+them with a whack of the stick and the lordly "Mash!" of the superior
+animal. For our own part we are "scared stiff," but follow along in the
+wake of our infant protector to a wee wooden church which staggers under
+the official title, "The Cathedral of St. David."
+
+[Illustration: A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson]
+
+We have had occasion to speak of the splendid service rendered to
+Northern and Western Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company and by the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police. A third factor through the years has been
+building Empire with these. Are we not as a people too prone to minimise
+the great nation-building work performed by the scattered missionaries
+in the lone lands beyond the railway? Ostensibly engaged in the work of
+saving souls, Canadian missionaries, both Roman and English, have opened
+the gates of commerce, prosecuted geographical discovery, tried to
+correct social evils, and added materially to our store of exact
+science. Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools
+established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to
+deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman,
+the last thing you ask is, "To what church does he belong?"
+Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running
+through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no
+Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton.
+The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide
+the field between them.
+
+The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure
+than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had
+two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade
+Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the
+wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan
+scribe merely as "a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the
+Portage." In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between
+his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago,
+only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is
+literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world's map has
+ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his
+sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we
+might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from
+London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson's
+Bay forts, and substituting for Europe's vineyards and pleasant vales an
+unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.
+
+We are told that Bishop Bompas's father was Dicken's prototype for
+Sergeant Buzfuz. A new vista would open up to the counsel for Mrs.
+Bardell could he turn from his chops and tomato-sauce to follow the
+forty-years' wandering in the wilderness of this splendid man of God,
+who succeeded, if ever man succeeds, in following Paul's advice of
+keeping his body under.
+
+Bishops Bompas was one of the greatest linguists the Mother Country ever
+produced. Steeped in Hebrew and the classics when he entered the
+Northland, he immediately set himself to studying the various native
+languages, becoming thoroughly master of the Slavi, Beaver, Dog-Rib, and
+Tukudk dialects. When Mrs. Bompas sent him a Syriac testament and
+lexicon, he threw himself with characteristic energy into the study of
+that tongue. There is something in the picture of this devoted man
+writing Gospels in Slavi, primers in Dog-Rib, and a Prayer Book in
+syllabic Chipewyan, which brings to mind the figure of Caxton bending
+his silvered head over the blocks of the first printing-press in the old
+Almonry so many years before. What were the "libraries" in which this
+Arctic Apostle did his work? The floor of a scow on the Peace, a hole in
+the snow, a fetid corner of an Eskimo hut. His "Bishop's Palace," when
+he was not afloat, consisted of a bare room twelve feet by eight, in
+which he studied, cooked, slept, and taught the Indians.
+
+They tell you stories up here of seeing the good Bishop come back from a
+distant journey to some isolated tribe, followed at heel by a dozen
+little Indian babies, his disciples for the days to come. Bishop Bompas
+lived in one continent, but manifested in two, keeping himself closely
+in touch with the religious and Church growth of the Old World. When the
+British press had been given over to any particular
+religious-controversial subject, and the savants had finally disposed of
+the matter to their own satisfaction, travelling out by summer traverse
+or winter dog-sled would come a convincing pamphlet by Bishop Bompas, to
+upset altogether the conclusions of the wranglers.
+
+There is one tale of this man which only those can appreciate who travel
+his trail. An Indian lad confides to us, "Yes, my name is William
+Carpenter--Bishop Bompas gave me my name, he was a good man. He wouldn't
+hurt anybody, he never hit a dog, he wouldn't kill a mosquito. He had
+not much hair on his head, and when it was _meetsu_, when the Bishop eat
+his fish, he shoo that mosquito away and he say, 'Room for you, my
+little friend, and room for me, but this is not your place: go.'"
+
+We call upon the present incumbents of the little church of St. David.
+They are young people, the Rev. and Mrs. Day, putting in their first
+year in this Northern charge. Their home with its spotless floors and
+walls papered with old copies of _The Graphic_ and _Illustrated London
+News_ is restful and attractive. The garden of the parsonage shows an
+amount of patient work on the part of some one. Potatoes eighteen
+inches high and peas twice the height of this, with turnips and cabbages
+and cauliflower are good to look at. There are records to show that,
+years ago, Fort Simpson produced tomatoes and decent crops of barley.
+
+[Illustration: Interior of St. David's Cathedral]
+
+Entering the little church we see the neat font sent here by Mrs.
+Bompas, "In dear memory of Lucy May Owindia, baptised in this Church,
+January, 1879." Owindia was one of the many red waifs that the good
+Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took into their big hearts. Her story is a sad
+one. Along the beach at Simpson, _Friday_, an Indian, in a burst of
+ungovernable temper murdered his wife and fled, leaving their one baby
+to perish. It was not until next day that the little one was found,
+unconscious and dying. The Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took the child into
+their loving care. To the name Owindia, which means _The Weeping One_,
+was added the modern Lucy May, and the little girlie twined herself
+closely round the hearts of her protectors. When the time seemed ripe,
+Owindia was taken back to England to school, but the wee red plant would
+not flourish in that soil. She sickened and died. Hence the memorial and
+the inscription we read this July day. Much history of militant energy,
+much of endurance, and countless chapters of benevolence did the good
+Bishop write into the history of the North before, off on the Yukon side
+in 1906, "God's finger touched him and he slept."
+
+Missionaries of the present day are not without their troubles. Mrs. Day
+tells of potato-whiskey making in some illicit still back in the
+mosquito-woods, the results of which she fears; and, even as we speak,
+an Indian lunatic pokes his head through the palings of the
+potato-patch. From far back in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and from
+Fort Liard, the Hudson's Bay men have come to make their reports to Mr.
+Brabant at Simpson. They brought their wives and babies with them,
+brought also a quantity of beautiful porcupine-quill work, Fort Liard
+being one of the few places in the North where this art flourishes.
+Tomorrow they will start back, tacking against the stream, as the
+imported brides are doing before them.
+
+To dive into the journals of the past, of which the loft above the
+offices here at Simpson is full, is even more interesting than talking
+with the people of the present. We take 1837, the year which saw the
+accession in England of the young and well-beloved Queen, and from
+these musty books unearth a running commentary of what is doing in Fort
+Simpson in that year.
+
+"_1837, January 1_. The people were brought into the Hall, and enjoyed
+their meal with great appetites, being also treated to a glass of wine
+and a fathom of tobacco and a pipe. Wind East."
+
+"_1837, February 11_. Rabbits are numerous, but the ladies of the
+Establishment make no great effort in snaring them."
+
+"_1837, February 14_. Late last night arrived a woman, _Thawyase_, and a
+boy, the family of the late _Thoesty_. They have all come to take refuge
+here as they are starving. The woman at dusk decoyed old Jack away to
+camp in the woods--and the old fellow has found a mate."
+
+One wonders if either _Thawyase_, the decoyed Jack, or the old
+chronicler was conscious of the fact that this was St. Valentine's Day.
+
+"_1837, March 27_. Two geese have been seen to-day, the first this
+season."
+
+"_1837, May 2_. _Marcel_ sowed some oats. Mosquitoes begin to become
+annoying."
+
+"_1837, May 5_. Wild fowl are beginning to frequent the small lakes of
+the neighbourhood. The willows and young trees are now budding forth
+beautifully."
+
+"_1837, May 18_. _Hope_ began to plough this morning with the bull, but
+as this is the first time he has been yoked, the day's work is found to
+be but poor."
+
+"_1837, May 19_. Felix and Roderick McLeod made twelve bags of pemmican
+to-day."
+
+_1837, May 21_. The Mackenzie River broke up to-day, and continued
+drifting pretty thick till evening."
+
+"_1837, June 18_. Some of the Indians killed a bear before the door and
+it supplied us with a little fresh meat."
+
+"_1837, June 19_. Flies so numerous that we are under the necessity of
+putting our cattle into the stable, otherwise they will fall victims to
+the cruel insects."
+
+"_1837, June 20_. Weather very suffocating, thermometer 85 above at
+three p.m., not as much as a cloud to be seen in the firmament and not
+the least air to afford any refreshment; this along with the solitude of
+the time is enough to make people dull. No Indian from any quarter: well
+supplied with ammunition last spring, they forget us when they can get
+their own mouths satisfied. Ashley grinding barley in the steel mill."
+
+"_1837, June 21_. _Le Mari_ has just brought in some fish and a little
+bearskin in order to get a chemise, he says he is not able to hunt
+without a chemise, as there are so many flies just now. I have taken it
+upon myself to give him the shirt on credit."
+
+Here a new hand writes the records, untrammelled by any orthographic
+rules.
+
+"_1837, June 24_. Flys very numerus and trublsome to the Cattel."
+
+"_1837, July 11_. Starvan Indians going and coming ourly."
+
+"_1837, July 13_. Six squas arrived with plenty Bearrys--that's all they
+subsist on in this part of the River."
+
+"_1837, July 26_. Barley is getting ripe. But small birds nip off the
+ends of the stalks as fast as it ripens."
+
+"_1837, August 23_. Last night the bull broke into one of the gardens
+where oats was sown and eat the whole up."
+
+"_1837, September 18_. An Express arrived from Fort Norman with
+despatches from the Gentlemen of the Arctic Discovery Expedition, and it
+is most satisfying to learn that the first object of the Expedition was
+successfully accomplished: on the 4th August the Company's flag was
+planted on Point Barrow."
+
+"_1837, September 19th_. _Louson_ put parchment in the window-frames."
+
+"_1837, October 11_. Ice is forming since yesterday along the beach."
+
+"_1837, November 1_. This being the holiday for All Saints, the men
+though no saints celebrated it off duty. The weather cold but fine."
+
+"_1837, November 2_. I have been these two days occupied with the
+blacksmith in making an oven, and this evening it being finished we give
+it a fair trial by placing a large trout in it for supper and it is
+found to answer most excellently."
+
+"_1837, November 3_. Strong northwest wind with drift and cold. About
+one o'clock of last night the Aurora had a most unusual appearance,
+seemingly black in place of the white commonly observed and forming an
+arch from east to west, consisting of five streaks, here and there
+broken off."
+
+"_1827, November 5_. Blacksmith making iron runners for our traineaux
+from old gun-barrels."
+
+"_1837, November 30_. This being the anniversary of the Tutelar Saint of
+Scotland, we had in addition to our usual dinner a roasted swan and a
+moose-nose, a rice pudding, a cranberry tart, and a glass of wine."
+
+"_1837, December 1_. I was obliged to give four pounds of dried meat to
+the dogs for there are some that are almost dead and they et all the
+windows of the Forge."
+
+"_1837, December 2_. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of
+insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and prevent
+them devouring themselves."
+
+_December 25_. Thermometer 35 below the cypher this morning, this being
+Christmas no labour done. Wind N.W."
+
+"_1838, January 1_. The morning was ushered in by a salute fired by our
+people at the windows and doors, after which they came to wish us a
+Happy New Year--and in return, in conformity to the custom of the
+country they were treated, the men with half a glass of brandy each, and
+the women with a kiss, and the whole of them with as many cakes as they
+choose to take and some raisins. One of our gentlemen who had a bottle
+of shrub treated them to a glass, and after some chit-chat conversation
+they retired, firing a salute on going out. In the evening they played
+at Blind-man's-buff, concluding the fête by a supper in the Hall. I also
+gave each of the men a fathom of twist tobacco and a clay pipe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
+
+
+"With souls grown clear
+  In this sweet atmosphere,
+With influences serene,
+  Our blood and brain washed clean,
+We've idled down the breast
+  Of broadening tides."
+
+--_Chas. G.D. Roberts_.
+
+About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we
+push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and
+parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen
+present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.
+We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed
+into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet
+photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the
+Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we
+proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due
+northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the
+pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the
+river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so
+low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we
+impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the
+Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course
+for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora]
+
+At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal
+mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow
+the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake
+Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A
+ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the
+pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed
+view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who
+understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have
+that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to
+attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when
+many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so
+blatantly dub "progress."
+
+It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence
+we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road
+to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to
+the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons
+passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the
+silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.
+
+Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded,
+and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's
+development and acceptance--banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings
+of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and
+unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the
+Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into
+its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the
+Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the
+Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams
+hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to
+the _inconnu_ and the Indian.
+
+It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream
+to its mouth, "discovering" a river along whose shores centuries before
+had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race,
+wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or
+chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age
+follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time
+these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed "the red men" and "the American
+Indian."
+
+We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply
+turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl--gulls in great
+variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny
+laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers
+and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are
+to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the
+banks--the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid
+golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss
+dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash
+breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the
+swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of
+upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being
+modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.
+
+Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters
+begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly
+south to kinder skies, the _inconnu_ hurry northward seeking the sea.
+Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's "_Le convert du bon
+Dieu_," silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and
+ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering
+Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated
+fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the
+six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or
+unwitting of shelter.
+
+According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the
+ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds
+the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for
+him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut
+etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest
+it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his
+man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys
+upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues
+a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great
+hunter, man.
+
+In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the
+intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the
+Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke
+not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice
+of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power--the
+Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his
+children.
+
+Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is
+saying "Spring," full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the
+open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the
+honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and
+darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary
+streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting
+ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and
+all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.
+
+Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and
+wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into
+a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever
+hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has
+always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along
+her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of
+life; their unvoiced prayer is, "Give us our fish in due season." From
+the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and
+dipped and seined their sustenance--inconnu, jack-fish, grayling,
+white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice
+or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway--a trail worn
+smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast
+in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.
+
+Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and
+lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of
+recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the
+great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along
+these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph,
+self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the
+noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the
+keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife,
+Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand
+despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise
+was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the
+Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game
+of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a
+man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.
+
+About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and
+Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size.
+One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is "just
+like a town." Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough
+record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will
+always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered
+the fringed gentian (_Gentiana crinata_) with its lance-shaped leaves,
+delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian
+is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and
+it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63°. Purple
+asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse
+or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled
+flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and
+purple columbines already forming seed.
+
+Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance
+from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche
+Trempe-l'eau or "The Rock by the Riverside," an outcrop of Devonian
+limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above
+the river. We come into view of the "boucans" or beds of lignite coal
+which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in
+1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his
+journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back,
+for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it
+would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would
+come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter
+monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there
+were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the
+Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their
+eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of "small white buffalo" which they
+hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the
+_Sass-sei-yeuneh_ or "Foolish Bear" of the Slavis.
+
+[Illustration: Indians at Fort Norman]
+
+It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast
+of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes
+into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in
+a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been
+in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the
+current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor
+against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is
+a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by
+the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.
+
+The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole
+of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the
+outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established
+winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water,
+probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave
+Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual
+shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and
+fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are
+surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very
+late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.
+
+March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three
+feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier
+water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs
+are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings
+blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September
+is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last
+of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre
+of the lake freezes over.
+
+When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one
+going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle "Boyne
+Water." The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across
+the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the "Nest of
+the Wind" of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this
+great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in
+thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that
+the Great Spirit, "in the beginning," spread out there to dry. We find
+Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning,
+the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and
+Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat
+coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to
+his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library,
+and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas,
+beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman
+lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the
+outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and
+pink-teas.
+
+[Illustration: Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman]
+
+[Illustration: The Ramparts of the Mackenzie]
+
+Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path
+leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It
+is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of
+children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and
+awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb
+flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at
+lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.
+
+Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the
+peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float
+between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass
+Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for.
+The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection.
+If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they
+have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a
+wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache
+of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when
+ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky
+replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.
+
+It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest
+spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,--the Ramparts. The
+great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here
+narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles
+forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred
+feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers,
+and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, "turned on edge," flows,
+maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of
+the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring,
+the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a
+skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the
+cliffs above.
+
+As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian
+artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with
+the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted,
+our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of
+this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the
+picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn
+and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and
+envelopes the earth as with a garment,--the light that never was on sea
+or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to
+pass the portal into the Arctic World.
+
+[Illustration: Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth]
+
+A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians
+has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting
+for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big
+steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their
+old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock,
+ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower
+down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed
+from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river;
+and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at
+midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle.
+
+The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say
+our "joggafy" lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar
+bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in
+America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the
+Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen
+silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there?
+Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his
+daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,--Mrs. Pierre la Hache.
+Tenny wears his "other clothes" and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for
+this is his home. "It looks like a swan on the water," he says, when the
+first white houses come into view. "You like it, do you not?" "Like it?
+Good Hope is God's Country!" There is no place like home, even when it
+is the Arctic Circle!
+
+The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the
+dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the
+big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr.
+C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand
+servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the
+greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has
+continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition
+is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employés a pension
+after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely
+deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old
+gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to
+his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the
+younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up
+the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr.
+Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope
+Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.
+
+Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses,
+and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.
+Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back
+from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women
+call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to
+rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is
+hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list
+of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the
+unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss
+Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide
+world.
+
+We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of
+pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your
+throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine
+and _galettes_, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the
+window-ledge and look around the walls of the "homey" room we wonder if
+this really can be the "Arctic Circle, 23-1/2° from the North Pole,
+which marks the distance that the sun's rays," etc., etc., as the little
+geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday
+School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women,
+earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and
+girls--the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a
+pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there
+a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned
+hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend
+runs,--"Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a
+bottle and a little loaf of bread."
+
+Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first
+Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the
+first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: "And
+how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?" Quick came the
+girlie's reply, "They had to leave The Company's service!"
+
+Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. "We get a mail every
+year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail." This is to her
+the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A
+letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope
+crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it
+travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the
+Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by
+dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence
+the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good
+Hope on the Arctic Circle.
+
+We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and
+devotion to The Company,--these are the two key-notes of her character.
+Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made "outside"
+to Montreal when she was a young mother--it was just fifty years
+ago,--measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died,
+"_Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants_!" Some years after
+this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies,
+snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until
+it was torn from her by force.
+
+We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the
+whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable
+gardens are in evidence here,--potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages.
+Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's
+Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the
+store of the "free-trader," he says, "Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman,
+kindly, and dear, but she doesn't approve of me. She makes a point of
+not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church."
+
+"Why?" we ask, much surprised.
+
+"Oh," with a laugh, "you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B.
+Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns
+and a tail!"
+
+We step into the "Little Church of the Open Door," and sit down and
+think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the
+mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see
+across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a
+transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a
+saint,--St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery
+outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts
+will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, "Our Lady of
+Good Hope," the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri
+Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
+
+
+"Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,
+And out of my full heart,
+Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold
+The Infinite thou art.
+What matter all the creeds that come and go,
+The many gods of men?
+My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow."
+
+--_A Pagan Hymn_.
+
+"The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber," said
+text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We
+didn't find him.
+
+It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel
+since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the
+true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a
+master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were,
+men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for
+tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing,
+and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of
+the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and
+this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is
+always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his
+dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is
+a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he
+is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing
+with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little
+half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of
+good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly
+round the neck with, "Everybody are my friend."
+
+One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode
+on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to
+trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco,
+looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with
+him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures
+between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began.
+"What for this fellow, huh?" and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a
+little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or
+the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap,
+the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which
+looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each
+bargain sealed with a handshake.
+
+Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of
+animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours,
+the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a
+Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did
+when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same
+place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the
+claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.
+
+[Illustration: A Kogmollye Family]
+
+Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats
+while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to
+do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their
+names and to ask ours. "Major Jabussy," "Missa Blown," they got the
+names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into
+roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no
+one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this
+Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one
+exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair,
+the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in
+physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and
+Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six
+feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage
+and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has "arrived"; he has an
+air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms "Outside" you seldom see.
+
+The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to
+the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the
+Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for
+the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from
+the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for
+the American whalers.
+
+One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the
+Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two
+wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did
+she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak
+the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big
+seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years
+followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of
+walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet
+sinks in a well.
+
+One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord
+the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot
+consistency which was his taste, she said, "I'm not as young as I was,
+you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get
+another wife to help me with the work." Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon
+the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak,
+dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and
+as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a
+rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.
+
+How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire
+trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North
+family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but
+never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a ménage of nicer
+adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of
+life, waggish and keen, "quick at the uptak'," as the Scotch say,
+presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing
+her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior
+economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet,
+dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and
+plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of
+height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a
+man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception
+where men of the world forgather.
+
+Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the
+Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet,
+the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple
+dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking
+back to Old World culture and distinction.
+
+[Illustration: Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family]
+
+How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for
+her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy
+and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family
+fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps
+with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of
+her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the
+exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had
+brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the
+matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two
+school-girls.
+
+The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in
+vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were
+all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking
+Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If
+no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony
+there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?
+
+Kipling declares, "There's never a law of God or man runs north of
+fifty-three." The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent
+quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He
+is his own man.
+
+In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of "One
+man, One wife," allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and
+elsewhere, so that it may read, "One man, one wife at a time." Are we so
+sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the
+Eskimo?
+
+Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread,
+in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On
+the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples;
+here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill
+as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of
+seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In
+many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women
+outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and
+provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo
+is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large
+families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now,
+the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and
+provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a
+floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and
+generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can
+comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from
+extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the
+Nunatalmutes?
+
+The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo
+equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a
+significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either
+the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment
+to the latitude of 68° North and take cognizance of the fact that no
+seductive "Want Columns" in the daily press here offer a niche whereby
+unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as
+chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To
+keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own
+proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind
+is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all
+must have in order to live.
+
+Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a
+man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each
+partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness
+fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of
+human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle
+perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it
+seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?
+
+I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always
+content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit,
+nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a
+reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of
+seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely,
+but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the
+Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three
+winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her
+feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.
+
+In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate
+to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her
+brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast
+consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The
+ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests
+present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one
+needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as "odours of Edom and
+offerings Divine."
+
+The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a
+retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight
+suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands
+above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a
+gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in
+the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the
+air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice
+repeated,
+
+"Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya--yae!"
+
+Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory
+and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride,
+pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.
+
+By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most
+admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most
+misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The
+Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known
+but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is
+an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line
+between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty
+miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four
+peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
+and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of
+Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days
+brought their most precious medium of exchange,--a peculiar blue jade,
+one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a
+tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so
+the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's
+ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.
+
+This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and
+merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old
+men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious
+oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and
+courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these
+Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of
+delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no
+red-hots nor "fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled
+and f-five a bag!", but the Arctic concomitants of these,--boiled
+beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that
+smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in
+the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the
+counters that are different.
+
+Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down
+into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and
+fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the
+world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south
+were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that
+disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great
+Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771,
+followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives
+their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at
+Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band
+of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in
+1820 was more happy. He says, "The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands
+in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile
+intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making
+bows." Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this
+tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, "I called out '_Tima_'
+(Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out
+'_Tima_.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily
+by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white
+man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and
+they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up
+a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would
+eat it."
+
+Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian
+missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of
+such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited
+the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but
+rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John
+Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen,
+the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them,
+and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and
+his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo
+is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid
+moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.
+
+Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated
+religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to
+turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell
+to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, "Goodbye, my
+dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never
+reach you."
+
+The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north,
+"keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole." But the Eskimo
+has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and
+it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what
+it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast
+it doesn't drop below 55.
+
+The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,--the land and the sea,
+with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his,
+that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the
+Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most
+insistent one would be, "Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but
+hang on to your fish-net."
+
+Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo
+and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the
+contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The
+Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together
+the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of
+revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the
+blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts
+Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but
+with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies,
+and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In
+the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of
+one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against
+misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo
+stays on the coast to-day because it is to him "God's country" and not
+because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.
+
+For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed
+the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different
+bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the
+Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the
+ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the
+season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the
+intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the
+Eskimo?
+
+Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta
+region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of
+that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever,
+consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling
+decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though
+consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian,
+measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal
+than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.
+
+What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them
+making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic,
+so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole
+horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but
+call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates
+once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and
+molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side
+of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the
+Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.
+
+The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by
+marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the
+whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its
+changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of
+the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the
+Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo
+mothers, and, for "floating fathers," marking their escutcheon with
+every nationality under the sun,--American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,
+Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all
+miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is
+different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a
+Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or
+Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.
+There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo
+"wives" outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.
+One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken
+"outside" by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or
+eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south
+to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the
+marriage-contract is "good for this season only," and the wife and
+children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him
+with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.
+
+What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her
+people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of
+Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the
+erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she
+is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and
+capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man
+of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her
+second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she
+shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she
+again essays Hymen's lottery.
+
+Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share
+that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a
+child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the
+half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness
+forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall
+below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the
+ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity
+plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the
+blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see
+and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied
+and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in
+this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, "The
+sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and
+fourth generation;" it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own
+inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally
+descend in direct line.
+
+We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he
+approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of
+hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft,
+his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But,
+most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children.
+"A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure," is a pretty theory,
+but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own
+footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the
+igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in
+and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe
+air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.
+
+The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but
+there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive.
+He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his
+place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent
+entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no
+power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of
+doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden
+Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily
+even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered
+into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is
+but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be
+born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day
+meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the
+clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born
+while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from
+the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at,
+much less fuss over, the little stranger.
+
+Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown
+man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy
+to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the
+newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers
+around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes
+possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in
+twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to
+influence the character and destiny of the growing child.
+
+We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The
+summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its
+earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's
+back under her _artikki_, or upper garment, which has been made
+voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King
+Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a
+bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is
+wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother
+who first crooned in love and literalness,
+
+"By-o, Baby Bunting,
+Daddy's gone a-hunting,
+To get a little rabbit-skin,
+To wrap his Baby Bunting in."
+
+Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet.
+While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer
+enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a
+beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins
+pendant,--rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the
+floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and
+jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of
+hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young
+hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the
+culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in
+one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.
+
+A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns
+to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon
+the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as
+the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the
+Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being
+inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.
+
+The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not
+unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for
+twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a
+little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out
+every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At
+eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line
+on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an
+air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not
+think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with
+the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam,
+and says, "The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so."
+
+These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their
+play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North,
+as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their
+vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no
+molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a
+walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was
+neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of
+tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball,
+down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft
+parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under
+dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."
+
+The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.
+It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated
+difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on
+each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his
+adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound
+by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to
+him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.
+All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a
+row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind,
+for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted
+discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the
+ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball
+diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line
+of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and
+out among the camps of the Eskimo,--"Self-reverence, self-knowledge,
+self-control."
+
+[Illustration: Farthest North Football]
+
+What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude
+imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and
+"visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas;
+but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up
+in her mother's long dresses.
+
+[Illustration: Two Spectators at the Game]
+
+When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in
+spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative
+of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time
+that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle
+are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the
+meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and
+south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the
+anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game,
+help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six
+months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever.
+The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any
+suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are
+finished and the new hunts not yet begun. "I'll eat my hat" is an empty
+threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing
+pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.
+
+At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me
+this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie
+Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and
+cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again
+indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken
+violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one
+little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained,
+alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young
+Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the
+silent camp.
+
+One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that
+little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing,
+waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies
+of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as
+its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went
+in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that
+A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too,
+and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have
+been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly
+compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.
+
+[Illustration: An Eskimo Exhibit
+
+A--Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.
+
+B--Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the
+missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word "Lamb" having no
+meaning to an Eskimo.
+
+C--Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.
+
+D--Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.
+
+E--Model of Eskimo paddle.
+
+F--Skin model of the _Oomiak_ or Eskimo woman's boat.
+
+G and H--Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half
+a thimbleful of tobacco.]
+
+As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of
+loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had
+never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry
+admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he
+is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with _after_ the fit of
+passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools,
+with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their
+wise papers on the training of "the child," the Eskimo children we saw
+were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense
+of the word, more truly "educated" than many of our children are.
+Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained
+admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern
+conditions.
+
+Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint
+of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the
+family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very
+nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the
+mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the
+fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national
+greatness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
+
+
+"I have drunk the Sea's good wine,
+Was ever step so light as mine,
+Was ever heart so gay?
+O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee,
+For this old joy renewed,
+For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued
+With sunlight and with sea."
+
+--_A Pagan Hymn_.
+
+On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow
+passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the
+steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants
+is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of
+running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial
+banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in
+the scow may sleep in peace.
+
+At Point Separation, 67° 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the
+east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles,
+the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden
+sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred
+miles east and west.
+
+The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It
+was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and
+Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in
+their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later,
+Richardson, this time concerned with the _Plover_ Relief Expedition of
+the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,
+
+"July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my instructions,
+a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug a pit at a distance
+of ten feet from the best grown tree on the Point, and placed in it,
+along with the pemmican, a bottle containing a memorandum of the
+Expedition, and such information respecting the Company's post as I
+judged would be useful to the boat party of the _Plover_ should they
+reach this river. The lower branches of the tree were lopped off, a part
+of its trunk denuded of bark, and a broad arrow painted thereon with red
+paint. In performing these duties at this place, I could not but recall
+to mind the evening of July 3rd, 1826, passed on the very same spot with
+Sir John Franklin. We were then full of joyous anticipation."
+
+As we look at these enduring lobsticks, we recollect that Commander
+Pullen, with two boats from the _Plover_ in 1849, visited the depot and
+found the precious pemmican. We leave the Mackenzie proper for the
+present and enter the easternmost channel of its farthest north
+tributary, the Peel, and follow this considerable stream thirty-three
+miles to Fort Macpherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.
+
+Fort Macpherson has a striking site. To the east, spreads a rolling
+wooded plain of alluvial origin, containing thousands of lakes. The west
+aspect gives us an uninterrupted view of the wooded valley of the Peel,
+backed by a heathery slope with the northern Rockies on the far horizon.
+Due north, upstarts a peak of the Rockies known locally as Black
+Mountain--a dark barren spur two thousand feet in height. A winter trail
+from Macpherson to Arctic Red River cuts no fewer than thirty-three
+small lakes.
+
+[Illustration: Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs]
+
+On the beach to meet us are Mounted Police and Eskimo from Herschel
+Island, Church of England missionaries, traders of the H.B. Co., and
+Loucheux Indians. But here, as at Arctic Red River, it is that Polar
+gentleman the Eskimo who claims our attention. Let Sergeant Fitzgerald,
+R.N.W.M.P., stationed at Herschel Island, speak for the Kogmollye and
+Nunatalmute Eskimo. In his departmental report this officer states, "I
+have found these natives honest all the time I have been at Herschel
+Island. I never heard of a case of stealing among them." He has been
+there five years. Up here on the Arctic the bare word of an Eskimo is
+accepted of all men. If he states to an H.B. Co. factor that he has an
+order from a whaling captain to get certain goods for himself, that
+unwritten order is honoured though it may date back two or even three
+years, whereas an order presented by a white man must be in writing and
+certified.
+
+Why should I enter the lists and take up icy spear for my Eskimo fellow
+British subject? Because he is so very worth while. Because through the
+years the world has conspired to libel him. Because within a decade or
+two he will have passed utterly off the map. And because it is so very
+much pleasanter to write appreciations than epitaphs. This man wins you
+at once by his frank directness; his bearing is that of a fearless
+child. The Indian, like Ossian's hero, scorns to tell his name, and on
+occasion will dodge the camera, but the Eskimo likes to be photographed.
+Young and old, they press to our side like friendly boys and girls round
+a "chummy" teacher, volunteering information of age, sex, and previous
+condition, with all sorts of covetable bits of intimate family history.
+You love the Eskimo because he is kind to his dogs and gentle to little
+children. His entire willingness to take you on credit is contagious,
+trust begets trust even in walrus latitudes.
+
+[Illustration: Two Wise Ones]
+
+The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a clever chap. With no school-teacher, no
+school, no modern appliances, he does many things and does each
+admirably. He is a hunter by land and sea, a fearless traveller, a
+furrier, a fisherman, a carver, a metal-smith, and he takes in every
+task the pride of a master mechanic,--"the gods see everywhere." The
+duties of the man and the woman are well-defined. The head of the
+Kogmollyc household is the blood-and-flesh-winner, the navigator of the
+kayak, the driver of dogs. It is he who builds the houses on the march,
+and when occasion requires he does not consider it _infra dig._ to get
+the breakfast or mind the baby. The wife dresses the skins, prepares
+the food, makes all the clothing, and the lord of the igloo demands from
+her the same perfect work that he turns out himself.
+
+[Illustration: A Nunatalmute Eskimo Family]
+
+When an Eskimo wife has finished making her spouse a pair of waterproof
+boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up. If there is one
+little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her,
+and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways. Either she
+must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word,
+or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker.
+We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was
+no recrimination. No word was spoken on either side, the exacting
+husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.
+
+With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin. Her
+tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a
+repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden
+dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs. The whole performance
+was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.
+
+If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo
+foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many
+surprises would await her. Instead of asking for references from her
+last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her
+teeth. In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as
+important a factor as your hands. The reporter for the funeral column of
+an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of
+speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little
+ones, would call pathetic attention to, "the tired and patient teeth
+worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household." A young
+wife's cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that
+shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the
+seagull and chew these into shape. You see, after the boots are wet
+each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with
+oil and chewed into shape. We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at
+this wifely duty. Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands,
+incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way
+round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking
+like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make.
+Solomon's eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70°
+North would read, "She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh
+willingly with her hands; she riseth also while it is yet night and
+cheweth the boots of her household."
+
+Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove.
+The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of
+the woman are brought into requisition. The raw sealskins or hides of
+the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up
+and dried thoroughly. Before this stiff material can be worked up into
+garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically
+chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task. Creasing the hide along
+its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way
+along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way
+back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of
+the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.
+
+It falls to the lot of the woman, too, to do her share of boat-making.
+The men deftly fashion the frames of kayak and oomiak, using in their
+construction not a single nail or piece of iron, but fastening the wood
+together by pegs and thongs of skin. Then the women come on the scene,
+measure the frame, and sew green hides of the proper shape to fit,
+making wonderful overlapping seams that are absolutely watertight. As it
+is necessary to put the skin covering on while the hides are raw, the
+whole job has to be completed at one sitting. So a bee is held of the
+women of the communal camp.
+
+[Illustration: Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks
+
+The scenes etched in the larger represent the events of one year of the
+carver.]
+
+Where did the Eskimo get his versatile ability? Only the walrus knows.
+The whalers have inducted the Eskimo into the art of making
+cribbage-boards. They use for each board a complete tusk of
+walrus-ivory, covering the whole with a wealth of descriptive carvings
+illustrative of all that comes into the yearly round of an Eskimo's
+life,--ice-fishing, bear-hunting, walrus-sticking. So far as we could
+find out, the Husky's connection with cribbage ceased with his making
+these _edition de luxe_ boards. He seemed himself to have gathered no
+inkling of the fine points of that game which one instinctively
+associates with Dick Swiveller as tutor and as pupil the little
+Marchioness, "that very extraordinary person, surrounded by mysteries,
+ignorant of the taste of beer, and taking a limited view of society
+through the key-holes of doors." In the world outside, far from igloos
+and ice-floes, where people gather round cheery Christmas fires with
+"one for his nob," "two for his heels," and "a double run of three,"
+these ivory crib-boards are sold for from seventy-five to one hundred
+dollars each. We have two among our most treasured trophies, and with
+them an ivory ring beautifully formed which we saw made. Set in the ring
+is a blue stone of irregular shape which was fitted into its ivory niche
+with a nicety of workmanship that few jewellers could attain. I had
+fashioned for me also a gavel in the shape of a sleeping seal, made of
+fossil ivory from the Little Diomedes. The contrast of the weathered
+brown of the outside of the ivory with the pure white of the inner
+layers, when worked up into a carved design, gives the effect of cameo
+and intaglio combined.
+
+We tasted many new Eskimo dishes. When, on our return, we confessed that
+the brain of the seal served here is a delicious dish, we ran against
+the sensibilities of refined natures. But why is it cruder to enjoy
+seal's brains _â la vinaigrette_, than to tickle our taste with brains
+of the frolicking calf? The seal furnished a more equivocal dinner than
+this, nothing less than entrails _au naturel_, which our hostess draws
+through her fingers yard by yard in pure anticipative delight, each
+guest being presented with two or three feet of the ribbon-like _pièce
+de résistance_. The scene that jumps to our memory as we watch this
+feast of fat things is connected with food-manipulations in Chicago. It
+was down at Armour's in the stockyards that we had seen Polacks and
+Scandinavian girls preparing in the succulent sausage a comestible that
+bore strange family semblance to that which our friends are now eating
+before us, this linked sweetness long drawn out.
+
+[Illustration: Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo
+
+A--Eskimo soapstone lamp which burns seal-oil. The wick is of reindeer
+moss.
+
+B--Eskimo knife of Stone Age.
+
+C--Its modern successor, fashioned from part of a steel saw, with handle
+of ivory. This is the knife used by the women; note how the old shape is
+retained.
+
+D--Eskimo Tam O'Shanter. The band is of loonskins, the cap proper being
+carefully constructed from swans' feet. This admirably shows the
+cleverness of the Eskimo in adapting natural forms to economic use, each
+foot of the swan being a true sector of a circle.
+
+E--Old-time stone hatchet.
+
+F and G--Knives filed from saw-blades, with bone handles.
+
+H--Mortar for pulverising tobacco into snuff.
+
+I--Needle set in a wood handle, and by rapid rotary motion used to
+pierce ivory.]
+
+
+Mr. John Firth, of the Hudson's Bay Company here, gives us much
+information regarding these people who for thirty-seven consecutive
+years have traded with him. The Kogmollycs have been here "from the
+beginning," the Nunatalmutes moving into this region in 1889, driven out
+of their hunting grounds inland from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, by a
+scarcity of game. The two tribes live in peace and intermarry. The aged
+among them are respected. Criminals and lunatics are quietly removed
+from the drama. Supposed incurables commit suicide and in that act
+reach immediately a hot underground heaven.
+
+Nature to these Eskimo is especially benign. The junction of the
+Mackenzie and the Peel is covered with a forest of spruce, and even to
+the ocean-lip we trace foot-prints of moose and black bear. In the delta
+are cross, red, and silver foxes, mink and marten, with lynx and rabbits
+according to the fortunes of war. The Eskimo declare that, east of Cape
+Parry, bears are so numerous that from ten to twenty are seen at one
+time from a high hilltop.
+
+The Chauncey Depew of the Kogmollycs, the man with the best stories and
+the most inimitable way of telling them, is Roxi. It was Roxi who gave
+us the love story of his cousin the Nuntalmute Lochinvar. This young man
+wooed a maid. The girl's father had no very good opinion of the lad's
+hunting ability and was obdurate. The lover determined to take destiny
+into his own hands. A ravine of ice stretched between his igloo and that
+of the family to whom he would fain be son, and over the chasm a
+drift-log formed a temporary bridge. Lothario, one night, crossed the
+icy gully, entered the igloo of his elect, seized her in her
+_shin-ig-bee_ or sleeping-bag and lifted the dear burden over his back.
+In spite of struggles and muffled cries from within, he strode off with
+her to his side of the stream. The gulch safely crossed, he gaily kicked
+the log bridge into the gulf and bore his squirming treasure to his own
+igloo floor. He had left his seal-oil lamp burning and now it was with
+an anticipative chuckle of joy that he untied the drawstring. We end the
+story where Roxi did, by telling that the figure which rolled out
+sputtering from the _shin-ig-bee_ was the would-not-be father-in-law
+instead of the would-be bride!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
+
+
+"Into this Universe, and _Why_ not knowing
+Nor _Whence_, like Water willy-nilly flowing,
+  And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
+I know not _Whither_, willy-nilly blowing."
+
+--_The Rubaiyat_.
+
+The Midnight Sun! The sun does not sink to the horizon, but pauses for a
+moment and rises again. Dawn and eventide are one. The manifestations of
+light ever since we left Athabasca Landing have been wonderful,
+uplifting. The supreme marvel of the Midnight Sun is not what we see but
+what we feel. Standing at this outpost of Britain's Empire, we give our
+imagination rein and see waking worlds and cities of sleep. As this red
+sun rises from its horizon-dip, it is the first of the unnumbered
+sunrises which, as hour follows hour, will come to the continents.
+Longfellow says:
+
+"Think, every morning where the sun peeps through
+The dim, leaf-latticed windows of the grove,
+How jubilant the happy birds renew
+Their old, melodious madrigals of love!
+And when you think of this, remember too
+_'Tis always morning somewhere_, and above
+The awakening continents, from shore to shore,
+Somewhere the birds are singing evermore."
+
+[Illustration: Home of Mrs. Macdonald.]
+
+How do the people of Macpherson divide into day and night their
+largesse of light? By common consent four o'clock in the morning seems
+to be bedtime, and by four in the afternoon people are busying
+themselves with breakfast. _In Polar Circles, do as the Polars do_, is
+good advice, and we follow suit. Individuality is strongly marked at
+this metropolis on the Peel. Every one you meet is a mine of interest,
+and sharp contrasts present themselves. Mrs. Macdonald discusses fur and
+deer-meat with Jack Johnson. He is a trapper who plays the game alone
+and who last year was reduced to killing his favourite dog for food.
+Current report credits him with having "killed his man in the Yukon."
+Mrs. Macdonald is a Loucheux woman who, at the age of fourteen or
+fifteen, married Archdeacon Macdonald of the English Church and for
+eight long years afterwards assisted him in his life work of translating
+the Gospels into the Loucheux language. She has come all the way from
+Winnipeg to the Arctic Circle to spend the summer visiting her people.
+We lose our hearts to her two sons, splendid fellows both.
+
+It is the Eskimo who brings both missionary and trader to Fort
+McPherson. Are these Eskimo, Christians? Are they _civilised_? These are
+the questions that confront us when we speak of these Farthest North
+Canadians. It is an age of classification. You cannot find a flower
+nowadays that some one has not tacked a Latin name to, and it goes by
+inverse ratio--the smaller the flower the longer the name. Every bird
+you hear sing, even though it stop but an hour to rest its tired pinion
+on its northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat.
+How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape? In the northeast of
+Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary. In Alaska,
+on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to
+its bosom. In between these two come the people we are studying. The
+Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to
+influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not
+Episcopalians. What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of
+integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one? Heathens?
+The question sets us thinking.
+
+The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as "Any irreligious, rude,
+barbarous or unthinking class or person." This Eskimo is not
+"irreligious," for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and
+an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death,
+and he accedes to Kipling's line without ever having heard it,--"They
+that are good shall be happy." He is not "rude," but exceedingly
+courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude.
+"Unthinking" he certainly is not. Six months' darkness within the igloo
+gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker
+has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated
+cobbler is your true philosopher.
+
+There remains but the one ear-mark, "barbarous." The dictionary declares
+that barbarous means, "not classical or pure," "showing ignorance of
+arts and civilisation." On the first of these indictments our poor
+Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical. And what man dare
+pronounce on the purity of another? Then we come to "arts" and
+"civilisation." In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every
+European who has visited him. The stumbling-block in this honest search
+for a tag to put on my people is the term "civilisation." One is
+reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons:
+"Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man's doxy." Was it not
+Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, "I am conscious that life has
+been trying to _civilise_ me for now seventy years with what seems to me
+very inadequate results"?
+
+If "Christianity" with the Eskimo means taking him into the white man's
+church, and "civilising" means bringing him into close contact with
+white men's lives, then he has not yet attained the first, and has but
+little to thank the second for. Two years ago eighty of these people in
+one tribe died of measles, a white man's disease. A stray chaplain
+wandered into an encampment of Eskimo, finding his way from a whaling
+ship. He told the people of Heaven, its golden streets, pearly gates,
+and harp-songs, and it meant nothing to these children of frost. They
+were not interested. Then he changed his theme, and spoke of Hell with
+its everlasting fires that needed no replenishing. "Where is it? Tell
+us, that we may go!" and little and big they clambered over him, eager
+for details.
+
+Prayer as presented by the white man is recognised as an incantation
+which should bring immediate and literal results. An enquiring scientist
+was seated one day with Oo-vai-oo-ak, the two fishing through adjacent
+air-holes in the ice. Calling across to the white man, Oo-vai-oo-ak
+said, "How is it, brother, have you any fish?"
+
+"No," replied the man of letters, "I have taken nothing."
+
+"Have you spoken to God this morning?" asked the Eskimo in a
+business-like tone.
+
+"No," said the wilted Walton.
+
+"Well, that's what's the matter," returned Oo-vai-oo-ak; "I always speak
+to God every morning before I go fishing. Once, when I went to Herschel
+Island, a missionary told me what to say. It always works. I have many
+fish."
+
+The scientist, interested, queried, "And do you do the same when you go
+duck-hunting or goose-hunting or when you are after seal?"
+
+"No," eagerly responded Oo-vai-oo-ak, dropping his line and pressing
+close to the geologist, "Is there a prayer for duck, and for geese, and
+one for seal? The missionary never told me that. You teach it to me, eh?
+I like to make sure what to say to catch that fellow,--goose and seal."
+
+But, unfortunately for both, the university man did not have the charm.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge]
+
+Broadly speaking, the Eskimo's theory of things, evolved from white
+spirits on the ice-floes or carried across in the age of the mastodon
+from sires and grandsires in Asia, does not differ materially from our
+own. There is a Good Spirit, called by different tribes Cood-la-pom-e-o,
+Kelligabuk, or Sidne, who dwells high in the zenith, and to whom it is
+good to pray. There is an Evil Spirit, Atti, symbolising cold and death.
+Their heaven is a warm underworld reached by entrances from the sea.
+Hell is a far, white, dreary plain. The Eskimo pray to Sidne; but it is
+wise to propitiate Atti or Tornarsuk, and in this last idea they but
+follow their Chinese or Tartar ancestors. In common with all nations,
+the Kogmollycs have a tradition of the flood. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the
+Elder said, "This world once covered with the sea." Asked why she
+thought so, she replied, "You have been down to the land of the
+caribou, eh? Little smooth stones from the sea are there, and shells."
+
+The labrets or lip-ornaments, shirt-stud shaped effects worn in holes
+pierced in the cheek, strike us with interest. Is it too daring a
+conjecture to trace in these, which Eskimo men so sedulously cherish and
+resolutely refuse to talk about, a religious significance? The term
+"Kelligabuk" in a literal translation means "Mastodon." This animal,
+whose bones not infrequently are unearthed from ice-floes, has been for
+all time venerated as a god of the hunting grounds. Is it too fanciful
+to suggest that the labrets are a sort of peripatetic idol carried
+around on the person as an imitation of the tusks of this God-Mammoth?
+
+East and south of the Mackenzie delta the Eskimo tell of a Supreme
+Goddess, Nuliayok, who was once a coy maiden and refused to marry a
+mortal. Wooed by a gull, she accompanied the bird to an inland home, to
+find instead of her dreams of delight a nest of sticks and rotten fish
+on a high-hung ledge. Jostled by the other fulmars, or gulls, who tried
+to push her off the rocks, she sent for her father. In the night-time he
+came and sailed with her over the water in an oomiak. The deserted
+fulmar-bridegroom, taking a leaf out of Prospero's book, raised a storm.
+The father, to lighten the craft and propitiate the storm-spirit at the
+same time, threw the poor bride over-board, and cut off her fingers as
+she clung to the boat. As the four fingers dropped into the sea they
+changed respectively into beluga the white whale, nutchook the common
+seal, oog-zook the big seal, and ibyl the walrus. After thus giving
+origin to the four great sea-friends of the Innuit, the Goddess
+Nuliayok let go the boat and went to the world beneath the sea, where
+she now lives in a whalebone house with a dog for husband. She cannot
+stand erect, but hunches over the ground, holding one foot under her as
+a baby does who has not yet learned to walk.
+
+It is to Nuliayok that the spirits of sea-animals go after staying three
+days by their dead bodies; and this is the reason why the Eskimo breaks
+the eyes of a killed seal. He does not want it to witness the indignity
+of seeing its own body denuded of its skin. This too is the _raison
+d'être_ of the ceremonies which every Eskimo punctiliously performs in
+connection with the animal he kills. Each animal has a soul or spirit to
+be offended or placated; if pleased, the spirit of the dead animal
+communicates with its living kin, who in turn will deem it an honour to
+be killed by such considerate folk as the ceremonious Innuit. Round the
+igloo fire we heard another tradition of Nuliayok. The Goddess of the
+Sea once gave birth to a litter of white and red puppies. These she put
+into two little water-tight baby-boots and set them floating before a
+north wind. The puppies landed on southern shores and became the white
+race and the red race, the Europeans and the Indians. The Innuit, of
+course, had lived from the beginning.
+
+We arrogate to ourselves the term of "white race," but if these Eskimo
+were to wash themselves daily (which they do not do yearly) they would
+be as white as we are. They have fleshy intelligent faces and eyes with
+more than a suggestion of the almond-slant of the Oriental. The idea
+occurs to us that the full appearance of the cheeks of the women is more
+likely to be caused by the exercise of chewing skins and boots than by
+an accumulation of fatty tissue. The men are distinguished by the thin,
+straggling growth of beard and moustache which adorns their Asiatic
+progenitors. The labrets of the men are offset by the long pendant
+earrings of the women, which are made from H.B. Co. beads and shells
+brought by Alaska Indians from the Pacific, It is only the women who
+here tattoo their faces, the three long stripes extending from lower lip
+to the chin. The men crop their hair in the style of the tonsure of the
+monk. Neither man nor woman provides any head covering except the hood
+of the _artikki_ or smock, which hood, fringed with waving hair of the
+carcajou or wolverine, hangs loosely at the back until called into
+requisition by a winter's storm or a summer's siege of mosquitoes.
+
+Eskimo clothing is much lighter in weight than it seems, and this is one
+reason why the Eskimo attachés of every Arctic expedition have moved
+around with less exhaustion than their European or American leaders. A
+well-made Eskimo outfit of inner and outer suits, with mittens, socks,
+and boots, weighs about thirteen pounds, while one imported fur coat of
+European deerskin will alone weigh more than that.
+
+A custom noted at the afternoon whale-meets and pink-teas might
+fittingly find way into the latitudes where narrow toes and French heels
+obtain. Two ingenious young Kogmollyc belles had placed applique pockets
+mid-leg on their lower garments. When the walrus was passed round and
+conversation became general, the boots were slipped off quietly and one
+foot at a time was thrust for a resting spell into the pocket provided
+on the opposite trouser-leg. This act of easement was done deftly, and
+the neat action of instep boot-jack never lost its fascination for us.
+
+[Illustration: A Wise Man of the Dog-Ribs]
+
+All the way from boundary-line to ice-barrier we had seen Indians
+tricked out in grotesque garments borrowed from the white man and used
+in combination with their own tribal covering of skins and furs. These
+sun-bonnets and shepherd's-plaid trousers, silk hats and red-flannel
+petticoats, the trader had persuaded the child of the woods to buy. The
+debonair Eskimo is a re-incarnation of the bastard brother of Aragon's
+Prince, and, leaning his furry back against the North Pole, says with
+him, "I smile at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no
+man's pleasure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business,
+laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour."
+
+[Illustration: A Study in Expression]
+
+You cannot induce an Eskimo to think he wants anything just because you
+have found that thing to your liking. There are two reasons for this.
+First, long experience in the most rigorous climate which the human race
+inhabits has taught this man what garments are the most suitable for him
+in which to live and move and have his being. Second, although the
+Indian may ape the white man as a superior being from whom eleemosynary
+grub and gew-gaws may be wheedled, the Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta
+considers himself to be the superior of every created being. The Eskimo
+knows what he wants; he is always sure of it, and there is no
+vacillating. When he comes into the H.B. Company's post to trade, skins
+are his currency, the pelts of the silver-fox his gold coinage. A good
+silver, or black-fox is worth here about one hundred dollars in barter.
+
+We saw a band of Nunatalmutes come into Fort Macpherson to do their
+summer shopping. They wanted English breakfast tea, superior rifles and
+ammunition, and a special brand of tobacco. Failing any or all of these,
+it was in vain that the Factor displayed before them the wares of John
+Bull, Uncle Sam, or Johnny Canuck, or any seductive lure made in
+Germany. Ig-ly-o-bok and Nan-a-sook-tok bought what they found to their
+liking, took small change out of two silver-fox skins, and put the
+remaining six pelts back into the wooden box which formed at once their
+savings bank and letter of credit for the season to come. The
+hungry-eyed H.B. man confided to us that two of these coveted pelts had
+been thus exhibited to him and thus tucked back into the Eskimo
+sinking-fund for three successive seasons.
+
+As regards weapons, we found Eskimo hunters in the transition stage. The
+old-time spears, four feet long and tipped with ivory, are still in
+active service. The bows, with arrows finished in copper, flint, and
+bone, have been relegated largely to the boys, while Krag-Jorgensen,
+Lee-Enfield, and other high-power guns are bought from American whalers.
+The fish-hooks which I got in friendly barter are interesting to any one
+born with angling blood in his veins. Beautifully fashioned of ivory,
+copper, bone, and beads, the contrivance is a sinker, bait, and hook,
+all in one. The daily baskets procured with this lure incontestably
+proves the Husky a judicious hooker.
+
+The Eskimo is a merger. Father Petitot shows us the close analogy
+between the Kogmollyc language and the tongues of eastern Asiatic
+tribes, ancient and modern. This Eskimo's speech, then, gives him a
+connection with the effete East (which is his west), while enamelled
+washbasins, with here and there a corrugated wash-board, prove that
+slowly but surely Canadian culture is reaching him from the south.
+
+With two modifications, this Eskimo is invariably truthful. Like the
+Indians to the south of him, seeking to please you by answering a
+question in the way that you desire, he will at times tell you an
+untruth, for it seems to him discourteous to answer your question other
+than in the way which you anticipate. For instance, if you say to Roxi,
+"Wasn't that a grey goose we heard overhead?" Roxi will readily assent,
+though he well knows it to have been a mallard duck, but he would spare
+your ignorance. Again, it is Eskimo etiquette to belittle your own
+success in hunting and, in so doing, be not literally truthful. When we
+place this delightful trait alongside the fish-stories we are familiar
+with, who would seek to change the heathen?
+
+Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of
+each other for better or for worse. It is an easy union entered upon and
+maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one
+manifest advantage,--Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When
+unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of
+the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes
+herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium
+attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam
+husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young
+Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways. She
+asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, "No. You may go
+to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction,
+and I hunt." Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e.,
+the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six
+nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father,
+for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the
+ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was
+strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a
+tree handy he would have been lynched. This would have been the first
+lynching recorded in Canada. The feeling of the Eskimo community was
+that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the
+bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper
+state to her father's door or to let her have the dogs.
+
+In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in
+re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical
+ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores. The ceremonies which
+approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the
+importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of
+what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them
+grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out
+each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a
+freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony,
+replied, "New light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was
+yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to
+igloo reminds us of the "first-footing" of the Scottish village. The
+mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the
+old Lord of Misrule.
+
+About the season of Christmas, a great meeting is held in the igloo,
+presided over by the Angekok or medicine-man, who entreats the invisible
+powers for good fortune, immunity from storms, and a plenitude of
+blubber for the ensuing year. This invocation is followed by a family
+feast. Next day the ceremonies are carried on out-of-doors, where all
+from oldest to youngest form a ring-around-a-rosy. In the centre of the
+circle is set a crock of water, while to the communal feast each person
+brings from his own hut a piece of meat, raw preferred. This meat is
+eaten in the solemn silence of a communion, each person thinking of
+Sidne, the Good Spirit, and wishing for good. The oldest member of the
+tribe, a white-haired man or tottering dame, takes up a sealskin cup,
+kept for this annual ceremony, dips up some of the water and drinks it,
+all the time thinking of Sidne, the Good Spirit, while the others close
+their eyes in reverent silence.
+
+Before passing the cup on to the rest of the company that they may
+drink, the old man or woman states aloud the date and place of his or
+her birth, as accurately as it can be remembered. The drinking and
+thinking ceremony is performed by all in succession, down to the last
+naked baby cuddling in its mother's _artikki_, the little child that
+cannot yet speak. The solemn rite is brought to a close by the tossing
+of presents across the ring from one to the other, the theory being
+that, as they generously deal with others, so Sidne will deal with them
+in the coming year. So up here on the edge of things, among our
+"uncivilised heathens," we have our Christmas presents and "_Peace on
+earth, good will to men_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
+
+
+"Man does not live by bread alone."
+
+Exigencies of life have caused the Mackenzie Eskimo to formulate on
+vital matters an unwritten law to which each gives assent. Succinctly
+stated, this system of Northland jurisprudence runs thus:--
+
+_(a) Should a man, inadvertently or by malice aforethought, kill
+another, the wife and children of the man so killed remain a burden on
+the murderer so long as he or they live._
+
+_(b) A drift-log found is treasure-trove, and belongs to the finder, who
+indicates possession by placing upon it a pipe, mitten, or personal
+trinket of some kind_. Whalers, missionaries and Mounted Police are a
+unit in testifying that precious flotsam of this kind has remained four
+or five years in a land of wood-scarcity without being disturbed.
+
+_(c) No one must eat seal and walrus on the same day_. Thus a check is
+given to luxuriousness and the Eskimo is self-prevented from falling
+into the fate which overtook Rome.
+
+_(d) All large animals killed are to be looked upon as common property
+of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them_.
+Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of
+the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's
+crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, holding
+all things in common.
+
+The Eskimo realises that the pleasure of life is in pursuit, not in
+acquisition. Where wants are many, joys are few; the very austerity of
+his life has made a man of him. Laying up few treasures for the elements
+to corrupt, accumulating no property except a little, a very little, of
+the kind designated by Wemmick as "portable," he, to better and saner
+effect than any man, decreases the denominator of his wants instead of
+increasing the numerator of his havings. Surrounded by the palcocrystic
+ice, the genial current of his soul has not been frozen by that ice. An
+Eskimo family accepts life with a smile and, in the faith of little
+children, goes on its way.
+
+An old Scot once prayed, "O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at
+this time the savin' grace o' _continuance_." Only one man has less need
+to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo.
+The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is
+spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are
+never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the
+little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no
+broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out
+dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning
+clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the
+opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the
+Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active
+ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.
+
+On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo
+attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live
+beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is
+happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother
+often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest
+of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and
+spreading over every life it touches.
+
+There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which
+we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his
+generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs
+met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man
+exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all
+carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or
+the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the
+leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his
+price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was
+dropped back into _artikki_ recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy
+child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift.
+It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be
+scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who
+tried to beat down his price as "the _cheap_ engineer."
+
+Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little
+group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs,
+and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while
+the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men
+were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet
+nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our
+researches. The whalers call him "Set-'em-Up," for his name bears the
+convivial translation, "Give us a drink." "You going to make better man,
+you get Outside--make him like Emmie-ray?" As Emmie-ray pursues the
+tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue,
+with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of
+the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating
+Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.
+
+Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people,
+instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him
+for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the
+world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts
+of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be
+a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's
+blood.
+
+Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came
+originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees
+before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their
+predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon
+estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil,
+its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel
+wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has
+another unit--blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and
+Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your
+apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber
+and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season.
+These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at
+the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the
+white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has
+pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.
+
+At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous
+Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder,
+but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had
+whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the
+whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater
+part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and
+who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty
+Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi
+had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of
+the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry,
+and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into
+the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to
+the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the
+sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the
+dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking
+bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard
+the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on
+Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the
+ocean from another age and a far land, "Thy necessity is greater than
+mine." Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the
+shores of many seas.
+
+Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of
+geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to
+the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination
+still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of
+rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if
+you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a
+thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was
+served, though he _would_ eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a
+distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the
+gastronomic line he drew. "Aw!" replied he, "No fellow eats owl, you
+know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all
+right. The crow's a kind of _rook_, you know, and every fellow eats
+_rook-pie."_
+
+Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin
+in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable
+compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this
+people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him
+through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a
+hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the
+light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly
+pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal,
+then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This
+jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of
+food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his
+own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.
+
+Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a
+feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so "bluggy." You feel
+differently about it at 70º North. You put prejudice far from you,
+comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese,
+and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with
+mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment.
+Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square
+there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.
+
+We had brought with us on our transport two years' provisions for the
+detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel
+Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated
+cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their
+commissariat. Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip
+bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick
+or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the
+tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old
+body herself. Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg,
+seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of
+desiccated vegetables. I know. I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed,
+"Honesty _is_ the best policy. _I've tried baith_."
+
+But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a
+bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back
+between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw
+or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes
+like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. If you have scooped shrimps
+from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a
+parasite.
+
+Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale
+which in life holds the baleen. What is whale-gum like? It tastes like
+chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber
+tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would
+liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a
+southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as
+lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled
+beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and
+gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and
+moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than
+pigs-feet.
+
+Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that
+overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You
+may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the
+musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's
+scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my
+vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw
+the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the
+association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat _must_
+taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first
+blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is
+that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing
+exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by
+cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much
+better frozen than cooked.
+
+Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much
+esteemed delicacy. During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide
+light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo. The
+blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in
+sealskin bags--the winter provision of gas-tank, electric
+storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this
+master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not
+centuries, the inventive adaptability of his "civilised" cousins. The
+blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its
+flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an
+inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land
+kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he
+has never seen. He doesn't eat it, but drops it into the cavernous
+recesses of his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of
+English undefiled. "Disgusting," you say. It's all a matter of latitude.
+Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet
+of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer
+period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of
+an "all-day sucker." These little babies have the digestion of an
+ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts
+until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at
+once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about
+as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little
+chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it
+with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled
+Fauntleroy on an imported apple. The Eskimo mother has no green apples
+to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon
+the troubled waters. Every day in the year her babies are crammed with
+marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.
+
+To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only
+vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their
+food is eaten. They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the
+marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised
+and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the
+Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen
+hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island
+sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis
+of the _Karluk_, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132
+ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked
+whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.
+
+Who are these people, and whence came they? Each little tribe is a book
+unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are
+confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they
+are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning
+himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation
+chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. "_We used to know
+it." "Our fathers have told us." "This land-whale with its tail in
+front once lived in the land of the Innuit_." We are now the ones to
+become excited. Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had
+been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest. "Where did
+your fathers see this animal?" we asked. "Here, in this country. In the
+ice his bones were hidden," said the old man. With this he relapsed into
+the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.
+
+Captain Mogg, of the whaling schooner _Olga_, two winters ago pursued
+his whaling operations far to the north and east. Ice-bound at Prince
+Albert Land, he stumbled upon a little settlement of Eskimo. These were
+completely isolated from and had had no communication with white men or
+any community of their own race. Only one of their number had seen a
+white man before--one old, old woman, the grandmother of the band. The
+captain of the _Olga_ speaks Eskimo fluently, and to him this ancestress
+of the "lost tribe" had an interesting story to tell. She remembered a
+white man who came across the Great Sea from the west in "a big kayak,"
+and she extended her arms to show its size. Her people had given this
+stranger seal-meat and blubber and the "Chief" from the great ship had
+presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the
+seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very
+child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early
+fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage
+and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the
+little girl's questioning wonder,--"Of what animal is this the skin?"
+Thus does history manifest itself on the other side of the shield "after
+many days."
+
+Through the years, the Eskimo has fared better than the Indian. It
+would seem that the London Directorate of the H.B. Co. expected its
+servants within the Arctic Circle in the days that are past to do almost
+a Creator's part and make all things of nothing. The scanty provisions
+and trading goods from England which filtered in thus far were to be
+given to the Indians in exchange for furs, while the Factor and his
+people were largely expected to "live on the country."
+
+Cannibalism was not unknown. The winter of 1841-2 was an especially hard
+one. On the 18th March, 1841, J. William Spence and Murdock Morrison
+were dispatched with the winter express from Fort Good Hope to Fort
+Macpherson. During the second night out, while they were asleep in the
+encampment, they were knocked on the head by four starving Indian women,
+immediately cut to pieces, and devoured. It is further reported that
+these women previously had killed and eaten their husbands and all their
+children except one little boy. Of the two murdered Scots they ate what
+they could that night and made pemmican of what was over, reporting
+afterward that one was sweet but that the other, tasting of tobacco, was
+not so good.
+
+Father Petitot gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His naïve
+words are, "_Chie-ke-nayelle,_ a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning
+fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his
+features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his
+youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine of 1841. He
+killed his young daughter with a hatchet-blow, cooked her like flesh,
+and ate her as a meat-pate. It is said that after one has partaken of
+human flesh, the appetite for it often returns. I hasten to add that
+_Chie-ke-nayelle,_ in spite of the soubriquet _mangeur de monde_ which
+is irrevocably rivetted to his name, has not succumbed to such an
+appetite. He is indeed an excellent Christian. Nevertheless, I would not
+like to camp with _Chie-ke-nayelle_ in time of famine."
+
+Another starvation story related by the good Father is not quite so
+ghastly. He tells us of one "M. Finlaison of burlesque memory," who,
+when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of
+his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish
+reel. That was their dinner for the day,--instead of meat they had
+sound. The narrator adds, "In America they would have lynched the
+too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed and
+applauded the master."
+
+The winter of 1844 also was a season of distress. Referring to this
+year, a beautiful young Indian woman said to the sympathetic priest, "I
+did not wish to eat the arm of my father. I was then a small child of
+eight, and I had not been able to see my old father eaten without crying
+out with loud screams. But my mother called to me in rage, 'If you do
+not eat of it, it is that you condemn us and hate us, then you will
+surely go the same way.' And I ate the flesh of my father, hiding my
+sobs and devouring my tears, for fear of being killed like him; so much
+was I afraid of the eyes of my mother."
+
+Another Indian woman confesses, "I left my husband, a hunter at the
+fort, and took with me by the hand my only child, a boy of six, and
+directed my steps towards _Ka-cho-Gottine._ It was indeed far. I only
+knew the way by hearsay. Once I myself have eaten of my father, but now
+I am a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm
+in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days.
+Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on
+the final resurrection day?" Here Father Petitot interpolates, "Ah! if
+she had only read Dante!" "I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he
+was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart
+for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and
+knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death
+that awaited my only child. But what could I do?" This story has a more
+comfortable ending than the previous one. We breathe relief in learning
+from the priest that the following night the little boy overtook his
+mother. He had walked all day and all night, following her snowshoe
+tracks. They went on together, the third day they snared some hares, and
+their troubles were over.
+
+Father Petitot tells of a Rabbit-skin Indian who found a mummified body
+in the forks of a tree near the Ramparts of the Mackenzie and who came
+running into the Mission, his hair on end with fright, asking excitedly,
+"Did God make that man or was he made by the men of the Hudson's Bay?"
+
+Another tale of his is of an Indian, _Le Petit Cochon_, who had a
+tape-worm and thought it was a whale. "Unfortunate!" exclaims the
+Father, "possessed of a whale! That's the difference between _Le Petit
+Cochon_ and Jonah." Sucking Pig said he would join the Church if the
+priest would rid him of the tape-worm. But we must use the words of
+Petitot himself, for they are too delicious to lose. "Christmas night,
+1865, after midnight mass, _Le Petit Cochon,_ carefully purged, both as
+to body and soul, by an emetic, two purgatives, and a good confession,
+content as a King, received holy baptism. I gave him the name of Noel."
+
+In starvation times, guests were not appreciated. Robert Campbell of the
+H.B. Company, writing from Fort Halkett in 1840, says, "God grant that
+the time of privation may soon end, and that I may not see a soul from
+below till the snow disappears." These days of the early forties when
+England was engaged with the Chartist risings at home and her Chinese
+wars abroad, were surely parlous times up on this edge of empire. The
+Fort Simpson journals of February 4, 1843, record, "The _Cannibal_, with
+young _Noir_, and others of the party of _Laman_, arrived this evening
+in the last stage of existence, being compelled by starvation to eat all
+their furs."
+
+Still these sonsy Scots kept a good heart and were able to jest at their
+misfortunes with the grim humour that belongs to their race. Neither
+empty larder nor other misfortune disheartened them. The recurrence of
+New Year's Day and the Feast of St. Andrew were made ever occasions for
+rejoicing. Up on the Pelly Forks under date of November 30th, 1848, the
+record reads, "Though far from our native land and countrymen, let us
+pass St. Andrew's Day in social glee. So fill your glasses, my lads, and
+pass the bottle round." Three years later, on the same anniversary, the
+lines are, "Very cold for St. Andrew's, and no haggis for dinner."
+
+And as January Ist ushers in the year 1845, the Factor at Fort
+Macpherson bursts into verse:
+
+"This day, Time winds th' exhausted chain
+To run the twelvemonths' length again.
+I see the old bald-pated fellow
+With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,
+Adjust the unimpaired machine
+To wheel the equal, dull routine.
+
+Underneath the record a postscript appears, in another hand:
+
+"Oh let us love our occupations,
+Bless the Co. and their relations,
+Be content with our poor rations,
+And always know our proper stations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TALE OF A WHALE
+
+
+"In the North Sea lived a whale."
+
+What is a whale? Well, although the whalers dub it so, it is not a fish,
+but is a true mammal, the last of the mammoth creatures that trod the
+earth and floundered the seas of a past age. The whale is the biggest,
+the meekest, and the most interesting of living animals. As we go north,
+we readjust all our ideas of distance and immensity. Rivers are longer,
+lakes more majestic, and whales bigger than we have ever dreamed.
+Examining a stranded whale at Herschel, we see the flippers to be really
+hands with four fingers and a thumb enveloped in a sheath, and
+rudimentary hind-legs are discovered under the tough skin. Without
+doubt, the ancestors of the whale were land mammals which became adapted
+to a littoral life, and in splashing round the shore acquired the habit
+of swimming. Subsequently carried out to sea, they became under the new
+environment the structure as we see it.
+
+Off the delta of the Mackenzie, the Circumpolar of Arctic Bowhead whale
+_(Balaena mysticetus_) is making his last stand. Unless a close season
+is enforced, this cetacean carrying round his ten thousand dollar
+mouthful of baleen will soon fold his fluked fins like the Arab and
+swing that huge body of his into line with the Great Auk, the
+Sea-Otter, the Plains Buffalo, and all the melancholy procession of
+Canadian Has-Beens.
+
+[Illustration: We Tell the Tale of a Whale]
+
+Whales divide themselves into two great classes: those furnished with
+teeth (the _Denticete_) and those in which the place of teeth is
+supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or "whalebone" of
+commerce (the _Mysticete_ or _Balaenidae_). The members of the Baleen
+Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the
+Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality
+of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the "Arctic
+Whale," "Polar Whale," "Greenland Whale," "Bowhead," "Right Whale," or
+"Icebreaker."
+
+Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to
+one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of
+exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons.
+Comparisons are illuminating. The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field
+Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in
+longitudinal measurement. The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen
+to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil
+each,--lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy! The eyes placed
+in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange. The
+tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of
+which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he
+feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil. The
+aorta is as big as a man's waist and, at each pulsation of the heart,
+spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood. The heart itself is more
+than a yard in transverse diameter. The toothed whales carry the teeth
+in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti
+or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca'ing Whale, the White
+Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as
+Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins. Only the toothed whale eats fish;
+the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life,
+called "brit" by the whalers. The Bowhead that we have come up to the
+Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria. He couldn't eat a herring
+if by that one act he might attain immortality.
+
+Whale errors die hard. Artists persistently depict the big animals as
+spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales
+breathe out air only from their lungs. They come to the surface for
+that purpose, the "blowing" being quite analogous to the breathing of
+land mammals. Noticing the condensation of a whale's breath up here in
+the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular
+blunder. Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale)
+bulls. "At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea."
+Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything
+but common or seaside air.
+
+The Bowhead is hunted for his "whalebone"; the Cachalot or true Sperm,
+the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and
+spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his
+head.
+
+It is customary to call whales "fierce," "savage," "murderous," but this
+is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate. Every family,
+however, has its black sheep. The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of
+sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales. One Killer taken
+up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals,
+and it choked to death on the fifteenth. Banded in Molly Maguire groups,
+the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in
+swimming off the Pribilofs. We have seen them, a pack of hungry
+sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale! A number of these brigands of the
+Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened
+mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead's tongue is
+eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles. At the approach of the Killer
+even sea-lions seek the shore. And the Alaska Indian who would pose as
+Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the
+crest of his totem.
+
+The American is more aggressive--shall we say progressive?--than the
+Canadian. The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his
+summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada. Each of these
+floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen
+thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been
+content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into
+their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.
+
+[Illustration: Two Little Ones at Herschel Island]
+
+Is there much money in whales to-day? Are not oil and whalebone drugs in
+the market? Let us see. Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island
+anchorage. Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out
+from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter
+waiting-quarters. One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of
+outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit.
+In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer _Orca_, captured
+twenty-eight whales. The _Jeanette_ in 1905 got ten whales and a calf,
+the _Karluk_ got seven whales, the _Alexander_ eight, the _Bowhead_
+seven. The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them
+thirty-three whales and one calf. At fifteen thousand dollars each (San
+Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very
+nearly half a million. Two years later the _Narwhal_ took out fifteen
+whales, the _Jeanette_ and _Bowhead_ each four. Although the average
+bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far
+beyond that figure. A whale caught by Capt. Simmons of the ship _John M.
+Winthrop_ carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its
+head,--$16,750! One of these at a time would be good fishing.
+
+The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American
+steam-whaler _Grampus_, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one
+whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go
+"to the east'ard of P'int Barrow" for this big whale; since that date
+the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five
+whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the "bone" (baleen) at
+two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a
+pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half
+millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the
+past twenty years, by the back-door route.
+
+Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert
+evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the _Narwhal_, in 1907
+lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen
+whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous,
+but that they are on the move east and north.
+
+The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San
+Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go
+into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible
+next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can
+stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its
+catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible;
+dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over
+again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks,
+and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a
+lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one
+twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one
+forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth,
+fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth.
+Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It
+looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco
+waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B.
+overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the
+vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come
+across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land
+or marine) induces in most of us.
+
+A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific
+route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a
+half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the
+whaling-fleet. "The farther north the finer fur" is a recognised law.
+The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns,
+ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the
+choicest furs this continent produces.
+
+The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this
+international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British
+Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver
+Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur
+bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would
+think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the "feel" of
+Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta
+claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs,
+feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60° and the uttermost edge of
+things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be
+hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the
+rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by
+interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of
+these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.
+
+Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by
+deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its
+biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern
+Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon
+the shingle. "As far as we go!" This is essentially the Island of
+Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's
+last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings.
+We are in latitude 69-1/2° N. and just about 139° west of Greenwich; we
+are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in
+South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never
+dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above
+sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel
+at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is
+twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For
+six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice
+hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose
+from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for
+twenty years to make their home!
+
+The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one
+corner,--who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from
+Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste
+hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is
+interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily
+lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his
+boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the
+whaler picked up and attached to his ménage the Eskimo from the mainland
+in little bunches _en famille_. Ensuing connubial complications brought
+the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from
+each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American
+citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax
+Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty
+whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.
+
+Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can
+winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a
+feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and
+automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers'
+quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest
+Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear
+panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.
+
+North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy
+arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief
+smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly
+desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that
+they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above
+ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between
+this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is
+nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid
+disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of
+America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have
+been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the _Penelope_ off
+Shingle Point, the _Bonanza_ off King Point, the _Triton_ on the shores
+of Herschel itself, the _Alexander_ near Horton River, a little
+missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship _The Duchess of
+Bedford_, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in
+Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the
+ocean of her quest.
+
+The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for
+miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with
+drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,--a boon more prized by
+them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps
+and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where
+whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.
+
+In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,--saxifrages, white anemones
+through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox
+dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight
+Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It
+sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the
+evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints
+and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish,
+shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature
+whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the
+short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds
+nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming,
+the "cockshut light" of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the
+morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the
+day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into
+activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are
+cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter
+deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the
+year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring "leads"
+in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend
+out in the track of the big Bowhead.
+
+Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for
+"Outside" got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel
+all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy
+threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are "mounted" in
+imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride
+here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got
+to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One
+able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a
+medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the
+request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the
+island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was
+signed "T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.," and, after making it, the A.B., M.D.
+saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury
+spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes
+"you never can tell."
+
+Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size:
+they are "suckers" under a year, "short-heads" as long as they are
+suckled, "stunts" at two years, "skull-fish" with baleen less than six
+feet long, and "size-fish" at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A
+whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds
+enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the
+greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand
+years! A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles
+when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring
+with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an
+Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps.
+Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a
+thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of
+Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual
+migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and
+salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads
+trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey
+in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept
+them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year
+by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in
+successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family
+of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm,
+excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change
+in the season of their amours.
+
+A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended
+motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds
+beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface
+horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same,
+a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale
+of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an
+hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five.
+Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that
+a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains
+23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead
+feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. He quaintly elucidates
+this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons
+would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in
+the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive
+and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.
+
+The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and "long years
+afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke." Those who stick
+harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating
+rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in
+blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and
+a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage
+connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir
+John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the "North
+Sea" lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of
+having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of
+Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his
+inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked _Ansell Gibbs_.
+The _Ansell Gibbs_ was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield
+Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871. Imagination sees opportunity in
+this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept
+apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern
+Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of
+utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's
+enamoured dolphin?
+
+Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday,
+while officers from three ships were "gamming" over their afternoon
+walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, "I hear a Bowhead!" There was
+much chaffing about "Kelly's band," but Kelly weighed anchor and went to
+find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the
+bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made
+by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to
+give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice.
+Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the
+water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths.
+Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck,
+at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is "gallied" or
+stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but
+there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From
+the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out "hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo" of the
+hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that
+"beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before
+slipping back to 'F' again." He assures us that, "with the Humpback the
+tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a
+violin."
+
+Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year
+men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a
+mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they
+strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to
+the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He
+carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers
+and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the
+ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm,
+and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He
+had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.
+
+[Illustration: Breeding Grounds of the Seals]
+
+Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has
+entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have
+shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out
+strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a
+cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on
+Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention
+of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance
+which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which
+clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the
+harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the
+"fish" is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound,
+and hot air from the engine pumped into the "proposition" keeps it
+afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales
+in one day,--Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.
+
+The Eskimo say, "There is no part of a seal that is not good," and the
+same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The
+viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear
+in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From
+the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields
+of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers
+for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn
+can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is
+absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the
+Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more
+than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders
+find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the
+Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward
+and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now,
+enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow
+fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she
+must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like
+it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will
+bear the legend, "Whale cream soda" and "Best Whale Milkshake."
+
+To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the
+whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of
+ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.
+
+What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and
+flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all
+the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made
+from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone
+horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a
+dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last
+generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never "broke its mighty heart"
+in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible
+steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new
+avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers
+of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine
+filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the
+manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and
+elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this
+writing advertises:
+
+WHALEBONE TEETH $5
+A GREAT DISCOVERY
+THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST
+AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN
+DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH
+Guaranteed ten years
+YOU BITE CORN OFF THE COB
+
+Spermaceti, the solid waxy body carried round in the Cachalot's head in
+solution, is a valuable whale-product. Bland and demulcent, spermaceti
+is employed as an ingredient in ointments, cosmetics, and cerates.
+Spermaceti candles of definite size form the measure of electric light,
+giving rise to the phrase "of so many candle-power." Present-day
+spermaceti is both a saving and a destructive agent. Large quantities of
+it are used in Europe in the manufacture of ecclesiastical candles, and
+part of the same consignment may help to make self-lubricating
+cartridges.
+
+Most valuable of all whale-products, the costliest commodity on this
+earth ounce for ounce with the one exception of radium, is ambergris. As
+amber was once considered "the frozen tears of seagulls," so ambergris
+for ages puzzled the ancients. Some called it "the solidified foam of
+the sea," with others it was a "fungoidal growth of the ocean analogous
+to that on trees." When people in the old days came across anything
+exceedingly costly they wanted to eat it, on the same principle which
+makes the baby put each new gift into his mouth. So we have historic
+record of pearl soup a la Cleopatra, and dishes dashed with ambergris.
+Milton sings of,--
+
+"Beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
+In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
+Grisamber-steamed."
+
+What is this choice tidbit? It is a morbid secretion of the intestines
+of the sick Sperm-whale, and sells for from thirty to forty dollars an
+ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a
+dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or
+cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island
+beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that
+solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy
+odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a
+floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In
+pharmacy, it is regarded as a cardiac and anti-spasmodic and as a
+specific against the rabies. For years it has been used in sacerdotal
+rites of the church; and suitors of old times sought with it to charm
+their mistresses. The dying sperm, spouting up the ghost, offers of his
+very vitals to aid the lover and serve the church.
+
+Fascinating are the finds of ambergris. The barque _Sea-Fox_ of New
+Bedford, in 1866, off the coast of Arabia, took a one hundred and
+fifty-six pound mass of ambergris, which was sold to the Arabs of
+Zanzibar for ten thousand dollars in gold. The _Adeline Gibbs_, in the
+same year, took one hundred and thirty-two pounds from a bull-sperm
+south of St. Helena, and sold the hunk for twenty-three thousand
+dollars. Three winters ago an Arctic whaling-crew put into Seattle, and
+there leaked out the interesting story of how, not recognising the
+priceless unguent, they had greased their oars, masts, and knee-boots
+with "a big lump of ambergrease."
+
+In modern whaling not an ounce of the carcase is cast as rubbish to the
+void. The intestines make a soft kid which takes any dye and is largely
+used for artistic leather-work. The size of these immense strips makes
+possible splendid belts for machinery with a minimum of joinings. The
+chemically-macerated bones are turned into an "indestructible"
+crockery-ware which is far more enduring than anything made of
+vegetable-fibre. The Beluga gives us the best shoe-strings in the world.
+You can lace your shoes with a Beluga lace for two years and be sure it
+will not break the morning you are in an especial hurry to catch an
+inter-Reuben train.
+
+An interest attaches to living whales which outweighs the fascination
+with which we study their dead parts. Each species of the whale
+propagates with one of its own species only. The fidelity of whales to
+each other exceeds the constancy of birds. The whale mother gives birth
+to one calf, and in extremely rare cases two calves, producing every
+second year, the young being born between the end of March and the
+beginning of May. When the mother suckles her young she throws herself
+on one side on the surface of the sea and the calf regularly feeds at
+the breast (like a young Eskimo) for nearly two years. During this time
+the baby is extremely fat and the mother correspondingly emaciated.
+Perhaps nothing in nature is more touching than the devotion of a female
+whale to its wounded young. Whalers harpoon the babe at the breast so
+that they may afterwards secure the dam. In this case, the mother joins
+the wounded young under the surface of the water, comes up with it when
+it rises to breathe, encourages it to swim off, assists its flight by
+taking it under her fin, and seldom deserts it while life remains.
+
+Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the
+thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities
+in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great
+Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to
+restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which
+has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a
+thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant
+generations of man grow another one to take its place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
+
+
+"The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
+That blaze in the velvet blue.
+They're God's own guides on the Long Trail--
+The trail that is always new."
+
+--_Kipling_.
+
+A tax on tea caused the revolt of the thirteen Colonies, a taunting load
+of tennis-balls lost France to the Dauphin. Eighty years ago on this
+Arctic edge, white beads, or the lack of them, lost a lucrative
+fur-trade, alienated the Loucheux and caused the death of whites.
+"Trifles make the sum of human things."
+
+The old records tell the story. John Bell from Fort Good Hope, under
+date of August 14th, 1827, writes to the Factor at Fort Simpson:
+
+"The beads sent in for the Loucheux trade are not sufficiently large to
+please them. I request you will endeavour to send in the largest size
+for the trade of the ensuing year. A specimen of the kind wanted I send
+enclosed."
+
+The Factor at Fort Simpson, under date of November 22nd of the same
+year, writes to the Governor and Chief Factors at Montreal:
+
+"I now forward a specimen of the common white beads wanted for the trade
+with the Loucheux Indians. It is their request and I hope it will be
+attended to. I would not venture to make the demand, were it not from
+conviction that without this favourite article these Indians look with
+indifference on the best of our goods. No other ornamental article is
+ever asked for or wanted by these natives."
+
+The same official on March 15th, 1828, pleads with Montreal:
+
+"The white beads demanded for the Loucheux trade I hope will be sent,
+and of the size according to sample enclosed. May I use the freedom of
+representing the importance of getting this article to the liking of the
+Indians, to come up by the Montreal canoes and be ready for outfit 1829?
+Three kegs will contain the quantity required, 200 to 250 pounds."
+
+Again on the 29th of November, 1829, he writes Montreal:
+
+"The White Beads asked for the trade with the Loucheux are not according
+to the order sent, 15 pounds only of the quantity received (200 pounds)
+are of the proper size, the remainder being the same as those in outfit
+1825 so much complained of. They will not be satisfactory to the
+Indians. We request you will be pleased to make a strong representation
+to their Honours at Home that this article be sent according to order
+and sample. We now conceive to say anything further would be tiresome."
+
+The Fort Simpson Factor on March 19th, 1830, reports to Montreal:
+
+
+"The goods came. The white beads was too small and not according to
+order or sample asked for. The Indians would not take them and left the
+Fort dissatisfied."
+
+The Trader at Fort Good Hope augments the story by recording that the
+Indians would be better pleased in trade with two small kegs of the
+special beads they wanted than with half a ton of any other trade goods
+which London could manufacture and send out. The sequel of the story is
+that, disappointed time and again in not getting their favourite beads,
+the Loucheux Indians failed to bring in the autumn supply of meat to
+Fort Good Hope and in consequence, before the snows of the winter of
+1831 had melted, many of the white men attached to that post died of
+starvation.
+
+[Illustration: The Keele Party on the Gravel River]
+
+We had gone North with the birds in spring and now, as we turn our faces
+homeward, the first migrants with strong wing are beginning their
+southward flight. Our travel is against current now, for we make slower
+time than we did coming in and consequently see more of the passing
+shore-line. The last specimens we gather within the Arctic Circle are
+the blue blossoms of the flax. In them we see the earnest of many a
+cultivated farm of the future. The days are getting perceptibly shorter
+and one by one the old familiar constellations come back in the
+heavens. We find it a relief to have once more a twilight and a
+succeeding period of dusk. Yet are we loath to leave this fascinating
+North with its sure future, its quaint to-days, and all the glamour of
+its rich past.
+
+We had just passed Fort Norman when the sharp eyes of an Indian
+deck-hand saw three figures on the beach ahead. Pulling in at the point
+where the Gravel River joins the Mackenzie, we find a regular Robinson
+Crusoe group,--Mr. J. Keele, of the Dominion Government Survey, and his
+two associates. Going in on the Yukon side, Mr. Keele's task has been to
+cross the Divide between the Yukon and the Mackenzie, mapping the rocks.
+The only white man they had seen in sixteen months was a French priest
+who had passed yesterday, and whose knowledge of current events in
+Canada and Europe was scanty. They were glad to see us. A moose-skin
+boat showed how they had run the rough Gravel; the meat of two moose
+smoked over the camp-fire; their dogs were fat. These are men who know
+the woods--no hard-luck story here. It needs only Friday's funny fat
+umbrella to complete the picture, with the goat scampering in the middle
+distance.
+
+Coming on board, the surveyors are greedy for newspapers, and we in
+return learn somewhat of that great slice of land which they are the
+first to traverse. The Gravel River is two hundred and fifty-five miles
+long, with "white water" all the way. The force of the current may be
+appreciated from the fact that it is forty-four hundred feet above the
+sea-level at the Height-of-Land, and only four hundred feet here where
+it enters the Mackenzie. All along the banks of the Gravel are moose,
+mountain sheep, and caribou. The winter cabin of the party was built on
+the Ross River and there, during the past winter, they experienced a
+temperature of 54° below. A party of this kind must be to a large extent
+self-supporting, as it would be impossible to carry from the outside
+food for such a long sojourn. Speaking with Mr. Keele, one is forcibly
+struck with the fact that what the technical schools teach their
+students forms but a small part of the equipment of the man who would do
+field work in Northern Canada--packing, tracking, hunting, and breaking
+trail,--each man must do his share of these.
+
+The Keele party on the great watershed, as they travelled east, crossed
+two families of Mackenzie River Indians going westward to hunt, on the
+west side of the ridge, the marten and the beaver. It was 32° below, and
+cold. The whole families were on the march, a little baby tucked in the
+curve of the sled, and tottering on foot an old, old woman, bent and
+wrinkled and scarcely able to move. As the Indians were on their return
+journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again.
+But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow
+falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in
+the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many
+journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering
+capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of
+hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that
+luxurious garment. In order that one might be warmly clad, many have
+gone cold, more than one sad, tired, old head has lain down for the last
+time by the lonely camp-fire.
+
+Sad is the lot of the Indian woman of the North. Fated always to play a
+secondary part in the family drama, it is hard to see what of pleasure
+life holds for her. The birth of a girl baby is not attended with joy or
+thankfulness. From the beginning the little one is pushed into the
+background. The boy babies, even the dogs, have the choicer bed at
+night, and to them are given the best pieces of the meat. The little
+girl is made to feel that she has come into a world that has no welcome
+for her and her whole life seems to be an apology. You read it in the
+face of every Indian girl or woman you meet, from the shrinking pathetic
+little figure in the camp to the bent old crone, whose upturned face
+with its sadly acceptive look gives you the flicker of a smile.
+
+Storm-stayed at Wrigley Harbour at the entrance to Great Slave Lake, we
+have some splendid fishing,--jackfish, whitefish, loche, inconnu, "and
+here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling." Within an
+hour I get fifteen graylings to my own rod. Collectively they weigh just
+a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the
+fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish.
+Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and
+the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had "The Complete Angler"
+for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the
+catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the
+grayling is eating fit only for "anglers and other honest men."
+
+The traverse of Great Slave Lake in the teeth of a wind is not without
+its interest, for the new steamer has yet to be tried in the waters of
+what practically amounts to an open sea. She behaves well, and brings
+us dry-shod into Fort Rae.
+
+[Illustration: The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake]
+
+We are the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae, and we
+afford as much interest to the Indians as they afford us. Lone Fort Rae,
+clinging to the Northern Arm of Great Slave Lake, was noted in the past
+as a "meat-post." It supplied the Mackenzie District with dried
+caribou-meat, and formed an outfitting point for the few big game
+hunters who trended east from here into the Barren Grounds seeking the
+musk-ox. Its foundation dates back to some time before the year 1820. We
+cross a bridge of clever Indian construction and sit for a while to muse
+on a flat boulder of primal rock. This stands as bell-tower to a quaint
+bell cast in Rome and bears an inscription to some dead and gone Pope.
+The missionary priest over half a century ago paddled in here bringing
+the Gospel to the Dog-Ribs.
+
+[Illustration: The Bell at Fort Rae Mission]
+
+The musk-ox _(Ovibos moschatus)_ is a gregarious animal which would
+appear to be a Creator's after-thought,--something between an ox and a
+sheep. The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the
+appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd. The
+present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and
+between the meridians of 86° and 125°. As it is the most inaccessible
+game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being
+hunted to extinction. Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed
+like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up
+wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees
+fit. Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle
+and horns outside, to meet a common danger. The robe of the musk-ox is a
+rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being
+very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base. According to
+the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April. The
+mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a
+sheltered place for the cradle. Three days after its post-natal burial
+it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf's
+burden.
+
+[Illustration: The Musk-ox]
+
+We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to
+Fort Resolution. Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the
+topics of conversation. Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk,
+and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and
+deposited at the front door of the H.B. Co. Factor there--a cow but no
+cow-food. All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North. She was
+fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her
+kind. One of Mr. Keele's men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which
+ate bacon-rinds with a relish. The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb
+trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become
+burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish
+enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead. A dog in
+the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the
+asphodel meadows. I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner
+probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to
+work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.
+
+From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories
+from the outgoing traders. We learn that when the church was still
+young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the
+wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were
+to be considered fish, or flesh. Rome evidently was not "long" on North
+American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever
+by declaring said tails "fish" and not flesh. This is why you can
+discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and
+commit no sin.
+
+The stories give us some idea of the difference between winter and
+summer travel across Great Slave Lake. Captain Mills tells of two Indian
+women, one old enough to have a daughter of forty, who drove a dogsled
+one hundred and forty-eight miles from Providence to Rae, in four days.
+The older one walked ahead of the dogs and made the trail while the
+other drove. Coming back, it took them five days, and the old woman
+explained, "We didn't make such good time, as we had a man with us." It
+was her son-in-law whom she brought back with her.
+
+A striking picture is given us of a woman who walked alone from Hay
+River to Province on snowshoes, taking thirteen days to do it. She had
+no matches, and carried her fire with her, keeping it alight in a little
+copper kettle. This, of course, necessitated her guarding it very
+closely and stopping to renew the fire from time to time; for if the
+burning wood was once permitted to die down, her life in that intense
+cold would go out with it.
+
+How cold does it get? Mr. Campbell Young, of our little group, says that
+he has been out when a thermometer--one obtained from the U.S.
+Meteorological Station--registered seventy-six degrees below zero, and
+has worked in weather like that. "I've been trapping in that
+temperature, when of course the weather was absolutely still, and I tell
+you I'd rather be out in seventy-six below than to cross Smith Portage
+with the mosquitoes." Mr. Christie, of the Keele Survey Party, says,
+"Last winter I had to go out and get a moose for the camp, and on the
+second day I met the Mounted Police boys who told me it had been
+seventy-five below. I had started out when it was quite mild, only
+forty-five below. You know when it is below fifty, for then your breath
+begins to crackle, and that's a sure sign." Mr. John Gaudet says, "I
+was driving last winter on Lesser Slave Lake when it was sixty-four
+below. Yes, it was quite cold."
+
+At Resolution we see once more our old friend Dr. Sussex, happy and
+busied among his Indians. It is just hail and farewell. The little "red
+lemonade" kiddies are the first to greet us as we come into Fort Smith,
+and here everybody goes visiting. Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald tells us
+that her grandfather had two wives, and was the father of twenty-two
+children. She says she and her brother are glad of this, as it gives
+them so many friends in all parts of the country; and we notice that at
+every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit--a cousin
+here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling
+cards and little friendly gifts up here is a "musky-moot"; the more
+formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may
+stay a day or two, is a "_skin-ichi-mun."_ Visiting a little on our own
+account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the
+gaudy calendars of the advertiser have not yet made their way. Each man,
+foolish enough here to want a calendar, marks out his own on pencilled
+paper. We come across an H.B. Journal of the vintage of 1826 where the
+reckless scribe introduces two Thursdays into one week, acknowledging
+his error in a footnote with the remark, "It is not likely that the eye
+of man will ever read this record."
+
+At Fort Smith we leave the steamer _Mackenzie River_ to take passage in
+the _Grahame_ from Smith's Landing, and once more essay the Mosquito
+Portage. We find our winged friends in fine fettle. Their eyes are not
+dimmed, their strength not abated. For miles we notice blackened and
+dead stems of young spruce, cut off as if by machinery, at a uniform
+height of two and a half feet from the ground. The top of the dead stem
+shows the depth of the snow when the rabbits, running along the surface,
+had nibbled off and eaten the growing spruce. A fur-trader at our side
+says, "While at Fort Macpherson I noticed that the ice always melted in
+the spring in Peel's River before it did in the Mackenzie. It would
+break up in the Peel about the Queen's Birthday and begin to go out.
+Reaching the Mackenzie, it came up against a solid mass of unbroken ice
+which sent it back to flood the whole country. It was a curious
+experience to paddle round in a canoe for miles and miles where one had
+set rabbit snares but a few weeks before. The poor rabbits themselves
+were at a loss, for no kind monition apprised them of the coming flood.
+We could see whole colonies of them,--each a shipwrecked sailor on his
+own little raft of bark, buffeted here and there with the stream and
+peering out across the swollen waters, like Noah's dove, seeking some
+green thing."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TO MCMURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
+
+
+"Think o' the stories round the camp, the yarns along the track--
+O' Lesser Slave an' Herschel's Isle an' Flynn at Fond du Lac;
+Of fur an' gun, an' ranch an' run, an' moose and caribou,
+An' bull-dogs eatin' us to death! Good-bye--good luck to you!"
+
+Our arrival at Chipewyan is opportune. Honorine Daniels, unceremoniously
+known as 'Norine among her friends (and they are legion), is about to
+join hand and fortune with one of the Mercredi boys. 'Norine owns a
+cottage in her own right, and to-night under her roof-tree there is to
+be a wedding-dance. We wait round, hungering for an invitation, finally
+to be told largely, "You don't need no invitation, everybody goes."
+
+We go with the crowd. The room is full to overflowing. Babies are
+deposited on the benches along the wall, dogs look in at the window. The
+air is heavy with mosquitoes and tobacco-smoke. But joy reigns. Nobody
+is too old or too obese to dance. Old Mr. Loutit and lame Jimmy Flett
+each secures a sonsy partner. There are three fiddlers, and these
+relieve each other in turn, for fiddling, beating time with your
+moccasin on the earthen floor, and "calling out" is hard work for one
+man. There are but two kinds of dances,--the Red River jig, and a square
+dance which probably had for honourable ancestors the lancers on the
+father's side and a quadrille on the mother's.
+
+Endurance is a sign of merit in the Red River jig. A man or woman steps
+into the limelight and commences to jig, a dark form in moccasins slips
+up in front of the dancer, and one jigs the other down, amid plaudits
+for the survivor and jeers for the quitter.
+
+It is the square dance that interests us, our attention being divided
+between watching the deft forms in the half light and listening to the
+caller-off. _Louie-the-Moose_ first officiates. His eyes look dreamy but
+there is a general's stern tone of command in his words:
+
+"Ladeez, join de lily-white han's,
+Gents, your black-and-tan!
+Ladeez, bow! Gents, bow-wow!
+Swing 'em as hard's ye can.
+
+"Swing your corner Lady,
+Then the one you love!
+Then your corner Lady,
+Then your Turtle Dove!"
+
+Over and over again Louie reiterates his injunction, to the
+accompaniment of pattering moccasins and a humming chorus from door and
+windows. There are phrases of variation, too. We catch the words,
+"_Address your pardner," "Adaman left," "Show your steps," "Gents walk
+round, and all run away to the west_."
+
+Then Michel Manvil takes hold of the situation. He stands up to it, and
+we hear
+
+"Ladies round ladies, and gents all so!
+Ladies round gents, and gents don't go!"
+
+Why should they, we wonder!
+
+The third fiddler is a full-blooded Chipewyan. In some dancing academy
+in the woods he has learnt a "call-off" all his own, and proud indeed is
+he of his stunt. We manage to copy it down in its entirety, fighting
+mosquitoes the while and dodging out into the open now and again for a
+little air.
+
+"'Slute your ladies! All together!
+  Ladies opposite, the same--
+Hit the lumber with yer leathers,
+  Balance all, and swing yer dame!
+Bunch the moose-cows in the middle!
+  Circle, stags, and do-si-do--
+Pay attention to the fiddle!
+  Swing her round, an' off you go!
+
+"First four forward! Back to places!
+  Second foller--shuffle back!
+Now you've got it down to cases--
+  Swing 'em till their back-teeth crack!
+Gents, all right, a heel and toeing!
+  Swing 'em, kiss 'em if you kin--
+On to next, and keep a-goin'
+  Till you hit your pards ag'in!
+
+"Gents to centre; ladies round 'em,
+  Form a basket; balance all!
+Whirl yer gals to where you found 'em!
+  Promenade around the hall!
+Balance to yer pards and trot 'em
+  Round the circle, double quick!
+Grab and kiss 'em while you've got 'em--
+  Hold 'em to it; they won't kick!"
+
+The perspiring musician pushes his instrument into the hands of _Running
+Antelope_ and turns to us with, "There's another verse, but I don't
+always give it." We ask him to repeat it for us, but he seems a little
+at a loss. "It's hard to call it out without the fiddle. When yer
+playin' you just spit it out--the words come to you."
+
+It is August 6th at Chipewyan, and once again we are at the parting of
+the ways. Every one we know is heading for "Outside" by way of the
+steamer _Grahame_ and the Athabasca scows. Our own ambition is to make a
+traverse of the great Peace River Country before the snows. We have had
+no mail since last May, and the temptation to follow the multitude as
+far as McMurray in the hope of finding letters there is too strong to be
+resisted. We will then return and try to perfect arrangements for the
+Peace.
+
+The outgoers are a cosmopolitan and happy "bunch,"--Major Jarvis,
+R.N.W.M.P., fur-traders galore, three Grey Nuns and a priest, Mr. Wyllie
+and his family bound for the Orkney Islands, fifty-four souls in all,
+without counting the miscellaneous and interesting fraternity down on
+the lower deck among the fur-bundles.
+
+It is essentially a _voyage de luxe_. When Mr. Keele imagines a place is
+good, the steamer stops and we all gather fossils. When lame James, the
+steward, our erstwhile jig-expert, is about to serve coffee, he pokes
+his head over the side and orders the engines stopped that we may drink
+the beverage without spillage. The beardless prospector buys tinned
+peaches from the commissariat, opens them with a jack-knife and passes
+them round the deck with impartiality and a
+to-hell-with-the-man-that-works smile. Who would envy kings?
+
+We arrive at McMurray in time for treaty-payment. Tethered horses at the
+tepee-poles, store-dolls for the babies, and unmistakable "Outside"
+millinery prove the prosperity of these Crees, and proves also their
+proximity to Edmonton. One little group looks tattered, out-at-heel,
+and hungry,--a Cree widow presenting her four offspring that they may
+receive the annual payment. The officials within the treaty tent declare
+the youngest baby an illegitimate child and will pay it no treaty,--it
+"has no name." I catch the anxious look in the mother's eye. Five
+dollars goes a long way when baby bodies have to be fed and clothed. The
+situation is crucial. Without a sponsor, the priest will not name the
+baby. With no name, it cannot draw treaty. I conclude to father the
+child, as its own (un)lawful father will not. My offer to give my name
+to the girlie, after due deliberation of Church and State, is accepted.
+Under the name of Agnes Deans Cameron the Cree kiddie is received into
+the Mother Church and finds her place on the list of treaty-receiving
+Indians--No. 53 in the McMurray Band. May she follow pleasant trails!
+
+[Illustration: A Meadow at McMurray]
+
+Back of McMurray lies a lush land. We tread a path a full mile in length
+leading to meadows where, belly-high, the horses graze. Every yard of
+our way is lined with raspberry bushes bent with their rich, red burden.
+
+While the furs are being transferred from the _Grahame_ to the scows,
+the working of our typewriter is a matter of much wonderment. Old Paul
+Fontaine, a half-breed who thinks he is a white man, first looks through
+the door, then comes into the dining hall where we are, takes his hat
+off, and watches respectfully. Then, with an air of great conviction,
+"This is the first time I ever see that. It is wonderful what man can
+do--wonderful. There is only one thing left to be done now--and that is
+to put the breath of life into a dead body." Solemnly putting on his
+hat, he turns and walks out.
+
+Mrs. Loutit, another fellow-passenger attracted by the click of the
+machine, comes in and recounts her arts, wild and tame. In winter she
+goes off in dog-cariole, traps cross-foxes off her own bat, shoots
+moose, and smokes the hide according to the ancient accepted mode.
+Coming home, she takes the smoked hide and works upon it silk embroidery
+of a fineness which would be the envy of any young ladies' seminary in
+Europe or America. She weaves fantastic belts of beads and sets the
+fashion for the whole North in _chef d'oeuvres_ of the quills of the
+porcupine. She is a most observant "old wife." Watching, fascinated, the
+lightning play of the machine, "Much hard that, I think, harder than
+bead-work, eh?" Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to
+find out how the dickens when you strike capital "A" at one end of the
+keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small "o" at the other
+end. There is something uncanny about it, and our stock goes up.
+
+[Illustration: Starting up the Athabasca]
+
+We confess to being a little homesick as we wave farewell to the half
+hundred passengers in the familiar scows embarked for their two hundred
+and thirty-eight mile journey up the Athabasca. It will be a tiresome
+enough trip, though, for every foot of the way the big boats will have
+to be tracked (towed) by teams of half-breeds scrambling along the
+shore, now on land, now splashing in the water. The party will have the
+mosquito as companion on the sorrowful way and it will take them four
+weeks to make Athabasca Landing, the distance which in the spring we
+dropped down in little over a week. We send letters home, and with
+hand-shaking all round bid farewell to Mr. Wyllie, the Grey Nuns, and
+the rest.
+
+[Illustration: On the Clearwater]
+
+Our way back on the _Grahame_ to Chipewyan is not without adventure. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon we run up hard and fast on a batture!
+There is no swearing, no shouting of orders. The deck-hands from long
+experience know exactly what to do. The engines are reversed and, in
+their efforts, seem to speak Cree, for we catch the sound of the
+familiar "Wuh! Wey!" But it is no go. The sun sinks behind the bank,
+over the tops of the poplars floats a faint rosy glow which fades into
+purple and then into black, and we are still there hard and fast. The
+drifting sand piles up against us, and, in scows, the whole cargo is
+removed. The captain throws out a kedge-anchor, and in a mysterious way
+we pull ourselves off by hawsers, as a man lifts himself by his own
+boot-straps.
+
+We have head-winds all the way. At four o'clock on the morning of August
+14th, stress of weather causes us to run in under the lee of an island.
+We tie up at the base of some splendid timber. Spruce here will give
+three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground. With an improvised
+tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big
+poplars (rough-backed). The first ran seven feet three inches, the
+second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches. Within
+view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and
+interspersed with them were spruce with a base-girth scarcely less.
+
+Arrived at Chipewyan, we are able to arrange to be taken up the Peace in
+the same little tug _Primrose_ which had before carried us so safely to
+Fond du Lac.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
+
+
+"What lies ahead no human mind can know,
+To-morrow may bring happiness or woe.
+We cannot carry charts, save the hope that's in our hearts
+As along the unknown trail we blithely go."
+
+When we leave Chipewyan August 17th, the fall hunt of waveys has already
+begun. We learn afterwards that the Loutit boys alone made a bag of
+sixteen hundred of these birds which, salted down, form a considerable
+part of the winter food of the old Fort. Mrs. William Johnson comes down
+to see us embark. She has overwhelmed us with generous kindness at our
+every visit to Chipewyan, kindness we cannot soon forget. It is a small
+group which now starts out in the little tug on the bosom of the mighty
+Peace,--Major Routledge, R.N.W.M.P., Mr. and Mrs. John Gaudet with their
+two olive-branches "Char-lee" and "Se-li-nah," now returning to Lesser
+Slave Lake from a visit to Fort Good Hope, Miss Brown and myself.
+
+This part of the journey we are to enjoy more keenly than all that has
+gone before. Rising on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, the
+Peace River is the largest affluent of the Mackenzie, being already a
+splendid stream when it cuts through that range. With but one break, the
+Peace River affords a nine hundred mile stretch of navigation, and we
+can justly describe the country through which it flows as a plateau in
+which the river has made for itself a somewhat deep valley. Extensive
+grassy plains border it on both sides, and north of Fort Vermilion
+country of this character extends to the valley of the Hay River.
+Crossing the Quatre Fourches, an offshoot of the Peace at the Lake
+Athabasca edge, we turn our faces due west to a land of promise. The
+Mackenzie River and the banks of the Great Slave may some day afford
+homes to a busy and prosperous populace, but there are many fertile and
+more accessible lands to be settled first. With the Peace River Country
+there is no conjecture, for it is merely a question of the coming of the
+railway. Given a connection with the world to the south, the district
+watered by the Peace will at once support a vast agrarian population.
+The advance riders are already on the ground.
+
+It is not our intent to go to the expense of using a steamer for our
+whole journey up the Peace. Scows will allow us to proceed more
+leisurely and to see more as we go, so the second day we turn the
+steamer back and transfer ourselves and our belongings into a little
+open craft or model-boat _The Mee-wah-sin._ We have a crew of five men,
+one on the steering-sweep and four to track, and in this wise we make
+our way for three hundred miles up the great river to Fort Vermilion.
+One day we improvise a sail and so make fifty miles in a favourable
+wind, but, with this exception, every other mile of the journey is by
+patient towing.
+
+Incidents are many. The first morning after we turned back the little
+tug, the Kid and I left the slow trackers behind and were glad to
+stretch ourselves in a long forenoon's tramp along the sandy beach. The
+mosquitoes were practically gone and for the first time all summer one
+could really enjoy the woods, where a tang of autumn in the air made
+every breath a tonic draught. Exulting in the fact that we were alive,
+we turned a sharp corner and came suddenly face to face with a grey
+wolf, loping along at a swinging pace at the water's edge, muzzle close
+to the ground! To make the story worth telling, one should have
+something to say of "yawning jaws" and "bloodshot eyes" and "haunches
+trembling for a spring." But this grey wolf simply refused to play that
+part. He took one look at us, evidently didn't approve, and turned up
+from his tracks quietly into the cottonwoods above. As we on our side
+had brought neither gun nor camera from the _Mee-wah-sin_, we are unable
+to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture. _Sic transit lupus_!
+
+A week out from Chipewyan, where the Swan River makes into the Peace, we
+came one glorious afternoon upon a camp of Crees, the family of the
+_Se-weep-i-gons_. They had just killed two bears. We bought the skins
+and a large portion of meat from them, and Mrs. _Se-weep-i-gon_ very
+kindly added to the feast of fat things some high-bush cranberries "in a
+present." As an excuse for listening to their soft voices, before we
+left the camp we asked the name of every member of the little group,
+scratching the list down on a piece of birchbark. The Crees evidently
+considered this an official ceremony, for after we had paid our score
+and shaken hands with everybody from Grandpa to the latest baby and were
+well out in mid-stream, Mrs. _Se-weep-i-gon_ came running down to the
+bank to call us back. Rowing to the shore we found that she had
+remembered one more child whose name she wanted to add to the list. She
+assured us that this one too had a little brass cross hanging round his
+neck, so we will be sure to know him if we meet him in the woods.
+
+We lived for the next two days on bear-meat and cranberries.
+
+[Illustration: Evening on the Peace]
+
+So one wonderful day follows another as our little boat is towed first
+against one bank then another of this majestic stream. The forest growth
+is a marvel. We measure one morning three of the spruce trees to which
+our tent-ropes are tied, and get for base measurement six feet eight
+inches, five feet two inches, and five feet respectively. The trees
+averaged ninety feet in height and would give perhaps one thousand feet
+to each tree. The autumn tints on the willows and alders of the high
+river-banks are indescribably beautiful. We pass through one hundred
+miles of a veritable field of the cloth of gold. We look out of our
+tent-flaps at night on this living glory, and wake up to it again with
+each new morning sun.
+
+One Sunday evening at dusk we slip into the Hudson's Bay post where the
+Little Red River makes into the Peace, the dear home of Tom Kerr, his
+Scottish wife, and their four bairns. Let me try to give the picture.
+Tom had been off all day cutting meadowgrass, and now wended his way
+home with a load of it in a little Old Country cart drawn by a wall-eyed
+mare. At her side frisked a foal, and two great stag-hounds ran back and
+forward between the master and his home by the riverside. Three children
+bounded out to greet their father. "Oh! Daddy, Daddy, the red coo broke
+away from the byre and is far awa on the ither side o' the burn!" Here,
+in a nutshell, you have the difference between the Mackenzie River of
+to-day and the Peace River. On the Mackenzie, swarthy forms are in
+evidence, Cree and French is spoken on all sides, there are no great
+fields of waving grain, and the dog is the only domestic animal. On the
+Peace is an essentially white race, cows, chickens, trustworthy old
+nags, porridge for breakfast, "the tongue that Shakespeare spake,"
+rendered in an accent born far ayont the Tweed. Right across the mouth
+of the Little Red River, Tom Kerr has a fishing scine. We go down with
+him to lift it, after the cows have been brought back to the narrow
+path. The net yields seven fish and they are of five different
+species,--trout, ling, sucker, jack-fish, and something else that Tom
+calls a "Maria." Daily this net is set, and for three hundred and
+sixty-five days every year it furnishes food for the family, in summer
+in the flowing water, and in winter under the ice. You couldn't starve
+at Little Red River if you wanted to. This is one of the most beautiful
+spots in the whole North Countree. Long after Tom and we and Mrs. Tom
+are under the gowans, and the little Kerrs possess the land, there will
+be populous cities along the Peace, and millionaires will plant their
+summer villas on the beauteous spot where we now stand.
+
+[Illustration: Our Lobsticks on the Peace]
+
+Bidding the bairns good-bye, we press onward on our way, Tom Kerr
+accompanying us. A great honour awaits us round the next corner, when
+the boatmen announce that they are going to make us each a lobstick. We
+land, as pleased as Punch over the suggestion. We now know what it feels
+like when the philanthropist of a village takes his after-dinner walk
+through the square and sees the sparrows drinking from the memorial
+fountain surmounted with his own bust, done in copper, life-size. It
+takes fully two hours to trim the trees into significant shape, but the
+beauty of this particular kind of Cook's Tour is that you go down when
+you like and stop when you want to. The lobsticks furnished, the men
+form a circle and discharge their muskets in salute, and on we go. We
+learn that the ethics of lobsticks is that each of these men, should
+Fate take him past this point again, will salute the lobstick just made
+and send a strong thought across the spruce-tops to us. There is a
+reverse to the shield. Should we, at any time before this journey ends,
+fail to make good, the men on the return voyage will cut the lobstick
+down. We are going to make no impertinent enquiries regarding the
+ulterior fate of these family trees. Is it not sufficient glory to say,
+"On the Peace River we _had_ a lobstick"?
+
+The Chutes of the Peace! These will live forever with the Ramparts of
+the Mackenzie as the two most majestic visions which the whole North
+Land gave us. We had not been prepared for that wonderful spectacle
+which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars
+for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its
+great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite
+across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet
+and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara,
+yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this
+land so pregnant with possibilities, a land which, though it echo now
+only the quiet foot of the Cree, is so unmistakably a White Man's
+Country, intensifies the sense of majesty and power which here takes
+possession of us. The men talk of the water-power furnished by the great
+falls, and hazard guesses of the future economic purposes to which it
+will be put. For our own part, our one wish is to get away from the
+noise of even these subdued voices and in silence feast our very souls
+on this manifestation of the power of God. The thoughts that we feel
+cannot be put into words. Why attempt the impossible?
+
+[Illustration: The Chutes of the Peace]
+
+Our way lies beyond this, and the Chutes have to be overcome. These
+half-breeds know exactly what to do in every emergency which arises.
+Only one of the men has traversed this river before, and he gives
+orders. We strip our little _Mee-wah-sin_ of her temporary masts and
+canvas awning and take out all our belongings. Everybody works. A
+purchase is obtained by throwing a pulley and rope over a nearby
+jack-pine, and the boat is pulled out bodily from the water. Then the
+crew drag her along the shore well beyond the head of the rapid, and we
+make camp.
+
+[Illustration: Pulling out the _Mee-wah-sin_]
+
+These delicious nights within the tent are memories that will remain
+through all the years to come. It is cool and silent and productive of
+thought. We are selfishly glad that fifty people went out by Athabasca
+ways, leaving to us all the mighty reaches and pleasant pastures of the
+Peace. The midnight is flooded by a glorious moon, and the thoughts born
+this afternoon of that stupendous fall have driven sleep far away.
+Opening the tent-flap, I slip through the camp of sleeping Indians to
+the edge of the fast-flowing stream. The feeling is insistent here which
+has been ever-present since we entered this valley of the Peace--here is
+the home prepared and held in waiting for the people who are to follow.
+
+"Listening there, I heard all tremulously
+Footfalls of Autumn passing on her way,
+And in the mellow silence every tree
+Whispered and crooned of hours that are to be.
+Then a soft wind like some small thing astray
+Comes sighing soothingly."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
+
+
+"Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and cheerily wise,
+With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes,
+Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,
+Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood,
+Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,
+As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world."
+
+--_Service_.
+
+It is on August 27th, in the evening, that the crew, all slicked up in
+their Sunday-go-to-meetings, draw us up on the beach of the City in the
+Silences, this Past-in-the-arms-of-the-Present,--Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+The first thing to meet our eye is the red roof of the flour-mill of the
+H.B. Co., a picture of progressiveness set in a living frame of golden
+wheat, the heavy heads nodding to the harvest.
+
+Vermilion is an old post of the Old Company. Alexander Mackenzie on his
+way to the Pacific found people at work here far back in 1792. The
+Vermilion of to-day stands a living monument to the initiative faith and
+hard work largely of one man, Mr. Francis D. Wilson, who has had charge
+of H.B. Co. interests here for nineteen years. Mr. Wilson found this
+place a fur-post on the edge of civilisation, and he has made of it a
+commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre. And his example has
+been contagious, for the half-breeds around him have become farmers, the
+Indians who traded furs a dozen years ago now buy harness and ploughs
+and breach-loading guns from The Company, paying for the same with wheat
+of their own growing.
+
+[Illustration: The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace]
+
+Vermilion is in latitude 58° 30' N.,--that is, about four hundred miles
+due north of Edmonton, and on practically the same parallel as
+Stockholm. The flour-mill that we now inspect is the most northerly
+wheat-mill on this continent, and it has been running for five years. It
+is the roller process, with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, the
+motor-power being a 40 H.P. Corliss engine. The wheat which feeds these
+rollers is all grown in nearby fields, and the resultant flour is
+consumed by the people of the lone posts of the Peace and the lower
+Mackenzie. Two years ago the H.B. Company paid to farmers, all of whom
+lived within a radius of five miles from the mill, the sum of $27,000
+spot cash for their wheat. An electric plant lights the mill and fort
+buildings, affording fifty six-candle-power lights.
+
+Right up to the door of the mill extends the sixty-acre wheat-field of
+the H.B. Company, from which Mr. Wilson computes that he will this year
+thrash two thousand bushels. If the H.B. wheat-field were to sell the H.B.
+mill these two thousand bushels at $1.25 a bushel (the ruling
+Vermilion price), there would be a net profit of $1500, after paying all
+expense of culture, to the credit of one branch of Mr. Wilson's
+commercial institution. For thirty years, wheat, oats, barley, and
+vegetables have been grown in Vermilion, not as an experiment, but as
+regular commercial crops. Cereals are sown late in April or early in
+May, and the harvest is gathered in August. More than once, wheat has
+matured in eighty-six days from seed-sowing to seed-garnering.
+
+Vermilion farmers boast sulkies and gang-ploughs and the latest geared
+McCormick, Massey-Harris, and Deering farm implements,--self-binders and
+seeders. Everything is up-to-date. We ourselves counted fifteen
+self-binders at work. And grain is not the whole story. The farmers own
+thoroughbred Ayrshire stock and splendid horses. I happened to be at the
+garden of the Church of England Mission when the potato-crop was being
+harvested, and found that seven bags of seed planted in the middle of
+May produced one hundred bags by the end of August. Five potatoes that I
+gathered haphazard from one heap weighed exactly five and one-half
+pounds. I photographed and weighed a collection of vegetables grown by
+Robert Jones on the Dominion Experimental Farm.
+
+[Illustration: Articles Made by Indians
+
+A--Wall-pocket of white deerskin, embroidered in silk-work, and bordered
+with ermine--the work of a Cree woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+B--Gloves of white deerskin embroidered in silk, the work of a Slavi
+woman on the Liard River (a branch of the Mackenzie).
+
+C, D, E, F, G, H, I--Moccasins as worn respectively by the Crees,
+Chipewyans, Slavis, Dog-Ribs, Yellow-Knives, Loucheux--all the work of
+the women.
+
+J.--Flour bag from the mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace, the most
+northerly flour-mill in America.
+
+K--Sinew, from close to the spine of the moose--used by the women of the
+North instead of thread.
+
+L--Very valuable net of willow-bark made by an old squaw at Fort
+Resolution. This is almost a lost art, and harks back to the pre-string
+days.
+
+M--The "crooked knife" or knife of the country.
+
+N--Match-box made from a copper kettle by an old Beaver Indian at Fort
+Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+O--_Babiche_, or rawhide of the moose or caribou--"the iron of the
+country."]
+
+One cauliflower weighed eight pounds, half a dozen turnips weighed nine
+pounds each, and twenty table beets would easily average six pounds
+each. The carrots and onions were sown in the open in mid-May and were
+as inviting specimens as I have ever seen. Tomatoes ripened in the open
+air on this farm on July 13th. Peas, sown on May 23rd and gathered on
+August 12th, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel. Experimental plots
+of turnips gave sixteen tons to the acre, and white carrots twelve tons.
+Apple-trees and roses we found flourishing on this farm, with
+twenty-five varieties of red, black, and white currants. The wheat story
+is of compelling interest. Preston wheat, sown on May 6th and cut on
+August 22nd, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel; Ladoga wheat, sown
+on the last day of April and cut on September 5th, ran sixty-four pounds
+to the bushel also, and early Riga weighed sixty-three pounds. In the
+garden of the R.C. Mission we were presented with splendid specimens of
+ripened corn and with three cucumbers grown in the open air, which
+weighed over a pound each.
+
+[Illustration: The Hudson's Bay Store]
+
+Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in
+extent than the whole of Belgium. There are probably a million acres of
+land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops
+like those cited. Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there
+are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white. They
+all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by
+hunting, trapping, and freighting. The settlement boasts two churches,
+two mission schools, and two trading stores,--a happy, prosperous, and
+very progressive community. Everything in the place points to this
+conclusion.
+
+The H.B. Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing
+$1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the
+monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats. This
+sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer _Peace River_,
+built here four years ago of native timber. She is a hundred and
+ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half
+feet and carrying forty tons burden. She can accommodate thirty
+passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes
+fifteen knots an hour. The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this
+boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.
+
+Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one
+man's logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of
+Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill. Edmond Paul's logs in
+one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at
+the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber. The biggest log in this raft was a
+twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which
+cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.
+
+Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and
+arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful
+of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and
+seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what
+has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole
+country spring when it is given rail communication with the
+plains-people to the south?
+
+Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious
+autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.
+Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these
+walls? Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and
+stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us
+to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home. It is a modern
+house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of
+hollyhocks on all sides. The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace,
+here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty. To the visitor who
+steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the
+reading man and the clever artificer. Scientific works of reference,
+good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged
+travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and
+human-nature, for five long months. The office furniture, hand-made of
+native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson's individual work in both
+design and execution. Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also
+a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these
+carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any
+one in the settlement, whether fort employé or not, who cares to come in
+here for a quiet hour to read.
+
+Kipling says, "You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile," but the
+Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line. In a corner of
+the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history. The
+honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of
+Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a
+sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by
+portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton. It
+carries on it the name of John Broadwood & Sons, London. Mrs. Wilson
+tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house
+to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance.
+The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of
+the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod
+Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.
+
+Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and
+the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B. Co., has put in a
+life of loving service among the people of Vermilion. Her knowledge of
+medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of
+need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother
+and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion.
+These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly
+kindness.
+
+Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with
+the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper. The country
+furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and
+bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made
+butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies
+whose four constituents--flour, lard, butter and fruit--are products of
+the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid
+fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild
+game--moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs,
+and mallards. Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen
+different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry,
+blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon. The salt comes from
+Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion
+beets if there should arise a market. What more would you? The
+Vermilionese on his fertile acres is as independent of the world outside
+as is the Eskimo in his Arctic igloo. The farm of Sheridan Lawrence,
+exhibiting its wide-stretching wheat-fields, some heads of which counted
+seventy-one kernels, with its patches of one-pound potatoes, twelve-foot
+sunflowers, and its quiverful of happy, tow-headed children, gives as
+sweet a picture of Canadian thrift and happiness as one would wish to
+see. Indeed, happiness seems to be the keynote of Vermilion, whether we
+seek it within the fort walls of the H.B. Co., on the fat acres of the
+farmers, or within the folds of Protestant or Roman Mission.
+
+[Illustration: Papillon, a Beaver Brave]
+
+We carry away with us two pictures, that we like to cherish, of the
+convent kiddies of Vermilion. The first thing we saw when we peered
+round a corner of this old-fashioned building was the bright face of
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury playing see-saw with a dozen wide-grinning
+Slavi babies. When the morning came when we were to bid reluctant
+good-bye to Vermilion and all its spontaneous kindness, the last sight
+that met our eyes before we turned the corner of the Peace was the whole
+convent force of Vermilion perched high on stumps and fence-rails,
+wishing us _bon voyage_ with fluttering pocket-handkerchiefs, while
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury, on a ladder, surmounted the crowd and waved
+her farewells with a table-cloth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
+
+
+"'Tis a summer such as broods
+O'er enchanted solitudes,
+Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods,
+And with lavish love outpours
+All the wealth of out-of-doors."
+
+--_James Whitcomb Riley_.
+
+[Illustration: Going to School in Winter]
+
+On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the
+little _Mee-wah-sin,_ and in the tiny tug _Messenger_ of the H.B.
+Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we
+puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around
+us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing
+cranes are flying.
+
+Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months
+of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect
+and created for herself a warm place in every heart. Se-li-nah, though,
+makes it impossible for us to pose as brave endurers of hardships. Each
+night and morning she carries her little pack on and off shore, takes
+her share of pot-luck at _meat-su,_ and is never cross. Bless the
+kiddie! If ablutions seem to her a work of supererogation and our daily
+play of toothbrush furnishes all the fascination of the unknown, still
+hers is the right stuff for pioneer lands and she has lessons to teach
+us in pluck and endurance.
+
+The first night out from Vermilion we made camp after dark and, on
+waking, found that in our blankets we had lain directly across four new
+bear-tracks. Moose-tracks are plentiful at every stopping-place, so we
+see to it that both guns and camera are primed. At eight next morning we
+pass Not-in-a-gu Seepee. Some Indians hail us, asking for tea, and from
+these we learn that ten families who made this their winter camp last
+season bagged eighty moose among them.
+
+At half-past two our chance came. To get away from the noise of the
+engine, the Kid and I had moved our work directly after breakfast to a
+flour-laden scow that we had in tow, and I was dictating this story to
+the machine when the sharp eyes of Showan in the distance spied a moose.
+He was on the shore cropping willows. It had been generously agreed that
+if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine, so in excited
+whispers the news is telegraphed to our end of the scow and my rifle is
+handed up. The fireman slows up on the engine, but still its throbbing
+sounds distressingly loud as we creep up on the feeding moose and scan
+the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are
+high,--perhaps one hundred and fifty feet--and sheer, but there are two
+gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly
+creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,--a
+regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those
+animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet
+biscuit. And now at last he sees us. I fire, and the shot just grazes
+his spine. Will he take to a gully? No, he plunges into the river
+instead and we follow him up in the little tug. One more shot is
+effective, and I have killed my premier moose. "Cruel!" you say. Well,
+just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat, as, with
+the exception of Vermilion's flesh-pots, we have done, and then find out
+if you would fly in the face of Providence when the Red Gods send you a
+young moose! To illuminate the problem I transcribe the menu of one
+sample week of the summer.
+
+[Illustration: My Premier Moose]
+
+This is the literal "dope sheet" of the camp cook:
+
+_Monday_:--Dried caribou and rice.
+
+_Tuesday_:--Salt fish and prunes.
+
+_Wednesday_:--Mess-pork and dried peaches.
+
+_Thursday_:--Salt horse and macaroni.
+
+_Friday_:--Sow-belly and bannock.
+
+_Saturday_:--Blue-fish and beans.
+
+_Sunday_:--Repeat.
+
+Dragged ashore, the moose proved to be a male of two prongs, about
+eighteen months old, and weighed perhaps four or five hundred pounds. A
+full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton. We are
+to learn that there are many viewpoints from which to approach a moose.
+The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo and Mrs. Gaudet each eloquently
+argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it,
+and Se-li-nah, looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in
+Cree, "_Marrow_ is nice." Poor young stripling of the Royal House of
+Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!
+
+The first thing Baptiste does is to plunge his penknife into the back to
+see how deep the fat is. We had noticed this testing process before. A
+bunch of feathers is always plucked off the new-killed bird that one can
+immediately gauge the gastronomic niche at which to set one's waiting
+stomach. No more voyaging to-night. The moose is cleaned and skinned.
+Mrs. Gaudet draws the skin. I claim the head. A little Indian boy, who
+with his mother had been added to our ship's crew at Carcajou Point,
+appropriates the kidneys, which he proceeds to roast in the ashes.
+Ten-year-old Bill evidently likes his devilled kidneys rare, for within
+three minutes we see him prancing round the camp, nibbling his dripping
+dainty from the point of an impaling stick.
+
+[Illustration: Beaver Camp, on Paddle River]
+
+Having sat round the barbecue half the night, we pull out late the next
+morning. And now, apprised by moccasin telegraph, we are all on the _qui
+vive_ to catch sight of a floating bride. A fur-trader attached to "The
+French Company" at Vermilion has been out on six months' leave and is
+bringing in a bride from Paris. We are to expect them to cross our
+course on a raft, floating in with the current of the Peace as we make
+our way upstream. We see the raft. All is excitement. We direct the
+steersman to draw close in, and the men prime their rifles for a salute.
+She is not visible,--floating brides on the Peace shrink evidently from
+being the cynosure of passing eyes. Our men fire their salute, the
+steersman on the raft looks puzzled when we, smiling our sympathy, peer
+over the edge of his craft, and see, instead of the Parisian bride,--a
+load of Poland pigs for Vermilion! It is the wrong raft. The real bride
+passes us in the gloaming ten hours later, when it is too dark to get a
+satisfactory photograph!
+
+On the evening of September 22nd we arrive at Peace River Crossing, or
+Peace River Landing, just a week out from Vermilion. Our course from
+there has been almost due south. We turn the little _Messenger_ back
+here and regretfully bid good-bye to our staunch and friendly boatmen.
+No people in the world could be pleasanter to travel with than these
+splendid men of the North. Indefatigable and ready for any emergency,
+they know their business and are always master of the situation;
+moreover, nature has dowered them with an intuitive delicacy as rare as
+it is pleasing. Through all these weeks, intensely interested as they
+are in everything that is new, never for a moment have they intruded
+upon us or our doings. At night there is not a man of them who will not
+walk a quarter of a mile through the woods rather than pass between our
+occupied tent and the camp fire. But let us offer to show them pictures
+or to explain the workings of the camera or the typewriter and it is a
+different story, for then every man Jack drops his oar or tump-line and
+rushes to our side like an excited schoolboy.
+
+Peace River Crossing is in latitude 56° N. and longitude 117° 20' W.
+From that far-off day in spring when we first touched the Clearwater we
+have been following in the historic footprints of Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie. We now take a day off, with the object of locating
+Mackenzie's last camp on the Peace, which he reached in 1792 and from
+which, in the spring of 1793, he started west across the map seeking an
+unknown route to the Pacific Ocean. We find the remains of that camp. It
+is in the corner of a potato-field a little way beyond Peace River
+Crossing and on the opposite side of the river. Only the foundations of
+the walls are left and the crumbling bricks of two old chimneys.
+Mackenzie was the first man to cross the continent from sea to sea north
+of the latitude of Mexico, and it was from this point where we stand
+that he launched his ambitious canoe. There is no more historic spot on
+the continent than that on which we stand this September day, and as yet
+it is all unmarked of commemorative stone or recording tablet. The lost
+camp had never been photographed until we brought our inquisitive camera
+to bear upon it.
+
+I stoop and pluck from where it nods behind the old chimney a wild
+larkspur, and as I half-mechanically count its forty-two seed-pods, I
+try hard to throw back my thoughts to the year 1792,--one hundred and
+sixteen years. It is a far call! Canada is tardy in her recognition of
+her early builders of Empire. Our cousins to the south would appear to
+be more appreciative. In song and story and by a memorial World's Fair
+the people of the United States have honoured the discoveries of Lewis
+and Clark, but Mackenzie crossed the continent a full dozen years in
+advance of these explorers.
+
+[Illustration: The Site of old Fort McLeod]
+
+Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where,
+amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company,
+a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is
+Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the
+noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours
+of dawn and "when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the
+grey." He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if
+he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting
+whisper, but its burden is ever the same.
+
+"Something lost behind the Ranges,
+Lost and waiting for you: Go!"
+
+No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to
+Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty
+and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his
+name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought
+uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not
+pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in
+astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for
+a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791.
+His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western
+Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of
+Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves "somewhere" far beyond
+the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong
+determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort
+Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we
+stand. The breaking of the spring ice of 1793 sent him forth on the
+quest of that Northwest Passage by Land.
+
+"O Young Mariner,
+Down to the harbor call your companions,
+Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas,
+And, ere it vanishes over the margin,
+After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!"
+
+We have not time to recount the chapters of the story, to name the
+streams ascended, the boiling gorges passed, the discontent allayed, the
+encouragement given, the lonely night-watches when the leader himself
+looked for comfort to his new-found stars. The Fraser was discovered,
+traced for a while; and then, striking westward, Mackenzie heard the
+beat of the surf upon the rocks, and came out from among the pines to
+the silver Pacific sparkling in the sun. It was a sweet day in summer's
+prime, and as the gulls cried overhead and the sun mixed scent of
+seaweed with balsam breath from in-shore, we can imagine but not divine
+the feelings of that brave man who had thrown himself face-downward on
+the sand and from whose presence the awed companions stole silently
+away. We remember the words of another builder of Empire,--
+
+"Anybody might have found it,
+But God's whisper came to me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
+
+
+"A haze on the far horizon,
+  The infinite tender sky,
+The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,
+  And the wild geese sailing high,--
+And all over upland and lowland
+  The charm of the goldenrod.
+Some of us call it Autumn,
+  And others call it God."
+
+--_W.H. Carruth_.
+
+At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is
+here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good
+Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they
+left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs
+twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons,
+which weigh over ten pounds each.
+
+To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies
+present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and
+the Pouce Coupé. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square
+miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water
+are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been
+damaged by frost.
+
+Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande
+Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande
+Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square
+miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their
+cattle longer than six weeks each winter.
+
+[Illustration: Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace]
+
+The Pouce Coupé would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace
+River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves
+the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in
+mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September.
+Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give
+abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in,
+tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and
+pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the
+naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn,
+and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This
+is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and
+the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that
+tickle his palate,--blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries,
+willow-berries, and saskatoons.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Dunvegan on the Peace]
+
+On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles
+south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in
+our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand
+miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the
+suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost
+all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times
+and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us
+through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open
+glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us
+bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this
+land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail
+is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and
+tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are
+fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the
+very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this
+Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling
+amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56° N. I pluck
+a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.
+
+Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser
+Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer
+civilisation,--the "civilisation" of Chicago! A strong desire possesses
+us to about-face and back to the woods again.
+
+It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we
+intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into
+sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,--men, women,
+children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering
+flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look
+up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the
+south,--one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty
+picture,--the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns
+with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. "It is the _Man with
+the Hoe_," I murmur. "Yes," assents the Kid, "and _The Angelus at Lesser
+Slave_."
+
+We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey.
+Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear
+delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the "horse
+latitudes"--though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey
+leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page.
+The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat
+and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs.
+Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole,
+this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses'
+mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the
+act making possible the writing of this "immortal work"!
+
+[Illustration: Fort St. John on the Peace]
+
+Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody
+rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a
+gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed
+on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey
+and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in
+Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly
+rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at
+dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the
+latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the
+vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant
+bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year.
+To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot
+straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the
+healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.
+
+[Illustration: Where King Was Arrested]
+
+There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in
+which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and,
+driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph
+giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.
+
+[Illustration: Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons]
+
+By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,--tall, straight,
+fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch
+blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one
+granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His
+grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a
+century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He
+married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the
+time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the
+notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to
+lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum,
+he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the
+flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy.
+It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can
+navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this
+Scots-Sioux,--strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party
+of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching
+Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who,
+too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec
+Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating
+sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile,
+of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of
+the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec
+has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, "Do
+not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?"
+
+Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young
+fellow of the H.B. Co. says, "It's beastly bad form to ask any man who
+comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a
+wilful-missing, that's his privilege." However, fate has thrown in our
+way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan
+up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down
+at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or
+less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise
+herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon
+make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs.
+Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.
+
+[Illustration: Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron]
+
+Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty
+years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged
+eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little
+brothers and cousins, _en famille_, they pitched off from Little Red
+River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger
+men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was
+seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it,
+and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless,
+they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who
+nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.
+
+How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the
+woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her
+clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little
+children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters
+who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat
+came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike
+became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate
+of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her
+sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket
+between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make
+Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful
+experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each
+feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out,
+thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping
+companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas.
+The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then
+the sister died. _How_ she died God and the watching stars alone know.
+Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as
+food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but
+admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.
+
+Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language
+which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same
+word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own
+volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human
+imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony
+undergone by these poor creatures--women and children with affections
+like our own--shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel
+camp of death!
+
+Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a
+recluse, shunned of all Indians as a "Wetigo" or "Cannibal." A friend
+was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon
+Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years
+passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is
+The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been
+born.
+
+As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly
+caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the
+Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat
+difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is "even
+as you and me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
+
+
+"I hear the tread of Nations yet to be,
+The first low wash of waves where soon shall roll a human sea."
+
+[Illustration: A Peace River Pioneer]
+
+Taking passage on the steamer _Northern Light_, we leave the settlement
+of Lesser Slave Lake, this world-in-small, on the first day of October,
+and, from here to Athabasca Landing, travel in company with Mr. J.K.
+Cornwall, President of the Northern Transportation Company. Between the
+time of our journey and this writing, Mr. Cornwall has been returned as
+Member of the Alberta Legislature for the district we are now
+traversing. He certainly knows his constituency better than most
+representatives do. There is scarcely a mile of these unmapped ways that
+he has not tramped alone; not an Indian guide in the North can last with
+"Jim" for a week, in summer, or on snow-shoes. When some Lesser Slave
+half-breeds were told that Mr. Cornwall was going to run for the
+legislature against Allie Brick, one of them said, "Jim wins. Allie
+Brick can't run. Not much fun in that race. No man on Peace River can
+run like Jim."
+
+Mr. Cornwall's pronouncement on the North Country can be taken as
+authoritative. He says, "Practically all the timber of any commercial
+value between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains is in these
+northern watersheds. This timber will be a very important factor in the
+coming development of Prairie Canada to the south, and fortunately, too,
+it is most get-at-able. There are thirty-six hundred miles of river and
+lake in the North on which steamers are plying to-day and which are open
+for navigation for six months in every year. The first railway that
+comes in will tap a system of transporation equalled only on this
+continent by the Mississippi and St. Lawrence with the Great Lakes. The
+American Government has spent two hundred million dollars on the
+improvement of Mississippi navigation, and to-day it is not as valuable
+a national asset as the great Athabasca-Mackenzie-Peace system is as it
+came from the hand of Nature. Thirty thousand bushels of wheat that
+would grade 'No. 1 Northern' was produced in the Peace River Country
+this year, besides thousands of bushels of oats and barley. In this
+Northland there are 100,000,000 acres of land fit for the growing of
+grain."
+
+Charles Dickens used to carry a note-book in his vest-pocket in which he
+jotted down names that tickled his fancy. Were Dickens to travel this
+route with us, his name-note-books would bulge. Where Lesser Slave River
+issues out of Lesser Slave Lake, we found Tom Lilac in earnest
+conversation with Jilly Loo-bird. Jilly has navigated the North all the
+way from Athabasca Landing to Hudson's Hope on the Peace, seeking a
+wife, and still lacks his connubial rib. Being told that ladies are on
+board, he breathlessly asks, "What colour?" When he learns that we are
+white, Jilly makes a dash for some cache in the woods which takes the
+place of clothes-closet, but the steamer has passed on before he
+emerges. Another lost chance, both for Jilly and the writer! For two or
+three miles here, where the river runs out of the lake, it never
+freezes, and ducks and wild-fowl remain here all the winter in open
+water. Last month, in this immediate vicinity, no fewer than one hundred
+moose were killed. Lilac tells us that last winter there was no snow
+here until March, and two winters ago absolutely no snow fell whatever,
+so that the sleighs were not gotten out and all the freighting had to be
+done with waggons. "No need to starve here," says Lilac, "the trout run
+up to forty pounds each. There are whitefish and grayling, and I gather
+berries all the year round. In summer, I get the red and white currants,
+raspberries, saskatoons, blueberries, gooseberries, and strawberries,
+and all winter long there are both high-bush and low-bush cranberries."
+
+[Illustration: Three Generations]
+
+Travelling with us are Judge Noel and Judge Beck, making the first
+circuit of justice through this country. Although they had come all the
+way from Edmonton looking for trouble, so splendid has been the
+surveillance of the Mounted Police here that no one could scrape up one
+case for the judges to try. The Peace River people seemed somehow to
+think that in greeting the judges with an empty house the settlement had
+failed to make good. Some one comforts them with setting forth as the
+ethics of the case the fact that the judges should be presented with
+white gloves, as the traditional sign of an empty docket. Again is Peace
+River chagrined, neither The Company nor the French Company has white
+kids in stock. Each judge is made the recipient of a handsome pair of
+moose-skin gloves, as a substitute, ornamented with beads and quills of
+the porcupine.
+
+At Norris's, we leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift
+Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout. The Dominion Government, with a
+series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to
+make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel. Where the Lesser Slave
+River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, and from
+there to Athabasca Landing float down the last stretch of our northern
+waterways of delight. There is frost each night now and the deciduous
+trees on the banks are a rich riot of colour. We resurrect from the
+depths all the warm clothing available and have opportunity of testing
+in their own latitudes the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and
+other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.
+
+Every passenger who floats with us enlarges our knowledge and enriches
+our vocabulary. Judge Noel's bodyguard is a young stripling of the
+Mounted Police, born in dear old Lunnon. It is always interesting to
+note the different things of which people are proud. Old men boast of
+their age and young ones of their youth. The fat woman in the side-show
+is arrogant over her avoirdupois; the debutante glories in her slender
+waist; and the globe-trotter triumphs in the miles he has travelled.
+Wyllie claimed distinction in never having left Chipewyan. This Mounted
+Policeman, who stretches out on the scow, plumes himself on two things:
+"I 'old the dahnsin' championship of Edmonton. I got a gold watch lahst
+winter for waltzin'." We smile approval, and the constable continues, "I
+waltzed,--reversin',--an 'our-an'-a-'alf! And--," straightening himself
+up, "I am the best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta."
+
+[Illustration: A Family on the Lesser Slave]
+
+Rich is the descriptive language of the North, and we lie awake on the
+scows, rolled in our blankets, loath to lose any of it. "Jim" is at the
+sweep. Many of the men are going out from the North for the first time
+in four or five years. They also seem too interested to slumber, and all
+night long the conversation goes on. A priest is describing some man who
+seems to be hard to identify. "You know him,--the son of the ole man
+with the patch on his nose wot died. I christen him last winter." No one
+is more apt at naming than these men. Two days ago, at the treaty at
+Lesser Slave, when a smiling couple drew five dollars for a baby one day
+old, a Cree bystander dubbed the baby "dat little meal-ticket." A young
+girl who came up to claim her money was nicknamed "Pee-shoo," or "The
+Lynx," because of her bad temper. So we see where all the old cats of
+the south come from.
+
+[Illustration: A One Night Stand]
+
+
+The scow glides on, and we doze, but do not sleep. In the dark she hits
+something and bumps us wide awake to hear the reassuring, "This is where
+Pat Cunningham's horses were drownded last week." Under Jim's command,
+everybody works, even learned judges from Edmonton. He says, "Take
+another shot at the oars, and then you can hit the feathers." In the
+morning, one half-breed fails to turn up for _meat-su_ and the comment
+is, "He feels the feathers pullin'." "Don't blime 'im," remarks the
+constable, passing the tea, "only fools and 'orses work."
+
+"He reached out his hand for a drink," rendered into trans-Athabascan
+would be, "He got his thievin' irons on the joy-juice," or "He stretched
+his mud-hooks for the fight-water." "He set him a-foot for his horse"
+means "He stole his horse," and from this we derive all such phrases as,
+"He set him a-foot for his blankets," "He set him a-foot for his furs,"
+"He set him a-foot for his wife."
+
+The springy tussocks of grass growing in swampy places are _têtes des
+femmes_, a name that pleased our fancy and made us think each time we
+negotiated them of walking over the swaying heads of women in a crowd.
+To call the tribes together, Indians are wont to send out significant
+little pieces of wood. The announcement in the society columns, if the
+Indians had any, would be, "The Crees sent out chips for a crush." An
+Indian far down the Mackenzie had a name that kings might envy. He was
+known among his tribe as _The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps_. When a
+beardless and ardent missionary approached this splendid chief, wanting
+to "convert" him to the Christian religion, the old man replied with
+indulgent dignity, "My son, for eighty years have I served the Great
+Spirit in my own way. I fear I am now too old to change."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
+
+
+"The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as
+the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself."
+
+--_Leviticus, XIX_, 34.
+
+[Illustration: A Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba]
+
+Edmonton once more. Two Spanish sailors shipwrecked and navigating the
+Pacific on a log, search the shore for a sign. Into what land are they
+drifting? The one at the bow (does a log have a bow?) sees something
+through the haze--"_Gracias a Dios_! Praise be to God, it is a
+Christian country! I see the gallows!" We too get our sign. We reach
+Edmonton on Convocation Day.
+
+Most young countries for the first ten years of their lives confine
+their energies to roads, bridges, transportation--things of the
+market-place. Alberta has been a full-fledged Province of Canada for
+barely three years, and, coming out of the wilds, we sit on the back
+benches and see her open the doors of her first Provincial University.
+The record is unique and significant. On the banks of the Saskatchewan
+rise the walls of the new Parliament Buildings, a replica in small of
+Minnesota's State Capitol at St. Paul. This new Province, carved out of
+the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within
+it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil
+in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a
+hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young
+people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of
+happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would
+you?
+
+The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan.
+On his promised visit to the Orkneys the old man had gotten as far as
+Winnipeg, where the crowds of the modern city affrighted him. "Miss
+Cameron, the men on the streets were as trees walking, and no man
+stopped to ask how the other was doing. If that is the world, I wanted
+to go no farther. I'm going back to Chipewyan, and I will take my family
+with me. We go home with dogs on the first ice!" Poor Wyllie! Before the
+bells rang out the Old Year, his soul heard the summons none may
+disregard, and alone he went out on the Long Journey.
+
+What of Inspector Pelletier, Walker, Joyce, and Conway, essaying the
+traverse from Resolution to Hudson Bay? For weeks after coming out we
+waited for news of the party. Month succeeded month and no word came out
+of the white silence. Hudson Bay has no daily mail service. "There ain't
+no busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay." It is not until March that
+the welcome word comes that the original party safely made salt water.
+The relieved tension at Regina headquarters and the joy of personal
+friends is dimmed by the news of the death of Corporal Donaldson, who
+joined the others at Chesterfield Inlet. Donaldson, in company with
+Corporal Reeves, started down Hudson Bay in an open boat and encountered
+a herd of walruses. Enraged and maddened at the shots of the men, one
+huge animal made a charge, the boat was upset, and Donaldson, trying to
+make shore, was drowned. Reeves survived.
+
+It seems to be a chapter of accidents. Just as this book goes to press
+we learn of a double fatality which attended the transport of the 1909
+outfit of Count von Hammerstein. This plucky developer of McMurray
+oilfields, while running Grand Rapids on the Athabasca (the rapids which
+we had descended in an empty while the other sturgeon-heads were
+discharging freight at Grand Rapids Island), struck a boulder. The boat
+turned turtle and the three men were tossed into the torrent,--von
+Hamerstein, V. Volksooky, a young Russian, and a French half-breed, La
+France. The Count was washed ashore and escaped, but the others were
+drowned. Deaths such as these are the price of Empire. When the
+railroad reaches the Athabasca, the running of these dangerous rapids
+will no longer be necessary.
+
+[Illustration: Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway]
+
+In the footprints of Back and Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and Sir
+John Franklin, for six months we have been treading the silent places.
+We have thought much of these faith-possessed men who found the roads
+that others follow. In faith they wrought. Canada does well to honour
+these great of old, and that she appreciates the work of her early
+explorers is shown in the fact that British Columbia recently granted a
+pension to the granddaughter of Simon Fraser, the man who in 1808 first
+sailed down the great river that bears his name. But the day of our
+great men is not over; Canada still in her great North and West has
+Pathfinders of Empire. The early voyageurs made their quest in the
+dugout and the birchbark; and the tools of these are rails of steel and
+iron horses.
+
+[Illustration: William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern
+Railway]
+
+We are accustomed to look upon a railroad as a cold thing of dirt and
+sand and rock, ties and steel,--a mechanical something associated with
+gradients and curves. But the history of railroading in Canada is one
+long romance; back of each line is its creative wizard. We are too near
+these men to get their proper measure; the historian of the future will
+place their names on Canada's bead-roll:--Charles M. Hays, the forceful
+President of the Grand Trunk Pacific; Mackenzie and Mann; William Whyte
+of the Canadian Pacific. Canada owes much to Caledonia. Nine-tenths of
+those pioneers of pioneers, the trading adventurers of the H.B. Company,
+came from Scotland, that grey land where a judicious mixture of
+Scripture and Shorter Catechism, oatmeal and austerity, breeds boys of
+dour determination and pawky wit, boys who, whatever their shortcomings,
+are not wont to carry their wishbone where their backbone ought to be. A
+conspicuous example of the dynamic Scottish Canadian, hale at sixty-six,
+is William Whyte, Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At an
+age when most men are content to "drowse them close by a dying fire,"
+William Whyte finds himself in complete charge of all the affairs of the
+Canadian Pacific Railway Company between the Great Lakes and the
+Pacific. Through the positions of brakemen, freight clerk, yard master,
+conductor, night station-agent, passenger agent, this man worked on his
+own passage along Fame's ladder. Twenty years of adolescence and
+preparation, twenty years with the Grand Trunk, a quarter of a century
+with the Canadian Pacific, this is William Whyte's record of splendid
+service. He has always played the game and he is still in the harness.
+
+[Illustration: Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern
+Railway]
+
+[Illustration: William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway]
+
+When people enquired of the early Christians, "What do you call your new
+religion?" they answered, "We call it _The Road_." If religion is the
+best work of a man made visible, as I think it is, then the Canadian
+Northern Road may well stand for the religious expression of the men
+who made it. It takes more than money, more than dreams, more than
+ambition, for two men in twelve years to build, own, and personally
+control five thousand miles of railway. As Riley says, it takes sweat. A
+mile a day for twelve years,--this is the construction-record of the
+Canadian Northern. It sounds like the story of Jonah's gourd. In 1896,
+nothing. In 1909, a railroad line with earnings of ten million dollars a
+year west of Port Arthur alone, and twelve thousand people on the
+regular pay-roll. Beginning in Manitoba and operating in the three
+prairie Provinces, the Canadian Northern is primarily a western railway,
+its remarkable growth being coincident with and closely related to the
+tide of immigration.
+
+[Illustration: In the Wheat Fields]
+
+As a case in point, on our way south from Edmonton we pass through the
+divisional point of Vermilion on the Canadian Northern, which is not to
+be confounded with our Far North Vermilion-on-the-Peace. Vermilion
+exemplifies wonderfully the Go-Fever and the Grow-Fever of the
+Prairies. Before it was three months old its citizens had organised a
+Board of Trade, had given it a Methodist Church, a newspaper, a bank, a
+public school, three lumber-yards, three hotels, three restaurants, four
+implement warehouses, two hardware stores, two butcher shops, four real
+estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a
+steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a
+bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two
+doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There
+were two pool-rooms and a bowling-alley.
+
+Farther south we reach the town of Vonda. The Canadian Northern reached
+this neighbourhood, and the town-site was surveyed in June, 1905. That
+year Vonda shipped over the line one hundred thousand bushels of wheat,
+and in 1906 her exports were five hundred thousand bushels. The Canadian
+farmer looks upon the railroad as his friend; you cannot expect _him_ to
+use the inclusive condemnation, "Corporations have no souls." The main
+line of the Canadian Northern runs from Port Arthur on Lake
+Superior--where, by the way, stands the world's largest grain
+elevator--to beyond Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan, operating in the
+heart of one gigantic wheat-farm. The method of construction has been
+unique. The owners commenced to build branch railways almost before they
+had a main line. Little spurs to small elevators grew into long branches
+flanked with bigger elevators, and the elevators evolved into villages,
+towns, and cities, until to-day the result of twelve years' growth shows
+a main line of thirteen hundred miles, with over three thousand miles
+of branch railways. An orchard tree is a good fruit-bearer when the
+thick clustering branches are more in evidence than the long thin trunk,
+and the same applies to railroads. But this main line will grow, too.
+Working out from its wheaten heart, its natural line of growth is east
+to Hudson Bay, north beyond Edmonton, and west to the Pacific. Surely
+the tentacles are pushing out. Already the Alberta Legislature has
+granted the Canadian Northern a charter to Athabasca Landing, and one
+hundred miles of steel will here tap all the lush land watered by the
+Peace and the Athabasca.
+
+More interesting than the line which gridirons the wheat-lands we are
+passing through, are the men who made it. To try to write the history of
+Western Canada's development and not speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann
+would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without
+mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil
+Rhodes of Canada--gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and
+with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher,
+he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of
+action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a
+saw-mill. Three things come to him as priceless treasure out of the
+self-discipline of these experiences: a rare aptitude to see and to
+focus the central idea of any proposition, quick and unerring decision,
+and the power of ready calculation. "I am seldom wrong in a figure," is
+one of his few admissions about himself. The President of the Canadian
+Northern travels without a secretary, dictates letters sparingly, and
+works in an office as bare of adornment as a monk's cell.
+
+And his working partner? Donald D. Mann is a man of deeds rather than
+words. James J. Hill has declared Mr. Mann to be the greatest railway
+builder in the world. Mr. Mann was born in Ontario not far from the
+sleepy town of Acton and just six miles east of Rockwood, the birthplace
+of James J. Hill. These two boys learned to swim in the same
+swimming-hole. One wonders from what roadside spring they quaffed the
+draught which sent them railroad-building. Mr. Mann thinks it a great
+advantage to be born a country boy, for he says it makes a lad frugal,
+strong, and resourceful. It worked out this way in his own case at
+least, for there is not a thing in railroad building that Mr. Mann
+cannot do with his own hands, from shoeing a mule to finding the best
+pass in the Rockies through which to slide his iron horse down to the
+sea. Direct, strong, simple, he knows how to control himself and manage
+others. D.D. Mann is a conspicuous example of what a Canadian boy has
+managed to accomplish by his own efforts. The beauty of this Western
+Canada is that it holds out opportunities to every plucky lad who has
+initiative and who is willing to work; nothing is stratified, the whole
+thing is formative.
+
+While the steel kings are letting the light of day into this great
+granary, they are being helped by a government representative, as
+democratic and direct as any of the pathmakers whose visible work we
+have been noticing. The Hon. Frank Oliver, Canada's Minister of the
+Interior, is essentially a self-made man. Before the railroad men
+realised their vision splendid, young Mr. Oliver and his bride rode into
+Edmonton on an ox-cart, with a modest little printing-press tucked away
+among the wedding-gifts and household goods. Oliver was a practical
+printer and soon issued a hand-dodger called by courtesy a newspaper.
+The editing habit sticks. The Minister of the Interior owns and
+publishes the Edmonton _Bulletin_. Mr. Mann says, "I like building
+railroads"; Mr. Oliver might parody him and say, "I like building
+newspapers."
+
+[Illustration: Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior]
+
+Arrived at Winnipeg, we look back across this great prairie we have
+twice traversed. The land stands ready to produce bread for the nations;
+Nature has done her part, now man must do his. The two greatest needs of
+Western Canada to-day are transportation and immigration. Of the one we
+have spoken; the other claims our interest even more compelling, for man
+is more vital than machinery. Canada is a country with a meagre past, a
+solid present, and an illimitable future.
+
+She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man's
+sky,--where wilderness and man are meeting. The flood of immigration
+hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the
+immigration policy of a government. It is the natural sequence of the
+economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least
+resistance to a more favourable situation. The people who are coming in
+are not dreamers but workers. "The world's greatest wheat-farm," says
+the economist. It is more than this: it is a human crucible, and we are
+witnessing here the birth-throes of an entirely new nation.
+
+[Illustration: Threshing Grain]
+
+While seventy-five per cent of Canada's wheat-farmers are either
+Canadian, American, or British-born, and of the class that preserves the
+homogeneity of the race, every country on the map pays tribute to the
+plains. Austrians are here and Galicians, Hungarians and Belgians,
+Dutch and French and Germans, Italians and Polish, the Russian
+Doukhobortsi, Finns and Danes and Icelanders, Swedes in thousands and
+stalwart Norwegians. South Africans and West Indians are coming in with
+Bermudians and Jamaicans and the bearded Spaniard. Far off on the
+Pacific Coast, strangers are knocking at the western gate,--Chinese,
+Japanese, and Hindoos.
+
+[Illustration: Doukhobors Threshing Flax]
+
+There is no Established Church in Canada; it is the freest land in the
+world. On his one hundred and sixty government-given acres, the new
+arrival may worship his God in his own way. The Greek Church in Winnipeg
+has a Bishop who one day each year makes holy water of the Red River
+when the Czar is performing the same blessing on the Neva. Down in
+Southern Alberta refugee Mormons from Salt Lake grow sugar-beets,
+revere the memory of Brigham Young, and multiply after their kind. Until
+within two years ago the expatriated Russian Doukhobors maintained a
+commonwealth of ten thousand souls, eschewing liquors and flesh-meats,
+making the prairie blossom into bumper harvests, and holding all things
+in common.
+
+Winnipeg has three thousand Icelanders who, every August, take a day off
+to celebrate the fact that the Danish King, in 1874, granted a
+constitution to Iceland. When you ask them why they came to America,
+they say, "Did not our Lief Ericcson discover this continent, why
+shouldn't we come?" The Icelanders boast two members in the Manitoba
+legislature. A Mennonite is a member of the Parliament of Alberta. The
+first graduate of Wesley College in Winnipeg to find a place on the
+staff of his Alma Mater is also a Mennonite. Winnipeg has several, Roman
+Catholic Polish lawyers. Statistics prove that the young Jewish people
+of Western Canada patronise the public libraries more than any other
+class or race. All the citizens-in-the-making are closely interested in
+politics. Recently there was chronicled the formation in Winnipeg of a
+Syrian Liberal Club and a Syrian Conservative Club. Up in Edmonton the
+Galicians (Ruthenians?) have just organised a corps of volunteer militia
+to serve the Canadian country of their adoption.
+
+[Illustration: Sir William Van Horne, First President of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway]
+
+The Americanisation of Canada? During the past seven years over three
+hundred and fifty thousand people have come to us from the United
+States. Is this American invasion to be feared politically? Western
+Canada has no more desirable citizens than those who come to us from
+the south. They are not failures, but are people who have made good,
+intent on making better. One generation at the most,--sometimes but a
+few years,--converts these into Canadian voters. The troubled English
+brother should remember that when "American" farmers in Canada pronounce
+on Canadian matters they do so constitutionally at the polls and as
+Canadian citizens. As Canadians we believe that our national
+institutions, though far from perfect, are in some respects superior to
+those of the United States. We believe they are at once more elastic,
+more responsive to the popular will, and more stable because more
+elastic. The west is gaining in political power as it gains in
+population and prosperity, and fortunately our government machinery has
+been well tested before it is called upon to feel the strain of our
+rapidly-increasing population. Canada may construct where older nations
+must reconstruct, and if we borrow an American institution or two,
+provided it be a good one, let no man hold up hands in holy horror.
+Japan has borrowed nationally whenever she saw, lying around loose,
+something she could use, and Japan is as Japanese at heart as she was in
+the days of the Tycoon and the two-sworded Samurai. Belgium to-day,
+after centuries of contiguity and intercourse, is not exactly France;
+and little Switzerland, surrounded by the Powers, will be Switzerland
+till the last curtain-fall.
+
+"Is Canada loyal to England?" is a question that sometimes meets us. No,
+Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let
+England see to it that she, too, is loyal.
+
+Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the
+Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace,
+are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated
+as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and
+the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land.
+God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the
+diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people in
+time will intermarry,--Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with
+these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations.
+Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type
+will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into
+the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who will step out?
+
+In the point of population, Canada begins the twentieth century where
+the United States began the nineteenth. The race is ours to run. Wise
+the nation, as is the individual, who can learn his lesson from a page
+torn out of his neighbour's book, learn what to follow and what to
+avoid. Our fore-elders who laid the foundations for us laid them
+four-square. As Canadians, we owe a debt to the Fathers of Confederation
+and their successors. In the West, our particular thanks are due to the
+Hudson's Bay Company, the R.N.W.M.P., and all those factors which
+established British law "in the beginning." Canada has never seen a
+lynching; we have had no Indian war; with but one weak-kneed exception
+there has been no attempt to hold up a train within our Western borders.
+This is the inheritance of the people of this generation, and on this
+foundation we must build. Our hope is in the children.
+
+On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had
+been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New
+Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary. They were
+all singing "_The Maple Leaf Forever_." It is the lessons these children
+are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the
+future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel
+wheat. In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed. Many
+signs are full of hope. Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with
+dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children
+in school. Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post. At
+all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed
+out with them!
+
+May I close with a purely personal note? At the end of a summer which
+had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman
+priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my
+life. We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls,
+the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the
+Lake of the Woods country. I was anxious to get the story of the
+recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs. But
+the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve. We
+turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary. Looking in
+at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a
+blackboard problem. "If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a
+trench 82 yards long----." And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse
+stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.
+
+"You are interested?" queried the Father.
+
+"Yes," I acknowledged, "I once taught school."
+
+He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.
+
+"I taught school for twenty-five years," I admitted.
+
+We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he
+turned to me with, "And you taught school--for twen-ty five years?"
+
+I nodded my head, and we went on. At the next landing the remark was
+repeated. At the foot of the stairs he excused himself and came back
+with the photographs which he presented to me with an Old World courtesy
+and dignity. Grasping my hand in farewell, once more the man of God
+wondered, "And for twen-ty five years you taught school. And you remain
+so--" He hesitated for the word, and I wondered what it would be. At
+last it came,--the tribute of one who expected to teach school all his
+life to one who had put in a quarter of a century at the work and still
+survived,--"You have taught school for twen-ty five years, _and you
+remain so glad!_"
+
+And this is the keynote of what the summer has left with us. As
+Canadians, looking at this Western Canada which has arrived and thinking
+of the lands of Canada's fertile Northland far beyond, for the future we
+are full of optimism, and of the present we are _glad_.
+
+
+
+ROUTES OF TRAVEL
+
+ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO THE ARCTIC VIA THE ATHABASCA AND MACKENZIE RIVER
+SYSTEMS.
+
+MILES     PLACE                PASSENGER              FREIGHT TARIFF      MODE OF TRAVEL                               TIMES
+                                TARIFF                  per cwt.
+  0   Edmonton
+100   Athabasca Landing         $8.00                    $1.00         Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy              Twice a week all year round
+
+
+                            DOWN      RETURN     DOWN    RETURN
+                           STREAM    UPSTREAM   STREAM  UPSTREAM
+  0   Athabasca Landing                                                Northern Transportation Co.'s SS.
+120   Pelican Rapids       $ 7.50    $ 7.50     $  .75   $  .75         _Midnight Sun_ (when business offers)
+165   Grand Rapids          10.00     15.00       1.50     1.50          or scows. From Athabasca Landing
+                                                                         to Grand Rapids.
+252   Fort McMurray         20.00     27.50       3.25     3.25        Scows from Grand Rapids to Fort
+                                                                         McMurray
+437   Fort Chipewyan        35.00     45.00       4.50     4.50        H.B. Co's SS. _Grahame_ (sternwheel
+539   Smith's Landing       45.00     55.00       5.50     5.50          river steamer, 130 ft. x 28 ft.;
+                                                                         accommodates 30 passengers; blankets
+                                                                         supplied; bathroom; meals served 50         From June to
+                                                                         cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).         August inclusive[1]
+                                                                         From Fort McMurray to Smith's
+                                                                         Landing.
+555   Fort Smith             48.00     58.00       6.25    6.25        H.B. Co. Transport, portage by teams
+                                                                         from Smith's Landing to Fort Smith.
+749   Fort Resolution        56.00     68.00       7.25    8.25        H.B. Co's SS. _Mackenzie River_
+819   Hay River              59.00     73.00       7.75    9.25          (strong new sternwheel, lake and
+869   Fort Rae               62.00     78.00       8.25   10.25          river steamer; accommodates 50
+917   Fort Providence        65.00     82.00       8.25   10.25          passengers, same conditions as _Grahame_
+1078   Fort Simpson          73.00     92.00       9.25   12.25          above). From Fort Smith to Fort
+1214   Fort Wrigley          80.00    102.00      10.25   14.25          Macpherson.
+1398   Fort Norman           87.00    112.00      11.25   16.25
+1572   Fort Good Hope        93.00    122.00      12.25   18.25
+1780   Arctic Red River     100.00    130.00      13.00   19.50
+1854   Fort Macpherson      103.00    133.00      13.75   21.25
+        (Peel's River)
+
+[Footnote 1: For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Edmonton Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO PEACE RIVER, VIA THE ATHABASCA RIVER (UP
+STREAM), LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LESSER SLAVE LAKE.
+
+MILES       PLACE                 PASSENGER     FREIGHT TARIFF  MODE OF TRAVEL                                                     TIMES
+                                    TARIFF         per cwt.
+   0   Edmonton
+ 100   Athabasca Landing            $8.00           $1.00       Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy                      Twice a week all year round
+
+
+   0   Athabasca Landing                                        Northern Transportation Co.'s SS.
+  75   Mouth of Lesser Slave                                    _Midnight Sun_ (sternwheel river
+       River                        $6.00          $ .80        steamer, 120 ft. long x 24 ft. beam;
+                                                                accomodates 35 in staterooms; passengers
+                                                                supply their own blankets;
+                                                                meals served 50 cents each; freight-carrying
+                                                                capacity 50 tons). From
+                                                                Athabasca Landing to Mouth of
+                                                                Lesser Slave River.
+
+  91   Norris's (head of rapids)    8.00            1.40        Portage 16 miles in N.T. Co's passenger
+                                                                and freight waggons from                             From May 15 to
+                                                                Mouth of Lesser Slave River to                       Oct. 15.[2]
+                                                                Norris's (head of rapids).
+
+ 194   Shaw's Point on Lesser
+       Slave Lake                  16.00            2.50        N.T. Co.'s SS. _Northern Light_ (sidewheel
+                                                                river and lake steamer, 100
+                                                                ft. long x 26 ft. beam; accommodates
+                                                                35 in staterooms; passengers
+                                                                supply their own blankets; meals
+                                                                served 50 cents each; freight capacity
+                                                                30 tons). From Norris's to
+                                                                Shaw's Point.
+
+ 201   Lesser Slave Lake Settlement                             Portage 7 miles to the settlement.
+
+
+   0   Lesser Slave Lake Settlement                             From Lesser Slave Lake Settlement to
+                                  $10.00            2.00        Peace River Crossing, teams and
+                                    to                          drivers may be hired; fare depends
+                                   25.00                        on number of passengers; takes 3                      All the year round
+                                 according                      days. Stopping places at intermediate
+                                 to number                      points, with stabling and hay;
+                                                                bunkhouses for travellers who supply
+  90   Peace River Crossing (Peace                              their own bedding and provisions.
+       River Landing)
+
+[Footnote 2: For further particulars regarding dates and rates, application 
+should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K. Cornwall, M.P.P.,
+of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to A.G. Harrison, 
+Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+PEACE RIVER ROUTES:--(1) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING UP TO HUDSON'S HOPE.
+(2) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING DOWN TO FORT CHIPEWYAN.
+
+MILES       PLACE                 PASSENGER             FREIGHT TARIFF          MODE OF TRAVEL                                                     TIMES
+                                    TARIFF                 per cwt.
+
+                                UPSTREAM RETURN         UPSTREAM RETURN         Having arrived at Peace River Crossing,
+                                          DOWN                    DOWN          the traveller may go up the
+                                         STREAM                  STREAM         Peace by H.B. SS. _Peace River_
+   0    Peace River Crossing                                                    (sternwheel river steamer, electric               From June to August
+  70    Fort Dunvegan            $10.00   $ 5.00          $1.00   $ .75         light, bathroom; accomodates 40                   inclusive.[3]
+ 200    Fort St. John's           25.00    15.00           3.00    2.25         passengers; blankets supplied; meals
+ 240    Hudson's Hope             35.00    20.00           5.00    4.25         served 50 cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).
+
+
+                                  DOWN   RETURN          DOWN   RETURN
+                                 STREAM  UPSTREAM       STREAM  UPSTREAM
+   0    Peace River Crossing                                                    Or, having arrived at Peace River
+ 280    Fort Vermilion           $15.00  $25.00          $1.00   $3.00          Crossing, the traveller may go down
+                                                                                the Peace.--
+ 330    Chutes of the Peace       17.00   30.00           1.75    4.00          By the H.B. SS. _Peace River_, from          From June to August
+                                                                                Peace River Crossing to the Chutes                inclusive.[3]
+                                                                                of the Peace.
+ 570    Fort Chipewyan            37.00   60.00           3.25    7.00          By H.B. SS. _Grahame_ or Tug _Primrose_,
+                                                                                from Chutes of the Peace to
+                                                                                Fort Chipewyan.
+
+
+[Footnote 3: For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New North, by Agnes Deans Cameron
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12874 ***
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12874 ***</div>
+
+<h1>THE NEW NORTH</h1>
+
+<h3><i>Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic</i></h3>
+
+<h2>BY AGNES DEANS CAMERON</h2>
+
+<center><i>WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR</i></center>
+<p>
+<br>&nbsp;<br>
+
+<center><i>Published November, 1909</i></center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0001"></a>
+<img src="images/img0001.jpg" width="362" height="575" alt="A Magnificent Trophy" title="">
+<BR><B>A Magnificent Trophy</B>
+</center>
+
+<p align=right>TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, JESSIE ANDERSON CAMERON</p>
+
+<p align=right>AND</p>
+
+<p align=right>TO ALL THOSE WHO TRY TO LIVE OUT HER SIMPLE RULE:
+<B>&quot;WE MUST JUST TRY TO DO THE VERY BEST WE CAN&quot;</B></p>
+
+<br>
+
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+<p>It is customary to write a preface. Mine shall be short. Out of a full
+heart, I wish to thank all the splendid people of the North who, by
+giving me so freely information and photographs, and chapters out of
+their own lives, have facilitated the writing of this story. For their
+spontaneous kindness to me and mine no acknowledgment that I can here
+make is adequate. What we feel most strongly we cannot put into words.</p>
+
+<p>AGNES DEANS CAMERON.</p>
+
+<p>August, 1909.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I: THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The Mendicants leave Chicago&mdash;The invisible parallel of 49 where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver&mdash;Union Jack floats on
+an ox-cart&mdash;A holy baggage-room&mdash;Winnipeg, the Buckle of the
+Wheat-Belt&mdash;The trapper and the doctor&mdash;Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks&mdash;Boy
+Makers of Empire&mdash;The vespers of St. Boniface</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II: WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The 1,000-mile wheat-field&mdash;Calgary-in-the-Foothills&mdash;Edmonton, the end
+of steel&mdash;The Brains of a Trans-Continental&mdash;Browning on the
+Saskatchewan&mdash;East Londoners in tents&mdash;Our outfit&mdash;A Waldorf-Astoria in
+the wilderness&mdash;The lonely cross of the Galician&mdash;Height of
+ Land&mdash;Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., the sleuth of Lesser Slave</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III: ATHABASCA LANDING</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Athabasca Landing, the Gateway of the North&mdash;English gives place to
+Cree&mdash;Limit of the Dry Martini&mdash;Will the rabbits run?&mdash;The woman
+printer&mdash;Hymn-books by hand in the Cree syllabic&mdash;Baseball even
+here&mdash;Rain and reminiscences&mdash;The World's Oldest Trust</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV: DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS</b></a><br>
+
+<p>&quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot;&mdash;The rainy deck of a &quot;sturgeon head&quot; under a
+tarpaulin&mdash;Drifting by starlight&mdash;The wild geese overhead&mdash;Forty-foot
+gas-spout at the Pelican&mdash;The mosquito makes us blood-brothers&mdash;Four
+days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling
+Athabasca&mdash;Nomenclature of the North&mdash;Sentinels of the Silence</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V: NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The <i>Go-Quick-Her</i> takes the bit in her mouth&mdash;Mallards on the
+half-shell&mdash;We set the Athabascan Thames afire&mdash;Sturgeon-head breaks her
+back on the Big Cascade&mdash;Fort McMurray&mdash;A stranded argosy, wreckage on
+the beach&mdash;Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader&mdash;A land flowing with
+coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI: FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Old Fort Chipewyan&mdash;In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John
+Franklin&mdash;Sir John turns parson&mdash;Grey Nuns and brown babies&mdash;Where grew
+the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial&mdash;Militant missionaries
+fight each other for souls&mdash;The strong man Loutit&mdash;Wyllie at the
+forge&mdash;An electric watch-maker&mdash;Where the Gambel sparrow builds&mdash;&quot;Out of
+old books&quot;</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII: LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Farewell to the Mounted Police&mdash;Our blankets on the deck&mdash;Fern odours by
+untravelled ways&mdash;Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of
+daylight&mdash;Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man&mdash;A 23-inch
+trout&mdash;First white women at Fond du Lac&mdash;Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a
+Fond du Lac library&mdash;The hermit padre and the hermit thrush&mdash;Worn north
+trails of the trapper&mdash;Caribou by the hundred thousands&mdash;The phalarope
+and the suffragette</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII: FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH</b></a><br>
+
+<p>World's records beaten on the Athabasca&mdash;Down the Slave to Smith's
+Landing&mdash;Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned&mdash;The Mosquito
+Portage&mdash;Fort Smith, the new headquarters&mdash;Lady-slippers and
+night-hawks&mdash;Steamer built in the wilderness&mdash;Last stand of the wood
+bison&mdash;The grey wolf persists&mdash;Fur-trade and the silver-fox&mdash;Breeding
+pelicans.</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX: SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>&quot;Red lemol-lade&quot; kiddies&mdash;Tons of crystal salt&mdash;Great Slave Lake and its
+fertile shores&mdash;Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh
+Edward&mdash;Hay River and its annual mail&mdash;Ploughing with dogs&mdash;Bill
+balked&mdash;The Alexandra Falls&mdash;Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputations
+while you wait.</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X: PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Drowning of De-deed&mdash;Fort Simpson, the old headquarters&mdash;A mouldy
+museum&mdash;The shrew-mice that were not preserved in rum&mdash;The farthest
+north library&mdash;Gold-seekers and grub-staked brides&mdash;Bishop Bompas, the
+Apostle of the North&mdash;Owindia, the Weeping One&mdash;Fort Simpson in the
+first year of Victoria the Good.</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI: FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Tenny Gouley tells us things&mdash;Mackenzie River, past and present&mdash;The
+fringed gentian at Fort Wrigley&mdash;The fires Mackenzie saw&mdash;The weathered
+knob of Bear Rock&mdash;Great Bear Lake&mdash;Orangeman's Day at Norman&mdash;The
+Ramparts of the Mackenzie&mdash;Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle&mdash;Mignonette and Old World courtesy&mdash;We meet Hagar once
+more&mdash;Potatoes on the Circle&mdash;The Little Church of the Open Door</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XII"><b>CHAPTER XII: ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Arctic Red River&mdash;Wilfrid Laurier, the merger&mdash;Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko, the
+danseuse&mdash;Marriage as the Oo-vai-oo-aks see it&mdash;Orange-blossoms at
+Su-pi-di-do's&mdash;Trading tryst at Barter Island&mdash;Floating fathers&mdash;By-o
+Baby Bunting&mdash;Wild roses and tame Eskimo&mdash;Midnight football with walrus
+bladder and enthusiasm&mdash;Education that makes for manliness</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"><b>CHAPTER XIII: FORT MACPHERSON FOLK</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Sir John Franklin's lobsticks at Point Separation&mdash;We reach Fort
+Macpherson on the Peel&mdash;Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., eulogizes the
+Eskimo&mdash;An Eskimo wife must make boots that are waterproof&mdash;She ariseth
+also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her
+household&mdash;Cribbage-boards the link between Dick Swiveller and the
+Eskimo&mdash;Linked sweetness long drawn out&mdash;Chauncey Depew of the
+Kogmollycs</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"><b>CHAPTER XIV: MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The Midnight Sun&mdash;Our friend the heathen&mdash;&quot;We want to go to
+hell&quot;&mdash;Catching fish by prayer&mdash;The Eskimo and the Flood&mdash;Pink tea at
+the Pole&mdash;Always a balance in the Eskimo Bank&mdash;Marriage for better and
+not for worse&mdash;Christmas carols even here</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XV"><b>CHAPTER XV: MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Jurisprudence on ice&mdash;The generous Innuit&mdash;Emmie-ray, the Delineator
+pattern&mdash;Weak races are pressed south&mdash;Roxi, a re-incarnation of Sir
+Philip Sidney&mdash;Blubbery bon vivants&mdash;Eskimo knew the Elephant&mdash;We write
+the last chapter of the story of McClure, the navigator&mdash;Cannibalism at
+the Circle</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"><b>CHAPTER XVI: THE TALE OF A WHALE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Circumpolar Bowhead makes his last stand&mdash;Whales here and elsewhere&mdash;The
+Yankee peddler at Canada's back-door&mdash;Thirteen and a half million in
+whale values&mdash;Wind-swept Herschel, the Isle of Whales&mdash;One wife for a
+thousand years&mdash;Baleen, Spermaceti, and Ambergris&mdash;Save the Whale</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"><b>CHAPTER XVII: SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Lives lost for the sake of a white bead&mdash;The stars come back&mdash;The Keele
+party from the Dollarless Divide&mdash;&quot;Here and there a grayling&quot;&mdash;Across
+Great Slave Lake&mdash;The first white women at Fort Rae&mdash;Land of the
+musk-ox&mdash;Tales of 76 below&mdash;Two Thursdays in one week&mdash;Rabbits on ice</p>
+
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"><b>CHAPTER XVIII: TO MC MURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The nuptials of 'Norine&mdash;Ladies round gents and gents don't go&mdash;The
+fossil-gatherers&mdash;I give my name to a Cree kiddie&mdash;A solid mile of red
+raspberries&mdash;The typewriter an uncanny medicine&mdash;The Beetle Fleet leaves
+for Outside&mdash;Shipwrecked on a batture</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"><b>CHAPTER XIX: UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Ho! for the Peace&mdash;One break in 900 miles of navigation&mdash;A grey
+wolf&mdash;Bear-meat and the Se-weep-i-gons&mdash;Ninety-foot spruces&mdash;Tom Kerr
+and his bairns&mdash;The fish-seine that never fails&mdash;Our lobsticks by Red
+River&mdash;The Chutes of the Peace</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XX"><b>CHAPTER XX: VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The farthest north flour-mill&mdash;The man who made Vermilion&mdash;Wheat at
+$1.25 a bushel&mdash;An Experimental Farm in latitude 58&deg; 30'&mdash;An unoccupied
+kingdom as large as Belgium&mdash;Where the steamer <i>Peace River</i> was
+built&mdash;The hospitable home of the Wilsons&mdash;Vermilion a Land of Promise
+Fulfilled&mdash;Culture and the Cloister&mdash;Thomas of Canterbury on the Stump</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"><b>CHAPTER XXI: FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Se-li-nah of the happy heart&mdash;My premier moose&mdash;The rare and resourceful
+boatmen of the North&mdash;Alexander Mackenzie's last camp</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"><b>CHAPTER XXII: PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Pleasant prairies of the Peace&mdash;We tramp a hundred miles&mdash;The Angelus at
+Lesser Slave&mdash;Poole coats and Norfolk shooting-jackets&mdash;Roast duck
+galore&mdash;Alec Kennedy of the Nile&mdash;Louise the Wetigo, she ate nineteen</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"><b>CHAPTER XXIII: LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Jim wins: Allie Brick can't run&mdash;100,000,000 acres of
+wheat-land&mdash;Jilly-Loo bird still lacks a rib&mdash;100 moose in one
+month&mdash;Peripatetic judges but no prisoners&mdash;The best-tattooed man in the
+Province of Alberta&mdash;The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV"><b>CHAPTER XXIV: HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Edmonton again&mdash;Wyllie goes out on the Long Journey&mdash;Donaldson killed by
+a walrus&mdash;Two drowned in the Athabasca&mdash;Steel kings and iron
+horses&mdash;Wheat-plains the melting-pot of a New Nation</p>
+
+ <a href="#ROUTES"><b>ROUTES OF TRAVEL</b></a><br>
+
+
+
+<h3>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#img0001">A magnificent trophy</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0016">Map showing the Author's Route</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0018">Sir Wilfred Laurier</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0022">Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0026">Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0031">The Canadian Women's Press Club</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0038">A section of Edmonton</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0041">The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0043">Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0044">A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0049">Athabasca Landing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0052">Necessity knows no law at Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0054">The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0062">C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0069">A "sturgeon-head" on the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0070">"Farewell, Nistow!"</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0076">Grand Rapids, on the Athabasca River</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0079">Portage at Grand Rapids Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0080">Our transport at Grand Rapids Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0081">Cheese-shaped nodules, Grand Rapids Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0087">Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0091">Towing the wrecked barge ashore</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0096">The scow breaks her back and fills</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0101">Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray trader</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0102">The steamer <i>Grahame</i></a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0104">An oil derrick on the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0105">Tar banks on the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0108">Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0115">Three of a kind</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0120">Woman's work of the Far North</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0129">Lake Athabasca in winter</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0131">Bishop Grouard</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0133">The modern note-book</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0135">Tepee of a Caribou-eater Indian</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0137">A bit of Fond du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0139">Birch-barks at Fond du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0148">Fond du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0150">Father Beibler carrying water to a dying Indian</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0152">Smith's Landing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0157">A transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0158">Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0161">The world's last buffalo</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0168">Tracking a scow across mountain portage</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0172">The "red lemol-lade" boys</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0173">Salt beds</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0175">Unloading at Fort Resolution</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0178">Coming to "take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0182">On the Slave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0184">Dogs cultivating potatoes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0187">David Villeneuve</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0192">Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0197">A Slavi family at Fort Simpson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0198">A Slavi type from Fort Simpson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0202">Interior of St. David's Cathedral</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0208">Fort Simpson by the light of the Aurora</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0215">Indians at Fort Norman</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0217">Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0218">The ramparts of the Mackenzie</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0220">Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie mouth</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0228">A Kogmollye family</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0231">Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak family</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0246">Farthest North football</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0247">Two spectators at the game</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0249">An Eskimo exhibit</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0253">Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo togs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0255">Two wise ones</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0256">A Nunatalmute Eskimo family</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0259">Cribbage-boards of walrus tusks</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0261">Useful articles made by the Eskimo</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0264">Home of Mrs. Macdonald</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0268">Eskimo kayaks at the Arctic edge</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0272">A wise man of the Dog-Ribs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0273">A study in expression</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0296">We tell the tale of a whale</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0299">Two little ones at Herschel Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0310">Breeding grounds of the seal</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0319">The Keele party on the Gravel River</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0323">The first typewriter on Great Slave Lake</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0324">The bell at Fort Rae mission</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0325">The musk-ox</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0334">A meadow at McMurray</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0336">Starting up the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0337">On the Clearwater</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0342">Evening on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0344">Our lobsticks on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0346">The chutes of the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0347">Pulling out the <i>Mee-wah-sin</i> </a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0350">The flour mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0352">Articles made by Indians</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0353">The Hudson's Bay Store</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0357">Papillon, a Beaver brave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0359">Going to school in winter</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0361">My premier moose</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0363">Beaver camp, on Paddle River</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0366">The site of old Fort McLeod</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0370">Jean Baptiste, pilot on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0371">Fort Dunvegan on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0373">Fort St. John on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0374">Where King was arrested</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0375">Alec Kennedy with his two sons</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0377">Cannibal Louise, her little girl and Miss Cameron</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0380">A Peace River Pioneer</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0383">Three generations</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0385">A family at the Lesser Slave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0386">A one-night stand</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0388">A rye field in Brandon, Manitoba</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0391">Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway </a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0392">William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway </a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0393">Donald D. Maun, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern Railway</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0394">William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0395">In the wheat fields</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0399">Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0400">Threshing grain</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0401">Doukhobors threshing flax</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0403">Sir William Van Horne, first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<center>
+<a href="images/img0016.png" name="img0016">
+<img src="images/img0016t.png" width="487" height="642" alt="Map of the Author's Route" title="">
+<BR><B>Map of the Author's Route</B></a>
+</center>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_I"></a><h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;We are as mendicants who wait<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Along the roadside in the sun.</span><br>
+Tatters of yesterday and shreds<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of morrow clothe us every one.</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;And some are dotards, who believe<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And glory in the days of old;</span><br>
+While some are dreamers, harping still<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Upon an unknown age of gold.</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;O foolish ones, put by your care!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Where wants are many, joys are few;</span><br>
+And at the wilding springs of peace,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">God keeps an open house for you.</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;But there be others, happier few,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The vagabondish sons of God,</span><br>
+Who know the by-ways and the flowers,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And care not how the world may plod.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>Isn't it Riley who says, &quot;Ef you want something, an' jest dead set
+a-longin' fer it with both eyes wet, and tears won't bring it, why, you
+try sweat&quot;? Well, we had tried sweat and longing for two years, with
+planning and hoping and the saving of nickels, and now we are off!</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare makes his man say, &quot;I will run as far as God has any
+ground,&quot; and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on
+going till we strike the Arctic,&mdash;straight up through Canada. Most
+writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and
+travel west by the C.P.R., following the line of least resistance till
+they reach the Pacific. Then they go back to dear old England and tell
+the world all about Canada, their idea of the half-continent being
+Euclid's conception of a straight line, &quot;length without breadth.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0018"></a>
+<img src="images/img0018.jpg" width="272" height="372" alt="Sir Wilfred Laurier" title="">
+<BR><B>Sir Wilfred Laurier</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt
+of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary
+and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves
+after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to
+follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from
+Dan to Beersheba to say &quot;All is barren,&quot; but to come near to the people,
+our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than
+Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of
+Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting
+that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.</p>
+
+<p>We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of
+all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend
+of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward,&mdash;till
+you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our
+ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St.
+Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of
+the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong
+hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on
+the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.</p>
+
+<p>There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage
+was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered
+Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool.
+But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last
+unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out,
+pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a
+dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.</p>
+
+<p>Kipling speaks of &quot;a route unspoiled of Cook's,&quot; and we have found it.
+Going to the office of Thos. Cook &amp; Son, in Chicago, with a friend who
+had planned a Mediterranean tour, I gently said, &quot;I wonder if you can
+give me information about a trip I am anxious to take this summer.&quot; The
+young man smiled and his tone was that which we accord to an indulged
+child, &quot;I guess we can. Cook &amp; Son give information on <i>most</i> places.&quot;
+&quot;Very well,&quot; I said, &quot;I want to go from Chicago to the Arctic by the
+Mackenzie River, returning home by the Peace and the Lesser Slave. Can
+you tell me how long it will take, what it will cost, and how I make my
+connections?&quot; He was game; he didn't move an eyebrow, but went off to
+the secret recesses in the back office to consult &quot;the main guy,&quot; &quot;the
+chief squeeze,&quot; &quot;the head push,&quot; &quot;the big noise.&quot; Back they came
+together with a frank laugh, &quot;Well, Miss Cameron, I guess you've got us.
+Cook's have no schedule to the Arctic that way.&quot; They were able,
+however, to give accurate information as to how one should reach Hudson
+Bay, with modes of travel, dates, and approximate cost. But this journey
+for another day.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Chicago one sizzling Sunday in mid-May, we (my niece and I) stop
+for a day to revel in bird and blossoms at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota,
+then silently in the night cross the invisible parallel of 49&deg; where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver.</p>
+
+<p>With the Polar Ocean as ultimate goal, we cannot help thinking how
+during the last generation the Arctic Circle has been pushed steadily
+farther north. Forty years ago Minneapolis and St. Paul were struggling
+trading-posts, and all America north of them was the range of the
+buffalo and the Indian. Then Fort Garry (Winnipeg) became Farthest
+North. Before starting, I had dug out from the Public Library the record
+of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago,
+deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their
+minutes) that &quot;Our Northern tier of States is too far north to
+successfully grow wheat.&quot; For years Winnipeg was considered the northern
+limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of
+limitation was pushed farther back until it is
+Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared &quot;Farthest North.&quot; To-day
+we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due
+north of Edmonton!</p>
+
+<p>In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh
+beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all
+interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach
+Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These
+were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. &quot;But,&quot; the old chap
+says, &quot;the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the
+Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it
+stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal
+to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin'
+red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set
+on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and
+what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart,
+poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the
+old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at
+sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all
+wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife.&quot; This incident was
+not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known
+to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his
+way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the
+war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured
+clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing
+this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by
+the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0022"></a>
+<img src="images/img0022.jpg" width="259" height="329" alt="Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada" title="">
+<BR><B>Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>What Cook &amp; Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg
+furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for
+two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when
+the Second Charles ruled in England,&mdash;an age when men said not &quot;How
+cheap?&quot; but &quot;How good?&quot;, not &quot;How easy?&quot; but &quot;How well?&quot; The Hudson's
+Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the
+Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can
+travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except
+under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for
+you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and
+sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot.
+Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be
+transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats,
+guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort
+Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between
+Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull
+whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.</p>
+
+<p>For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the
+Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the
+benefit of employ&eacute;s, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here
+they are as we copied them down:</p>
+
+Let all things be done decently and in order.<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1 Cor. xiv, 40.</span><br>
+<br>
+Be punctual, be regular, be clean.<br>
+Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.<br>
+Be obliging and kind one to another.<br>
+Let no angry word be heard among you<br>
+Be not fond of change. (Sic.)<br>
+Be clothed with humility, not finery.<br>
+Take all things by the smooth handle.<br>
+Be civil to all, but familiar with few.<br>
+
+<p>As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American,&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let<br>
+go your overcoat. Thieves are around,&quot;<br>
+
+<p>the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our
+shoulders, &quot;Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a
+transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, &quot;What makes
+Winnipeg?&quot; Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it
+out. &quot;This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our
+nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches
+going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty
+stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the
+remittance man from England, sorr,&quot; with a quizzical look at the checked
+suit of his interlocutor, &quot;shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies
+up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!&quot; As Mulcahey winks
+the other eye, we drift out into this &quot;Buckle of the Wheat-Belt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her
+a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of
+her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an
+increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one
+hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the
+world's history.</p>
+
+<p>Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and
+bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has
+had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now
+counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the
+British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway
+tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million
+dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings
+in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801;
+and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without
+Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade
+filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a
+day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed
+a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western
+Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures&mdash;the lure of the
+land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is
+estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one
+thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth
+of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring
+the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in
+figures&mdash;the &quot;power of the man.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0026"></a>
+<img src="images/img0026.jpg" width="490" height="372" alt="Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt" title="">
+<BR><B>Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City
+of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation
+of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg
+sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages&mdash;Armenian, Arabic,
+Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu,
+Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that
+some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast
+the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would
+Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the <i>London
+Times</i>, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out
+from among the flotsam in the kelp.</p>
+
+<p>Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we
+cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred
+steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate
+that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the
+six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This
+will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold
+by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for
+breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the
+list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics
+of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that
+these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do.
+&quot;But they are all good pay,&quot; the implement-man says. Looking at the red
+ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history.
+The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out
+into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these
+ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of
+faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and
+formative!</p>
+
+<p>We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we
+reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A.
+Stewart says to us, &quot;Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has
+fallen by the way.&quot; We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a
+cot. &quot;Tell him that you are going into the land of fur,&quot; whispers the
+doctor, &quot;he has been a trapper all his life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and
+his snow-shoes pinned him fast. When dragged out he had suffered so with
+the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to
+the hospital. Hard luck? Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with
+mercy. Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice
+of life,&mdash;a doctor with a man's brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the
+heart of a little child. The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has
+one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of
+motion remaining in the other leg. His vocal cords are so affected that
+the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the
+mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man. Between patient and
+doctor, a third man entered the drama,&mdash;Mr. Grey, a convalescent.
+Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother
+studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel,
+to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.</p>
+
+<p>Who is this patient? A man without friends or influence, not attractive
+in appearance, more than distressing to listen to,&mdash;just one more worker
+thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life. The
+consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not
+even arrest the creeping death. Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner
+of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked.
+Dr. Stewart had two men's work to do. He worked all day and was busy
+well into the night. A doctor's natural tendency is to see in each man
+that he ministers to merely &quot;a case,&quot; a manifestation of some disease to
+be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages. But in the
+Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young
+men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper
+was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke
+by twilight. We are happiest when we create. So he said to Carlton, &quot;Did
+you ever write a story?&quot; The head shook answer. &quot;Well, why don't you
+try? You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody
+else knows. Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The outcome was disappointing. The uncouth sounds, translated by Grey,
+were bald, bare, and stiff. Soon the stiffness worked off. With
+half-shut eyes Carlton lived again in the woods. He lifted the dewy
+branch of a tree and surprised the mother deer making the toilet of her
+fawn, saw the beaver busied with his home of mud and wattles, heard the
+coyote scream across the prairie edge. Easily the thought flowed, and
+the stuff that Grey handed in was a live story that breathed. In that
+brave heart the joy of the creator stirred, and with it that feeling
+which makes all endeavour worth while&mdash;the thought that somebody cares.
+A close observer at this stage of the game may read, too, on the face of
+Grey the kindly look that comes when we forget ourselves long enough to
+take the trouble to reach out for another man's viewpoint.</p>
+
+<p>Carlton's short stories, submitted to a publisher, were pronounced
+good, were accepted, and brought a cash return. They struck a new note
+among the squabblings of the nature-fakers. Favourable comment came from
+those who read them, who, reading, knew naught of their three authors.
+Before this Carlton had never written a line for publication; but he had
+been a true observer. He had felt, and was able to project himself into
+the minds of those living things he had seen and hunted.</p>
+
+<p>I leave the hospital cot with a strange lump forming in my throat,
+although every one around me, and the patient most of all, is gay and
+blithe. I say to Carlton, &quot;I wish I could take your knowledge and your
+eyes with me into the North, there is so much I will miss because of my
+lack of knowledge.&quot; With Grey's kindly interpretation I get my answer,
+&quot;You must take your own mind, your own eyes; you must see for yourself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>During the last day in Winnipeg, while the Kid (like faithful
+Ariovistus) is looking after the impedimenta, I snatch half an hour to
+look in at the Royal Alexandra upon the reception which the Women's
+Canadian Club is tendering to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Rain-bespattered,
+short-skirted, and anchored with disreputable rubbers gluey with
+Winnipeg mud, I sit on the fringe of things, fairly intoxicated with the
+idea that we are off and this North trip no dream. Mrs. Sanford Evans
+presides with her usual <i>savoir faire</i> and ushers in the guest of the
+day, beautifully-gowned and gracious.</p>
+
+<p>Like a bolt from the blue came the summons from the president, and I,
+all muddy, am called to the seats of the mighty. I have never seen a
+more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg
+Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face
+them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of
+mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my
+unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success
+of my journey. Mrs. Humphry Ward calls attention to the lack of
+playgrounds in England. She wants to bring more fresh air and space to
+the crowded people of the Old World. I submit that my wish is the
+mathematical converse to hers. My great desire is to call attention to
+the great unoccupied lands of Canada, to induce people from the crowded
+centres of the Old World to use the fresh air of the New.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0031"></a>
+<img src="images/img0031.jpg" width="619" height="391" alt="The Canadian Women's Press Club" title="">
+<BR><B>The Canadian Women's Press Club</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>To those who bid us good-bye at the train, the Kid and I yell
+exultantly, &quot;All aboard for the Arctic Ocean and way ports!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A group of Galicians sitting by the curb, two mothers and seven small
+children, one a baby at the breast, make the last picture we see as the
+train pulls out. It was the end of their first day in Winnipeg. The
+fathers of the flock evidently were seeking work and had left their
+families gazing through the portals of the strange new land. In the
+half-sad, altogether-brave lines on the young mothers' faces and their
+tender looks bent on the little ones we read the motive responsible for
+all migrations&mdash;&quot;Better conditions for the babies.&quot; In the little
+fellows of seven or eight with their ill-fitting clothes and their
+dogged looks of determination one sees the makers of empire. Before a
+decade is past they will be active wheat-growers in their own right,
+making two grains grow where one grew before and so &quot;deserving better of
+mankind than the whole race of politicians put together.&quot; I think it was
+President Garfield who said, &quot;I always feel more respect for a boy than
+for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that
+ragged jacket?&quot; It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A
+young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg
+students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic
+world&mdash;the Rhodes scholarship.</p>
+
+<p>We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers
+from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral,
+has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of
+forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures
+its every thought in bushels and bullion.</p>
+
+<p>The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg
+just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of
+David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here
+and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted
+some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony
+performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding.
+One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, &quot;I wudna
+have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a
+properly-ordained meenister.&quot; And he was coming. Even now he was
+floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having
+reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks
+before.</p>
+
+<p>When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton
+phrase, &quot;they do not teem with conversational grace.&quot; Straight from
+Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the
+Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago.
+In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and
+in his simplicity thought himself &quot;the first that ever burst into that
+silent sea.&quot; When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled
+sound, he was in doubt how to place it.</p>
+
+&quot;Is it the clang of wild-geese?<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is it the Indian's yell,</span><br>
+That lends to the voice of the North-wind<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The tones of a far-off bell?&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>The Indian boatmen <i>said</i> nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's
+parrot.</p>
+
+&quot;The voyageur smiles as he listens<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To the sound that grows apace;</span><br>
+Well he knows the vesper ringing<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of the bells of St. Boniface.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in
+the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness</p>
+
+&quot;The bells of the Roman Mission,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That call from their turrets twain</span><br>
+To the boatmen on the river,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To the hunter on the plain.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>That friend was a fellow-townsman of the &quot;Quaker Poet.&quot; The story was
+told to Whittier and inspired the lines of <i>The Red River Voyageur</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a><h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;To the far-flung fenceless prairie<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,</span><br>
+To our neighbor's barn in the offing<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the line of the new-cut rail;</span><br>
+To the plough in her league-long furrow.&quot;<br>
+&mdash;<i>Rudyard Kipling</i>.
+
+<p>Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at
+Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it
+will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.</p>
+
+<p>From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and
+two railway lines are open to us,&mdash;the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
+Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the
+latter.</p>
+
+<p>Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand
+miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are
+pouring. &quot;The sleeping nation beyond,&quot; is what General Sherman in a
+moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We
+are on the heels of the greatest economic trek this world has ever seen.
+The historian of to-morrow will rank it with the world migrations.</p>
+
+<p>The flourishing centres of Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its
+Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police,
+Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw
+towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand
+of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as
+these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp
+conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement
+warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it
+takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat
+elevator, red against the setting sun.</p>
+
+<p>The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo
+bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a
+sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude
+coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is
+the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the
+crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and
+fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to
+the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the
+transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.</p>
+
+<p>Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy,
+buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a
+busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many
+railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R.
+irrigation works, the largest on this continent. The area included in
+the irrigation block is twice as big as the Island of Porto Rico and
+one-eighth the size of England and Wales; and the ultimate expenditure
+on the undertaking will reach the five million mark.</p>
+
+<p>Calgary is the centre of a country literally flowing with milk and honey
+and fat things. The oil-fields of Pincher Creek, with their rich promise
+of becoming a second Pennsylvania, are contiguous to the city. The
+winter wheat grown in Southern Alberta was awarded first prize and gold
+medal at the World's Fair in Oregon in 1905. The hackney carriage horses
+which took first prize at the last Montreal and New York horse-fairs
+were foaled and raised near Calgary. If we were to continue going due
+west from this point, all the scenic glories of the Rocky Mountains
+would be ours&mdash;seventy Switzerlands in one. But that journey must stand
+over for another day, with the journey to Prince Rupert, the ocean
+terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Turning sharply to the north, we travel two hundred miles, and draw into
+where Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, sits smiling on the banks of her
+silver Saskatchewan. As he sees us digging out our tents and dunnage,
+the porter asks, &quot;Then yer not comin' back?&quot; &quot;No.&quot; &quot;You <i>are</i> goin' to
+the North Pole, then, the place you wuz hollerin' fer!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With the exception of Victoria, Edmonton has the most charming location
+of all cities of Western Canada. High Hope stalks her streets. There is
+a spirit of initiative and assuredness in this virile town, a culture
+and thoughtfulness in her people, expectancy in the very air. It is the
+city of contrasts; the ox-cart dodges the automobile; in the track of
+French heel treads the moccasin; the silk hat salutes the Stetson.</p>
+
+<p>Edmonton is the end of steel. Three lines converge here: the Canadian
+Northern, the Canadian Pacific, and the Grand Trunk Pacific. The
+Canadian Northern arrived first, coming in four years ago. Now that
+Edmonton has arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that
+there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis,
+anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in
+commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before
+Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian
+Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals
+and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that
+sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into
+Edmonton, as little was known of the valley of the Saskatchewan as is
+known now of the valley of the Peace. Without exception, Canadian men of
+letters go to other countries for recognition, but not so all our men of
+deeds. Mackenzie and Mann, &quot;the Brains of a Trans-Continental,&quot; stayed
+in Canada and put their genius to work here. The Canadian Northern is
+the product of Canadian minds and Canadian money.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0038"></a>
+<img src="images/img0038.jpg" width="383" height="140" alt="A Section of Edmonton" title="">
+<img src="images/img0039.jpg" width="383" height="140" alt="A Section of Edmonton" title="">
+<BR><B>A Section of Edmonton</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We walk Edmonton streets for ten days and see neither an old man nor an
+old woman. The government and the business interests are in the hands of
+young people who have adopted modern methods of doing things; single tax
+is the basis of taxation; the city owns its public utilities, including
+an interurban street railroad, electric lighting plant, water-works, and
+the automatic telephone. Mr. C.W. Cross, the Attorney-General of
+Alberta, is the youngest man in Canada to hold that high office. During
+the first session of the first legislature of this baby province less
+than three years ago, an enabling act was passed for a university.
+Nowhere else have I been sensible of such a feeling of united
+public-spiritedness as obtains here.</p>
+
+<p>Down in the river valley are hundreds of people living under canvas, not
+because they are poor but because building contractors cannot keep pace
+with the demand for homes. As we pass these tents, we are rude enough to
+look in. Most of them are furnished with telephones and the city water;
+here a bride bends over a chafing dish; another glance discloses an
+oil-painting that was once shown in the Royal Academy. From the next
+tent float the strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and, as we stop
+to listen, a gentleman and his wife step out. An auto picks them up and
+off they whirl to Jasper Avenue. The Lord o' the Tents of Shem
+disappears into his bank and Milady drives on to the Government house to
+read before the Literary Club a paper on Browning's <i>Saul</i>. To the
+tenderfoot from the South it is all delightfully disconcerting&mdash;oxen and
+autos and Browning on the Saskatchewan!</p>
+
+<p>The Sunday before we leave Edmonton I find another set of tents, put up
+by the Immigration Department, where East-End Londoners are housed
+pending their going out upon the land. In the first call I make I
+unearth a baby who rejoices in the name of Hester Beatrice Cran.
+&quot;H.B.C.,&quot; I remark, &quot;aren't you rather infringing on a right, taking
+that trade-mark?&quot; Quick came the retort, &quot;Ho! If she gets as good a 'old
+on the land as the 'Udson's Bay Company 'as, she'll do!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another lady in the next tent proudly marshalled her olive branches.
+&quot;D'isy and the baiby were born in the Heast Hend. They're Henglish;
+please God they'll make good Canaidians. They're tellin' me, miss,
+there'll be five 'undred more of us on the 'igh seas comin' out to
+Hedmonton from the Heast Hend, all poor people like ourselves. I often
+wonder w'y they don't bring out a few dukes to give the country a touch
+of 'igh life&mdash;it's very plain 'ere.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>By the first day of June we have our kit complete and are ready to
+leave. We have tried to cut everything down to the last ounce, but still
+the stuff makes a rather formidable array. What have we? Tent,
+tent-poles, typewriter, two cameras, two small steamer-trunks, bedding
+(a thin mattress with waterproof bottom and waterproof extension-flaps
+and within this our two blankets), a flour-bag or &quot;Hudson's Bay
+suit-case&quot; (containing tent-pegs, hatchet, and tin wash-basin), two
+raincoats, a tiny bag with brush and comb and soap&mdash;and last, but yet
+first, the kodak films wrapped in oilcloth and packed in biscuit-tins.
+The bits of impedimenta look unfamiliar as we take our first inventory,
+but we are to come to know them soon by their feel in the dark, to
+estimate to an ounce the weight of each on many a lonely portage.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0041"></a>
+<img src="images/img0041.jpg" width="381" height="142" alt="The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan" title="">
+<BR><B>The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At seven in the morning the stage pulls up for us, and it rains&mdash;no
+gentle sizzle-sozzle, but a sod-soaker, yea a gully-washer! The
+accusing newness of those raincoats is to come off at once. Expansive
+Kennedy looks askance at the tenderfoots who climb over his wheel. His
+Majesty's Royal Mail Stage sifts through the town picking up the other
+victims. We are two big stage-loads, our baggage marked for every point
+between Edmonton and the Arctic Ocean. Every passenger but ourselves
+looks forward to indefinite periods of expatriation in the silent
+places. We alone are going for fun. Our one care is to keep those
+precious cameras dry. This is the beginning of a camera nightmare which
+lasts six months until we again reach Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>And the fellow-passengers? Law is represented, and medicine, and the
+all-powerful H.B. Co. With us is Mr. Angus Brabant going in on his
+initial official trip in charge of H.B. interests in the whole Mackenzie
+River District, and with him two cadets of The Company. On the seat
+behind us sit a Frenchman reading a French novel, a man from Dakota, and
+a third passenger complaining of a camera &quot;which cost fifty pounds
+sterling&quot; that somehow has fallen by the way. Sergeant Anderson,
+R.N.W.M.P., with his wife and two babies are in the other stage.</p>
+
+<p>Kennedy, the driver, is a character. Driving in and out and covering on
+this one trail twelve thousand miles every year, he is fairly soaked
+with stories of the North and Northmen. The other stage is driven by
+Kennedy's son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was
+just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man. Dwarfed in mind
+and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp.</p>
+
+<p>The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his
+camera claims our attention. &quot;I thought I would be able to get out and
+run behind and pick flowers.&quot; Turning and introducing ourselves, we find
+the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat
+with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic
+Circle.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0043"></a>
+<img src="images/img0043.jpg" width="371" height="267" alt="Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta" title="">
+<BR><B>Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The girlish figure of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in
+gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the
+little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward
+look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of &quot;seven
+times nine,&quot; &quot;the mountains of Asia,&quot; &quot;the Tudor sovereigns with dates
+of accession,&quot; and other things appertaining to &quot;that imperial palace
+whence I came.&quot; All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty
+and food scarce, a backward thought to this teacher making muddy tracks
+toward the well of English undefiled, brings pleased content.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0044"></a>
+<img src="images/img0044.jpg" width="371" height="267" alt="A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge" title="">
+<BR><B>A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At noon it clears, and as we &quot;make tea&quot; at Sturgeon Creek (the Namao
+Sepee of the Indians), the first of the &quot;stopping-places&quot; or
+Waldorf-Astorias of the wilderness, the Doctor has his will and gathers
+violets, moccasin flowers, and the purple <i>dodecatheon</i>. As we pass Lily
+Lake he remarks, &quot;This reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk's place at
+Arundel; it is just like this.&quot; South Dakoty returns, &quot;I don't know
+him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Here and there we pass clusters of Galician huts. Instead of following
+the line of least resistance in the fertile plains to the south, these
+people, the Mark Tapleys of the prairies, choose cheap land up here for
+the pleasure of conquering it and &quot;coming out strong.&quot; They are a frugal
+people, with a fondness for work, a wholesome horror of debt, and the
+religious instinct strongly insistent. Off on a hillside near each
+little settlement a naked cross extends its arms. These are their
+open-air churches, and in all weathers, men, women, and children gather
+at the foot of the cross to worship the God of their fathers. By and by,
+when the soil has yielded to their labours, with their own hands will
+they build a church and without debt it will be dedicated. The idea of
+raising an imposing church and presenting God with the mortgage does not
+appeal to the Galician.</p>
+
+<p>The clean sheets at &quot;Eggie's,&quot; the second stopping-place, are
+attractive, and we sleep the sleep of the just. We acknowledge with
+inward shame that two years of city life have given us the soft muscles
+of the chee-chaco; we'll have to harden up a bit if we are to reach that
+far-away ocean.</p>
+
+<p>Next day, midway between Edmonton and Athabasca Landing, we water our
+horses at the Tautinau. We are standing at the Height of Land, the
+watershed between the Saskatchewan and the Athabasca. This little ridge
+where the harebells grow divides the drops of rain of the noon-day
+shower. Some of these drops, by way of the Saskatchewan, Lake Winnipeg,
+and Hudson Bay, will reach the Atlantic. Others, falling into the
+Athabasca, will form part of that yellow-tinged flood which, by way of
+Great Slave Lake and the mighty Mackenzie, carries its tribute to the
+Frozen Ocean. These last are the drops we follow.</p>
+
+<p>To save the horses we walk the hills, and I try to match giant steps
+with Sergeant Anderson. Kennedy, Junior, joins us and has a knotty point
+to settle regarding &quot;the gentleman wot murdered the man.&quot; It is hard to
+induce a Mounted Policeman to talk. However, to be striding Athabasca
+Trail with the hero of the Hayward-King murder-trial is too good an
+opportunity to lose, and, reluctantly rendered, bit by bit the story
+comes out.</p>
+
+<p>Most people looking at a map of Northwest Canada would think it a safe
+wilderness for a live man or a dead man to disappear in with no
+questions asked. In reality, it is about the worst place in America in
+which to commit a crime and hope to go unpunished.</p>
+
+<p>In September, 1904, the Indians reported to the Mounted Police that they
+had seen two white men in the early summer, and that afterwards one man
+walked alone, and was now at Lesser Slave. An observant Cree boy added,
+&quot;The dog won't follow that other white fellow any more.&quot; Sergeant
+Anderson, going to their last camp, turned over the ashes and found
+three hard lumps of flesh and a small piece of skull bone. Convinced
+that murder had been done, he arrested the suspected man and sent him to
+Fort Saskatchewan for trial. No one knew the identity of either the dead
+man or the living. In front of the old camp-fire was a little slough or
+lake, and this seemed a promising place to look for evidence. Sergeant
+Anderson hired Indian women to wade in the ooze, feeling with their toes
+for any hard substance. In this way were secured a sovereign-case and a
+stick-pin of unusual make. The lake was systematically drained and
+yielded a shoe with a broken-eyed needle sticking in it. Sifting the
+ashes of the camp-fire and examining them with a microscope, Anderson
+discovered the eye of the broken needle and thus established a
+connection between the camp with its burnt flesh and the exhibits from
+the lake. The maker of the stick-pin in London, England, was cabled to
+by the Canadian Government, and a Mr. Hayward summoned to come from
+there to identify the trinkets of his murdered brother. A cheque drawn
+by the dead Hayward in favour of King came to the surface in a British
+Columbia bank. Link by link the chain of evidence grew.</p>
+
+<p>It took eleven months for Sergeant Anderson to get his case in shape.
+Then he convoyed forty Indian witnesses two hundred and fifty miles from
+Lesser Slave to Edmonton to tell what they knew about the crime
+committed in the silent places. The evidence was placed before the jury,
+and the Indians returned to their homes. A legal technicality cropped up
+and the trial had to be repeated. Once more the forty Indians travelled
+from Lesser Slave to repeat their story. The result was that Charles
+King of Utah was found guilty of the murder of Edward Hayward and paid
+the death penalty.</p>
+
+<p>This trial cost the Canadian Government over $30,000,&mdash;all to avenge the
+death of one of the wandering units to be found in every corner of the
+frontier, one unknown prospector. Was it worth while? Did it pay? Yes,
+it paid. It is by such object-lessons that to Indian and white alike is
+forced home the truth that God's law, &quot;Thou shalt not kill,&quot; is also the
+law of Britain and of Canada.</p>
+
+<p>We are still on foot, when a cry from the Kid hurries us to the
+hilltop. Reaching the crest, we catch our breaths. Down below lies the
+little village of &quot;The Landing.&quot; That sparkling flood beyond proves the
+Athabasca to be a live, northward-trending river, a river capable of
+carrying us with it, and no mere wiggly line on a map.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a><h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>ATHABASCA LANDING</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;<br>
+Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods;<br>
+I wait for the men who will win me&mdash;and I will not be won in a day;<br>
+And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,<br>
+But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Robert Service</i><br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0049"></a>
+<img src="images/img0049.jpg" width="492" height="286" alt="Athabasca Landing" title="">
+<BR><B>Athabasca Landing</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Athabasca Landing, a funnel through which percolates the whole trade
+between the wheat-belt and the Arctic, is the true gateway of the North.
+Seeing our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union
+Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its
+edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an
+incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading
+itself with prodigality over the swift river.</p>
+
+<p>The Athabasca, after dipping to the south, here takes a sudden northward
+bend. Its source is in the crest of the continent far back in the
+Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river
+being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great
+tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to
+embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five
+miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps
+an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.</p>
+
+<p>We are in latitude 55&deg; North, and between us and the Arctic lies an
+unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and
+the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging
+like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south
+of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has
+stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a
+country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown
+and dubbed &quot;barren&quot; because unknown, will support its teeming millions.
+Chimerical? Why so?</p>
+
+<p>Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of
+55&deg; westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the
+Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map
+of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to
+follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year
+1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain,
+grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a
+half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one
+and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining
+in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are
+about to enter does not enjoy.</p>
+
+<p>Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by
+all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of
+moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing
+in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the
+little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large
+establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman
+Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted
+Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a
+blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of
+Cree-Scots half-breeds.</p>
+
+<p>Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a
+discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all
+sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the
+place,&mdash;tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike
+dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may
+be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the
+silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the
+language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, &quot;What means a
+camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a
+needle's eye.&quot; The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and
+coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its
+coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that
+stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed
+by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only &quot;for medicinal
+purposes.&quot; By an easy transferring of epithets, the term &quot;permit&quot; has
+come to signify the revivifying juice itself.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0052"></a>
+<img src="images/img0052.jpg" width="377" height="260" alt="Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the
+North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a
+rule they are not. There is no discussion of American banks and equally
+no mention of the wheat crop. The one conjecture round the bar and in
+the home is, &quot;When will the rabbits run this year?&quot; The rabbits in the
+North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark
+aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him.
+Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year
+means a scarcity of all kinds of fur. As surely as wheat stands for
+bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of
+the North.</p>
+
+<p>It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company
+making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in
+supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in
+barter during the previous winter. The big open scows, or
+&quot;sturgeon-heads,&quot; which are to form our convoy have been built, the
+freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen
+drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the
+word which is the keynote of the Cree character,&mdash;&quot;Kee-am,&quot; freely
+translated, &quot;Never mind,&quot; &quot;Don't get excited,&quot; &quot;There's plenty of time,&quot;
+&quot;It's all right,&quot; &quot;It will all come out in the wash.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When the present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office
+he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a
+time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was
+shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing,
+old Duncan Trembl&eacute;, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked
+admiringly at the printed slip and said, &quot;Aye, aye; the Commissioner he
+makes laws, but the river he boss.&quot; It is only when ice is out and
+current serves that the brigade moves forward. Old Duncan knows seven
+languages,&mdash;English, French, Cree, Chipewyan, Beaver, Chinook,
+Montagnais,&mdash;he speaks seven languages, thinks in Cree, and
+prevaricates in them all.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0054"></a>
+<img src="images/img0054.png" width="315" height="480" alt="The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians" title="">
+<img src="images/img0055.png" width="315" height="480" alt="The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians" title="">
+<BR><B>The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At the foot of the hill we visit the English parsonage, with its
+old-time sun-dial at the garden-gate. Within, we find what must surely
+be the farthest north printing-press. Here two devoted women have spent
+years of their lives printing in Cree on a hand-press syllabic hymns and
+portions of the Gospel for the enlightenment of the Indians. We wander
+into the school where a young teacher is explaining to his uneasy
+disciples the intricacies of Present Worth and Compound Interest. Idly
+we wonder to what use these bare-footed half-Cree urchins will put their
+exact banking knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere around us the wild flowers are a great joy; we hail with the
+gladness of released children the posies that sweetened childhood
+meadows&mdash;the dwarf cornel (Cornel Canadensis), dandelions, strawberry
+blossoms, wild roses, the pale wood-violet on its long stem, and amid
+these familiars the saskatoon or service-berry bushes, with blueberry
+vines, and viburnums of many kinds. On the street the natty uniforms of
+the Mounted Police are in evidence, and baseball has penetrated as far
+north as this. In the post office we read,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is decided to hold sports on the first day of July. The Committee
+promises a splendid programme,&mdash;horse-races, foot-races, football match,
+baseball game. There will also be prizes for the best piece of Indian
+fancy-work. Dancing will be in full swing in the evening. All welcome.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Opposite the hotel is a reading-room built by a Methodist parson who
+also made the furniture with his own hands; magazines, books,
+writing-material, games are available to all. This practical work of one
+man who accepted the responsibility of being his brother's keeper
+appealed to us. In a store near the hotel we see a Cree boatman
+purchasing a farewell present for his sweetheart. As he turns over the
+fancy articles, we have bad form enough to observe his choice. He
+selects a fine-tooth comb, for which he pays fifty cents, or as he calls
+it, &quot;two skins,&quot; and asks, as he tucks it into his jerkin, if he can
+change it &quot;if she doesn't like it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In the evening it rains, and the room assigned us becomes a living
+illustration of the new word we have just learned,&mdash;&quot;muskeg,&quot; a swamp.
+Putting the precious cameras on top of the bureau, we let the rest of
+the things swim at their pleasure. Starting with the rest of the
+unattached community of Athabasca Landing to go down to the pool-room,
+we catch sight of Dr. Sussex and the Cree priest, who have found a
+little oasis of their own around a big stove in the upper hall and, with
+chairs tilted back, are enjoying some portable hospitality from below.
+The doctor arises to escort us through the flood, and when I rally him
+about his liquid refreshment, he says, &quot;Oh, I had lemonade.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I see. And the priest?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He had&mdash;what he liked.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>If local colour and local smell is what we have come north for, we find
+it here. Mr. Brabant comes up with &quot;I wonder if that bunch of nuns is
+going to get here in time to take scows with us,&quot; and we pass into the
+billiard-room and watch the game. The players gliding round in moccasins
+are all half-breeds. The exclamations are for the most part in Cree or
+bad French, and as I crowd in looking for some local terms all that I
+hear intelligible is, &quot;That is damn close, I think me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For thirty-six hours on end it rains. That roof was full of surprises;
+you never knew where it would spring a fresh leak. One room is a little
+better than the rest, and we all gather there and make the best of
+it,&mdash;smoking, writing, telling yarns. A bumping noise from across the
+hall and the cry of a child startles us. It proves to be Sergeant
+Anderson's baby whose cradle has started afloat, and there is a general
+rush to rescue Moses from his bulrushes. Everybody is in good humour.</p>
+
+<p>As we calm the baby, South Dakota says &quot;It reminds me of the Englishman
+and his musical bath.&quot; We demand the story. &quot;Well, a rich American took
+a great liking to an Englishman he had been travelling with, and sent
+him for a birthday present a Yankee invention to set up in his
+country-house&mdash;a musical bath. As you turned on the spigot, the thing
+played a tune while you were washing, and sort of relieved the tee-deum.
+The two gents met next Christmas in New York, and the Yankee he sez,
+'And how did you like the bath?' 'Oh, thank you very much, it was kind
+of you indeed, but I found it a little irksome standing all the time,
+you know.' 'Standing, what the blazes do you mean?' asked the Yankee.
+'Well,' says the Britisher, 'the tune you furnished, you know, with the
+bawth, was <i>God Save the King</i>, and as soon as it began, you know, I had
+to stand, and it's rather tiresome taking your bawth standing, you
+know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Sergeant Joyce tells how at a Mounted Police dinner at Fort Saskatchewan
+a parson, who was a guest, in proposing a toast, facetiously advised his
+entertainers to have nothing to do with either a doctor or a lawyer. It
+was interesting to watch the parson's face when there arose to reply a
+lawyer and a doctor, each a constable in the rank and file.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Leslie Wood of Athabasca Landing adds her quota to the Tales of a
+Wayside Inn. We could have listened to her for a week and regretted
+neither the rain nor the waiting scows. As a girl she remembers being
+shocked at seeing men hold tin cups to the throats of newly-slaughtered
+buffalo, drinking with gusto the warm blood.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are the two greatest things on earth?&quot; Mrs. Wood, as a young girl,
+asked the dusky disciples of her Sunday School class. &quot;The Queen and The
+Company,&quot; was the ready response. &quot;And of these, which is the greater?&quot;
+Little Marten-Tail rubbed one moccasin over the other, and the answer
+came thoughtfully in Cree, &quot;The Company. The Queen sometimes dies, but
+The Company never dies.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Company,&quot; of which the little girl spoke, &quot;The Governor and Company
+of Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay,&quot; deriving its charter in 1670
+from the Second Charles of England, is the oldest chartered concern in
+the world, with a present-day sphere of influence as large as Great
+Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined. From lone Labrador to the
+Pacific littoral and from Winnipeg to the Frozen Ocean are scattered the
+two hundred and fifty fur-trading forts of this concern in charge of its
+two thousand strong silent servants. Last year it paid to its
+stockholders a profit of forty-five per cent on the invested capital,
+and for two hundred and thirty-nine consecutive years it has been
+declaring dividends. The motto of the Company, <i>Pro Pelle Cutein</i>, is
+prominently displayed at Athabasca Landing. Literally translated, the
+phrase means &quot;Skin for skin&quot;; but why the promoters should have chosen
+as war-cry the words which Satan used when fighting with the Lord for
+the soul of Job, is not so apparent.</p>
+
+<p>As we watch the trading goods being carried in the rain from warehouse
+to scows, we think how, weaving its cross-Atlantic way through the
+centuries and joining the periwigged days of the Stuarts to this day,
+the one man-made thing that has persisted is this commerce-shuttle of
+the H.B. Co.</p>
+
+<p>In the days when The Company had its birth, the blind Milton was
+dictating his message and the liberated Bunyan preached the spoken word,
+the iniquitous Cabal Ministry was forming in England, and Panama was
+sacked by Morgan the buccaneer. New York merchants of Manhattan met
+every Friday at noon on the bridge over the Broad Street Canal for
+barter, South Carolina was settled on the Ashley River, Virginia enacted
+that &quot;all servants not being Christians, imported into this country by
+shipping shall be slaves,&quot; and her Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was
+inspired to exclaim piously, &quot;I hope we shall have neither free schools
+nor printing these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience
+and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. God
+keep us from both!&quot; It was not until two years later that Addison was
+born, and that Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi, even as
+we now are essaying the Athabasca.</p>
+
+<p>Unique in commercial annals is the Royal Charter which gave, with power
+of life and death, to the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, less than
+twenty in number, &quot;forever hereafter&quot; possession and jurisdiction over a
+country as large as Europe. Liberty here for utter despotism, the widest
+of excesses. We marvel that from the first Prince Rupert of the Rhine to
+the latest Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Governors of the
+Ancient Company have, with Duncan-like demeanour, borne themselves so
+meek in their great office.</p>
+
+<p>It has been fashionable to paint the H.B. Co. as an agrarian oligarchy.
+Organized for the purpose of &quot;making fur&quot; before the time of the Habeas
+Corpus, two decades ahead of the Bank of England, sixty-two years before
+Benjamin Franklin began publishing &quot;Poor Richard's Almanac,&quot; and a
+century in advance of Watt's steam-engine, it is true that The Company,
+throughout the years, devoted itself to peltries and not to platting
+town sites. This was its business. From the beginning it has
+consistently kept faith with the Indians; the word of The Company has,
+for reward or for punishment, ever been worth its full face value. It
+was not an H.B. Scot who exclaimed feelingly, &quot;Honesty <i>is</i> the best
+policy, I've tried baith.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of devotion to The Company is as strong today as it ever
+was. When the present Commissioner took office he penetrated the North
+on a tour of inspection. At Athabasca Landing, since it was not known
+just when the Head would arrive, the local official charged all his
+clerks and minions to be ready at the sound of a whistle to salute and
+fall into line for inspection. The call to arms came on Sunday morning
+during divine service. Every attach&eacute; of The Company with one exception
+obeyed the signal. Young Tom Helly, the paid organist, stuck to his
+post; and next day he was called on the carpet. &quot;It was a special
+service; I was in the middle of the anthem, sir, and didn't like to
+leave the House of God.&quot; &quot;Couldn't you show some respect?&quot; roared the
+local officer. Man was near in Athabasca Landing and God far away. Down
+in the big office at Winnipeg is a Doomsday Book where the life-record
+of every servant of The Company is kept, for no man who has ever served
+The Company is lost sight of. When there is a good fur-winter, every
+employ&eacute; of The Company is handed an envelope which contains a
+bonus-cheque,&mdash;ten per cent of his yearly salary.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0062"></a>
+<img src="images/img0062.jpg" width="177" height="270" alt="C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co." title="">
+<BR><B>C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company and the head of one of
+Canada's big department stores were dining together at a Toronto Club.
+&quot;After six o'clock I don't want to see or hear of an employ&eacute;&mdash;he doesn't
+exist for me until eight o'clock next morning,&quot; said the head of the
+department store. &quot;Well, I'm more curious than you,&quot; smiled the
+Commissioner of the H.B. Co., &quot;I want to be reasonably assured of what
+every man-Jack of my people is doing all the time. I want to know what
+he reads, and if he treats his wife well, and how his last baby is
+getting along&mdash;you see, he's a working-partner of mine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There came out of Northern British Columbia last year the Indian wife
+and half-breed daughters of an H.B. Co. Factor. They were bound for
+Montreal and it was their first trip &quot;outside.&quot; The Commissioner at
+Winnipeg contradicts the old saw, and surely has &quot;a soul above a
+beaver-skin&quot;; like Mulvaney, too, he &quot;has bowels.&quot; Quickly went forward
+a letter to a tactful woman in the border-town through which the
+visiting ladies must pass&mdash;&quot;Meet them, and see that they get the proper
+things to wear in society circles in Montreal. I don't want them to feel
+ill at ease when they get there.&quot; Stories like these give us glimpses of
+the kind of paternalism exercised by the Ancient Company, the one trust
+that has never ground the faces of the poor, and in whose people to-day
+appears the &quot;constant service of the Old World.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The big books of The Company a year or two ago in unmistakable
+round-hand declared that one Running Rabbit, lawful widow of Blueskin,
+was entitled to draw from the coffers clear-side bacon and a modicum of
+flour. But one quarterly paysheet, returned to Winnipeg from Fort
+Churchill, showed that Running Rabbit in addition to her food allowance
+had been handed out forty cents' worth of cotton. Stern enquiry, backed
+by red-tape and The Company's seal as big as a saucer, was sent up to
+the Churchill Factor. Why had the allowance of Mrs. Blueskin (n&eacute;e
+Running Rabbit) been exceeded? By &quot;return mail&quot; nine months later the
+Factor reported,</p>
+
+&quot;The widow's gone,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Her tent's forsaken,</span><br>
+No more she comes<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">For flour and bacon.</span><br>
+N.B. The cotton was used for her shroud.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The Ancient Company was penny-wise, but in spite of the copybook line,
+not pound-foolish, as its dividend paysheets conclusively prove.</p>
+
+<p>There is no desire to show forth these silent ones of the North as
+infallible men and immaculate. They make many mistakes; they were and
+are delightfully human, and we couldn't picture one of them with a
+saintly aureole. But in the past, as in the present, they were large
+men; they honoured their word, and you couldn't buy them. Men of action,
+whether inside fort walls, bartering in the tepee of the Indian, or off
+on silent trails alone,&mdash;it has been given to each of them to live life
+at firsthand. In every undertaking the determining factor of success is
+men, and not money or monopoly. And because the North still breeds men
+of the H.B. type, the eye of The Great Company is not dimmed, its force
+not abated.</p>
+
+<p>We spoke with no fewer than three men at The Landing who came into the
+North in the year of the Klondike rush, that is, just ten years ago.
+Into the human warp and woof of the Great Lone Land of Northern Canada
+the Klondike gold-rush intruded a new strand. The news of the strike on
+Yukon fields flashed round the world on wires invisible and visible,
+passed by word of mouth from chum to chum, and by moccasin telegraph was
+carried to remotest corners of the continent. Gold-fever is a disease
+without diagnosis or doctor&mdash;infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if
+its germ once stirs in a man's blood, till the day of his death he is
+not immune from an attack. The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent
+swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous
+horde,&mdash;gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet
+firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two
+continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.</p>
+
+<p>Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from 'Frisco, Seattle, and
+Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have
+some records. But of that vast army who from the east and from the south
+travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has
+ever been made. Singly they went, in groups, and by partnerships of two
+and three. There was no route marked out by which they were to reach the
+glittering streams of which they dreamed; the general direction of north
+and west was all that guided them. Athabasca Landing was the portal
+through which they passed, and by every northward stream they
+travelled,&mdash;down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca
+to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore. By
+raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways
+who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to
+you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police
+Station where Sergeant Anderson rescued a dozen tenderfoots from
+drowning.</p>
+
+<p>To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the
+whites was a revelation. Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had
+been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed
+Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the
+outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that
+only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern
+Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first
+lessons from the Klondike miners.</p>
+
+<p>And what of the men who followed the gleam? Some reached Dawson. These
+were few. Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still. In the old books
+of the H.B. Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is &quot;a band of Indians
+<i>cast up</i> from the east,&quot; &quot;the Express from the North <i>cast up</i> at a
+late hour last night.&quot; On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from
+that point, hundreds of gold-miners are &quot;cast up&quot; on every interior
+shore. Acting as attach&eacute;s to Hudson's Bay posts, engaging as free
+traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic
+seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at
+least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us. Round
+the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still
+prays for her absent son. A silence like this once entered upon is hard
+to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about him the
+garment of the recluse. Outcropping from the strata in striking
+individuality, they belong to a different race to the plodding people of
+the Hudson's Bay posts, and are interesting men wherever you meet them.
+Keen of vision, slow of speech, and with that dreamy look which only
+those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet
+places,&mdash;they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and
+dropped here and there over the white map of the North.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a><h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Set me in the urge and tide-drift<br>
+Of the streaming hosts a-wing!<br>
+Breast of scarlet, throat of yellow,<br>
+Raucous challenge, wooings mellow&mdash;<br>
+Every migrant is my fellow,<br>
+Making northward with the Spring.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Bliss Carman</i>.<br>
+
+<p>If you have to do with Indian or half-breed boatmen in the North you
+plan to begin your journey in the evening, even though you hope to run
+only a few miles before nightfall. This ensures a good start next
+morning, whereas it would be humanly impossible to tear men away from
+the flesh-pots (beer pots) of Athabasca Landing early in any day. It
+took these chaps all the afternoon to say good-bye, for each one in the
+village had to be shaken hands with, every dog apostrophized by name.</p>
+
+<p>The Athabasca Transport of which we form joyous part makes a formidable
+flotilla: seven specially-built scows or &quot;sturgeon-heads.&quot; Each runs
+forty to fifty feet with a twelve-foot beam and carries ten tons. The
+oars are twenty feet long. It takes a strong man to handle the
+forty-foot steering-sweep which is mounted with an iron pivot on the
+stern.</p>
+
+<p>Our particular shallop is no different from the others, except that
+there is a slightly raised platform in the stern-sheets, evidently a
+dedication to the new Northern Manager of the H.B. Co. We share the
+pleasant company of a fourth passenger, Mrs. Harding, on her way home to
+Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. The second sturgeon-head carries
+seven members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, jolly laughing
+chaps, for are not they, too, like us, off duty? Inspector Pelletier and
+three men are to go with our Fur Transport as far as Resolution and then
+diverge to the east, essaying a cross-continent cut from there to salt
+water on Hudson Bay. For this purpose they ship two splendidly made
+Peterborough canoes. The other three members of the force are young
+chaps assigned to Smith's Landing on the Slave River, sent there to
+protect the wood bison of that region, the world's last wild buffalo.
+The third craft we observe with due respect as &quot;the cook boat.&quot; The
+remaining four scows carry cargo only,&mdash;the trade term being &quot;pieces,&quot;
+each piece from eighty to a hundred pounds, a convenient weight for
+carrying on the portages.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0069"></a>
+<img src="images/img0069.jpg" width="366" height="265" alt="A &quot;Sturgeon-head&quot; at Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>A &quot;Sturgeon-head&quot; at Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0070"></a>
+<img src="images/img0070.jpg" width="368" height="206" alt="&quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot;" title="">
+<BR><B>&quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot;</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>June 6th at a quarter of seven saw the whole populace of Athabasca
+Landing on the river bank&mdash;dogs, babies, the officials of the Hudson's
+Bay, parson, priest, police, and even the barkeep,&mdash;and with the yelping
+of dogs and &quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot; we are off. We are embarked on a
+2500-mile journey, the longest water route on the continent, down which
+floats each year the food, clothing, and frugal supplies of a country as
+big as Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The river is running five miles an hour and there is no need of the
+oars. The steersman is our admiration, as with that clumsy stern-sweep
+he dodges rocks, runs riffles, and makes bends. The scow is made of
+green wood, and its resilience stands it in good stead as, like a snake,
+it writhes through tight channels or over ugly bits of water. Everybody
+is in good humour; we are dreamers dreaming greatly. Why should we not
+be happy? Mrs. Harding is homeward-bound, Mr. Brabant on a new rung of
+the fur ladder of preferment, Inspector Pelletier and his associates
+starting on a quest of their own seeking. Sitting low among the &quot;pieces&quot;
+of the police boat, with only his head visible in the sunset glow, Dr.
+Sussex builds air-castles of that eleemosynary hospital of his on the
+Arctic Circle. The cook is whistling from the cook-boat. Five years ago
+he graduated from a business college, but the preparation of bannock and
+sow-belly appeals to the blood more insistently than trial balances and
+the petty cash book. As for ourselves, the Kid's smile is almost audible
+as she runs a loving hand over the oilskin cover of the camera. A
+favourite expression of mine in the latitudes below when the world
+smiled was, &quot;Oh, I'm glad I'm alive and white!&quot; On this exclamation I
+start now, but stop at the word &quot;white.&quot; North of Athabasca Landing
+white gives place to a tint more tawny.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred yards out, the Policemen are boyish enough to launch those
+shiny Peterboroughs just to try them, and in and out among the big
+sturgeon-heads, debonair dolphins, they dart. Then comes the rain, and
+one by one the clumsy boats turn toward shore. There are some things
+that even the enquiring mind cannot run to ground, things that just
+happen out of the blue. For fifteen successive springs I have tried to
+discover the first boy who brought marbles to school when marble-season
+came in, and I have never yet been able to put my finger on that elusive
+history-maker. So on this voyage, the fleet is started and stopped,
+landings are made, camping-places decided upon, and no ear can detect
+the sound of command.</p>
+
+<p>The scows tie up, and without undressing we sleep on board, pulling a
+tarpaulin over us and letting the rain rain. At 5:30 next morning we
+hear the familiar &quot;Nistow! Nistow!&quot; of the awakened camp. This word
+literally means &quot;brother-in-law,&quot; but it is the vocative used by the
+Cree in speaking to anybody he feels kindly toward. The cook makes a
+double entry with bacon and bannock, and there is exulting joy in our
+soul. Who would napkins bear, or finger-bowls? We had put them far
+behind, with the fardels.</p>
+
+<p>It is the season of lengthening days and fading nights. At seven o'clock
+we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first
+one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being
+shouted from boat to boat. Then, in one voice from three boats,
+&quot;Mooswa!&quot; and far beyond white man's vision the boatmen sight a moose.
+There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious
+Peterboroughs which were to make history on the map, and in the delay
+the moose wandered into pleasant pastures. The boatmen were very much
+disgruntled, as the moose is treasure-trove, the chief fresh meat that
+his world offers the Indian. From here to the Arctic are no domestic
+animals, the taste of beef or mutton or pork or chicken is unknown,
+bread gives place to bannock (with its consequent indigestion
+&quot;bannockburn&quot;), and coffee is a beverage discredited. Tobacco to smoke,
+strong, black, sweetened tea to drink from a copper kettle,&mdash;this is
+luxury's lap.</p>
+
+<p>The bowsman points to a rude cross on the right bank where a small
+runway makes in, &quot;Gon-sta-wa-bit&quot; (man who was drowned), he volunteers.
+Yesterday a Mounted Policeman buried there the body of an Indian man,
+his wife and his baby, who fell through the ice in a dog-sled this
+spring,&mdash;three in one grave, Lamartine's trinity, the Father, the
+Mother, and the Child.</p>
+
+<p>It is Sunday, and we have music from a li'l fiddle made by a squaw at
+Lac Ste. Anne. Lac la Biche River we pass, and Calling River, and at
+five in the evening are at Swift Current, Peachy Pruden's place, and
+then Red Mud. Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all
+night. Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the
+missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I
+draw up a canvas sheet. But it is too wonderful a night to sleep. Lying
+flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full
+of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up
+and pluck them. Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is
+the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the
+shadow of the cut-banks. At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in
+his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these
+human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or
+two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from
+high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant
+blood&mdash;the &quot;unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go.&quot; It is
+the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. In
+imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that
+long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back raucous encouragement to
+his long, sky-clinging V.</p>
+
+<p>Floating as we float, it is no longer a marvel to us that this North
+holds so many scientific men and finished scholars&mdash;colonial Esaus
+serving as cooks, dog-drivers, packers, trackers, oil-borers. The not
+knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new
+places and untrod ways,&mdash;who would exchange all this for the easy ways
+of fatted civilization!</p>
+
+<p>At five in the morning there is a drawing-in of the fleet to Pelican
+Portage. Before two hours have passed the grasshopper has become a
+burden, and it is 102&deg; in the shade, and no shade to be had. We are now
+a hundred miles from Athabasca Landing. On the left bank we come across
+a magnificent gas-well with a gush of flame twenty or thirty feet in
+height.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that eleven years ago, seeking for petroleum, the Dominion
+Government had a shaft sunk here; their boring apparatus was heavy, the
+plunger with its attachment weighing nearly a ton. At eight hundred feet
+the operator broke into an ocean of gas, and the pressure blew him with
+plunger and appliances into the air as a ball comes from a cannon-bore.
+The flow of gas was so heavy that it clogged his drills with maltha and
+sand, and from then to now the gas has been escaping. To-day the sound
+of the escape ricochets up and down the palisaded channel so that we
+cannot hear each other speak. There is gas enough here, if we could pipe
+it and bring it under control, to supply with free illumination every
+city of prairie Canada. It has destroyed all vegetation for a radius of
+twenty yards; but, oddly enough, outside this range of demarcation the
+growth is more luxuriant and comes earlier and stays later than that of
+the surrounding country. One redheaded Klondiker, ignorant of gas and
+its ways, ten years ago struck a match to this escaping stream, was
+blown into the bushes beyond, and came out minus hair, eye-brows and red
+beard&mdash;the quickest and closest shave he ever had. The shells of birds'
+eggs, tea-leaves from many a cheering copper-kettle, tufts of
+rabbit-hair, and cracked shin-bones of the moose, with here a greasy
+nine of diamonds, show, this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the
+gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or
+broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no
+thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a
+patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has
+consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills
+and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have
+eased the mind of poor Lo, around whose dying bunk we hear the relatives
+scrapping over his residuary estate of rusty rifle, much-mended
+fishing-net, and three gaunt dogs.</p>
+
+<p>We pass House River, and the devout cross themselves and murmur a
+prayer. The point is marked by a group of graves covered with canvas.
+Here years ago a family of four, travelling alone, contracted
+diphtheria, and died before help could reach them. There is another
+legend of which the boatmen unwillingly speak, the story of the
+<i>Wetigo</i>, or Indian turned cannibal, who murdered a priest on this
+lonely point, and ate the body of his victim. The taste for human flesh,
+Philip Atkinson assures us, grows with the using, and this lunatic of
+long ago went back to the camps, secured an Indian girl as bride,
+carried her to this point, took her life, and ate of her flesh. It is a
+gruesome story.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0076"></a>
+<img src="images/img0076.jpg" width="332" height="369" alt="Grand Rapids on the Athabasca River" title="">
+<BR><B>Grand Rapids on the Athabasca River</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Now begin the rapids, ninety miles of which we are to run. This rough
+water on the Athabasca is one of the only two impediments to navigation
+on the long course between Athabasca Landing and the Polar Ocean. These
+first rapids, frankly, are a disappointment. The water is high, higher
+than it has been for ten years, so the boiling over the boulders is not
+very noticeable. The Pelican Rapid and the Stony we shoot without
+turning a hair; the Joli Fou is a bit more insistent, but, as the cook
+says, &quot;nothing to write home about.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We drift in a drowsy dream of delight, and in the evening arrive at the
+head of Grand Rapids. If we had looked slightingly on the rough water
+passed, what we now see would satisfy the greediest. We tie up and get a
+good view of what lies ahead, and get also our first real introduction
+to the mosquito. In mid-stream he had not bothered us much, but after
+supper it rained a little, the day had been warm, and with cymbals,
+banners, and brass-bands, he comes in cohorts to greet us. The scows
+have their noses poked into the bank, the men have built smudge fires in
+front, but we decide that the best way to escape the mosquito is to go
+to bed. We lie down in the stern-sheets with our clothes on, make
+night-caps of our Stetson hats, pull the veils down over our necks, and
+try to sleep, but it is no avail. Each one of these mosquitoes is a
+Presbyterian mosquito and it has been ordained that this night he is to
+taste of white blood. It rains incessantly, and that hot hole in which
+we lie is one brown cloud of mosquitoes. The men on the bank have
+finally given it up as a bad job, and they set round the fires smoking
+and slapping different parts of their persons, swearing volubly in
+English. For the Cree language is devoid of invective. In the morning we
+are a sorry crowd, conversation is monosyllabic and very much to the
+point. It is the first serious trial to individual good-humour. When
+each one of your four million pores is an irritation-channel of
+mosquito-virus it would be a relief to growl at somebody about
+something. But the sun and smiles come out at the same time, and, having
+bled together, we cement bonds of friendship. What did Henry the Fifth
+say on the eve of Agincourt,&mdash;&quot;For he to-day who sheds his blood with me
+shall be my brother&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>Who would worry about mosquitoes with that splendid spectacular of the
+Grand Rapids at our feet? The great flood (Kitchee Abowstik) is divided
+into two channels by an island probably half a mile in length, with its
+long axis parallel to the flow of the river, and this island solves the
+question of progress. The main channel to the left is impassable; it is
+certain death that way. Between the island and the right shore is a
+passage which on its island side, with nice manipulation, is practicable
+for empty boats. Then the problem before us is to run the rough water at
+the near end of the island, tie up there, unload, transfer the pieces by
+hand-car over the island to its other end, let the empty scows down
+carefully through the channel by ropes, and reload at the other end.</p>
+
+<p>Between the bank where we are and the island ahead is a stretch of
+roaring water dangerous enough looking. We have learned ere this,
+however, to sit tight and watch for events. The careless Indians have
+straightened into keen-eyed, responsible voyageurs, each muscle taut,
+every sense alert. Our boat goes first, one half-breed with huge pole
+braces himself as bowsman, the most able man takes the stern sweep, the
+others stand at the oars. Fifteen minutes of good head-work brings us to
+the island and we step out with relief. The other boats follow and
+anchor, and we have opportunity at close range to inspect these worst
+rapids of the Athabascan chain. The current on the west side of the
+dividing island looks innocent, and we understand how the greenhorn
+would choose this passage-way, to his destruction.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0079"></a>
+<img src="images/img0079.jpg" width="278" height="384" alt="Portage at Grand Rapids Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Portage at Grand Rapids Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The transportation of pieces occupied four days, every moment of which
+we enjoyed. Grand Rapids Island is prodigal in wild flowers,&mdash;vetches,
+woodbine, purple and pink columbines, wild roses, several varieties of
+false Solomon's seal, our persisting friend dwarf cornel, and,
+treasure-trove, our first anemone,&mdash;that beautiful buttercup springing
+from its silvered sheath&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;And where a tear has dropt a wind-flower blows.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>I measured a grass-stem and found it two feet three inches high, rising
+amid last year's prostrate growth.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0080"></a>
+<img src="images/img0080.jpg" width="371" height="260" alt="Our transport at Grand Rapids Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Our transport at Grand Rapids Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At Grand Rapids Island we overtook two scows which had preceded us from
+The Landing and whose crews had waited here to assist in the transport.
+It gave us opportunity to observe these sixty representative half-breeds
+from Lac la Biche. Tall, strong, happy-go-lucky, with no sordid strain
+in their make-up, they are fellows that one cannot help feeling sympathy
+for. A natural link between the East and the West, the South of Canada
+and the North, they have bridged over the animosity and awkwardness
+with which the Red race elsewhere has approached the White.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0081"></a>
+<img src="images/img0081.jpg" width="368" height="211" alt="Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>In a glade our camp is made, inside our tents we arrange the
+mosquito-bar (a tent within a tent looking something like a good-sized
+dog-kennel), and here we lie in our blankets. The hum of the foiled
+mosquito is unction to our souls. It is a relief, too, to remove the
+day's clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.</p>
+
+<p>The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,&mdash;soft,
+yellowish, homogeneous. In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of
+ninety feet. The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four
+or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped
+nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones. The
+river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift
+current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as
+spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite
+the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet
+thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil
+trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great
+wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this
+strange page of history in stone.</p>
+
+<p>Timber along the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we
+see is largely second growth,&mdash;Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and
+aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender,
+delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery
+branches seem to float in air.</p>
+
+<p>Across the roaring water swallows are nesting in the clayey cliffs:&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;This guest of summer,<br>
+The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,<br>
+By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath<br>
+Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,<br>
+Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird<br>
+Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:<br>
+Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,<br>
+The air is delicate.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>We learn that half-breeds share the Scottish superstition that it is
+unlucky to disturb bank-swallows.</p>
+
+<p>Others of the migrant host travel in upper air more quickly than we on
+water, and have left us far behind,&mdash;swans, the Canada goose, great
+flocks of brant, waveys by the millions, followed by their cousins of
+the duck tribe,&mdash;spoon-bill, canvas-back, mallard, pin-tail, ring-neck,
+wood duck, and merganser. The geese will not stop until they have passed
+the Arctic Circle. Why people use the word &quot;goose&quot; as synonym for
+stupidity is beyond the ken of the ordinary observer. The text-books
+tell us tritely that the goose lives to be a hundred years. If she does,
+she may exclaim with the Churchmen, &quot;Yet are my years but labour and
+sorrow.&quot; The little chaps who have their birthday parties among
+sub-Arctic reeds are surrounded with enemies from the first day they
+crack their baby shells. Lynx and raccoon prey upon them by land, eagles
+and owls swoop upon them as they swim; and as with one eye they scan the
+sky above them, a greedy pike is apt to snap their web-feet from under
+them and draw them to a watery grave.</p>
+
+<p>The cadets of the Hudson's Bay Company exchange courtesies with the
+Mounted Police, each considering himself a distinct cut above the other.
+One Mounted Policeman, whose duty it had been to escort the crazed
+Russian Doukhobortsi on one of their &quot;altogether&quot; pilgrimages, is hailed
+across the circle, &quot;Here, lend us your knife, you nursemaid to the
+Douks.&quot; &quot;Who spoke?&quot; yawned the Policeman. &quot;Was it that fur-pup of the
+Hudson's Bay?&quot; &quot;Yes,&quot; retorted the first, &quot;and I'm glad I'm it; you
+couldn't pay me to wear a red coat and say 'Sir' to a damned little
+Frenchman, even if you are going to blaze a trail to Hudson Bay.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Some one asks Sergeant Joyce to tell his Bible story. He says, &quot;Oh,
+about Coal-Oil Johnnie! It was the cub's first year in the service, and
+he got off with some civilians and was drunk for a week. When he was in
+the Guard Room awaiting court-martial he had lots of time 'to sit in
+clink, admirin' 'ow the world was made.' Likewise he was very dry. There
+was nothing for him to amuse himself with but a paper of pins. He took
+the pillow of his cot and used the whole bunch of pins in working on it
+the one word 'Hagar,' in letters six inches high. The inspecting officer
+came in and the pin sign caught his eye. He spelled it out letter by
+letter, 'H-a-g-a-r,&mdash;what was the matter with him?' Johnnie retorted,
+'The him was a her, and she died of thirst in the wilderness.' The
+inspecting officer says to Johnnie, 'Well, that would never happen to
+you.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A peculiar drumming wafts from the shore-line. &quot;Pa-pas-ku,&quot; says one of
+the Cree lads, pulling his pipe from his mouth and listening. Young
+Hudson's Bay to my enquiring look returns, &quot;The Canadian ruffed grouse,&quot;
+which Sussex elucidated, &quot;<i>Bonasa umbellus logata</i>,&quot; at which we all
+feel very much relieved.</p>
+
+<p>The Kid was pressing specimens, and, holding up a branch, the Mounted
+Policeman next her said, &quot;Young jackpine, I think.&quot; &quot;It belongs to the
+Conifer family,&quot; corrects the Doctor. &quot;Oh!&quot; says the Mounted Policeman,
+with a sniff, &quot;then we'll give it back to 'em the next time one of the
+Conifer boys comes round.&quot; The man of the river and the woods hates a
+Latin name, and any stray classic knowledge you have is best hidden
+under a napkin. The descriptive terms men use here are crisp and to the
+point. The vicious habit of giving birds bad names is one that grows,
+and you never know when the scientific have come to a finality. For
+instance, little Robin Red-Breast <i>(&quot;the pious bird with scarlet
+breast</i>&quot; whose nest with four eggs the Kid discovered to-day), has
+successively lived through three tags, &quot;<i>Turdus migratorius</i>,&quot;
+&quot;<i>Planesticus migratorius</i>,&quot; and &quot;<i>Turdus canadensis</i>.&quot; If he had not
+been an especially plucky little beggar he would have died under the
+libels long ago. For my own part I cannot conceive how a man with good
+red blood in his veins could look a chirky little robin in the eye and
+call him to his face a &quot;<i>Planesticus migratorius</i>,&quot; when as chubby
+youngster he had known the bird and loved him as Robin Red-Breast. One
+is inclined to ask with suspicion, &quot;Is naming a lost art?&quot; Any new
+flower discovered these days, every clever invention in the realm of
+machinery, is forthwith saddled with an impossible name. If it had not
+been easy to clip the term &quot;automobile&quot; down to the working stub &quot;auto,&quot;
+the machine would never have run our streets. Again, the decimal system
+is conceded to be far ahead of the asinine &quot;five and one-half yards make
+one rod, pole or perch&quot;; the only reason why the commonsense thing does
+not supersede the foolish one is that the sensible measurement has the
+fool tag on it. Who could imagine ever going into a store and asking for
+seven decimetres and nine centimetres of picture-moulding, or dropping
+into the corner grocery to buy a hectolitre of green onions? When man
+dug gold and iron and tin out of the earth he made things with them. Now
+when we discover a new mineral we dub it &quot;molybdenum&quot; and let it rust in
+innocuous ease. When man loses the art of nervous speech, his power of
+action goes with it. And as we ruminate, the <i>Bonasa umbellus togata</i>
+drums on.</p>
+
+<p>When we pass the parallel of 55&deg;N. we come into a very wealth of new
+words, a vocabulary that has found its way into no dictionary but which
+is accepted of all men. The steep bank opposite us is a &quot;cut bank,&quot; an
+island or sandbar in a river is a &quot;batture.&quot; A narrow channel is called
+a &quot;she-ny,&quot; evidently a corruption of the French <i>chenal</i>. When it leads
+nowhere and you have to back down to get out, you have encountered a
+&quot;blind she-ny.&quot; The land we have come from is known as &quot;Outside&quot; or &quot;<i>Le
+Grand Pays</i>.&quot; Anywhere other than where we sit is &quot;that side,&quot; evidently
+originating from the viewpoint of a man to whom all the world lay either
+on this side or that side of the river that stretched before him. When
+you obtain credit from a Hudson's Bay store, you &quot;get debt.&quot; A Factor's
+unwillingness to advance you goods on credit would be expressed thus,
+&quot;The Company will give me no debt this winter.&quot; From here northward the
+terms &quot;dollars&quot; and &quot;cents&quot; are unheard. An article is valued at &quot;three
+skins&quot; or &quot;eight skins&quot; or &quot;five skins,&quot; harking back to the time when a
+beaver-skin was the unit of money. The rate of exchange to-day is from
+four skins to two skins for a dollar. Trapping animals is &quot;making fur.&quot;
+&quot;I made no fur last winter and The Company would give me no debt,&quot; is a
+painful picture of hard times. Whenever an Indian has a scanty larder,
+he is &quot;starving,&quot; and you may be &quot;starving&quot; many moons without dying or
+thinking of dying. &quot;Babiche&quot; in the North is the tie that binds, and
+&quot;sinew&quot; is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or
+caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of
+the spinal column of the same animals.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0087"></a>
+<img src="images/img0087.jpg" width="315" height="380" alt="Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police" title="">
+<BR><B>Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>There is but one thing on this planet longer than the equator, and that
+is the arm of British justice, and the Mounted Police, these chaps
+sprawling at our feet, are the men who enforce it. The history of other
+lands shows a determined fight for the frontier, inch by inch
+advancement where an older civilization pushes back the native,&mdash;there
+are wars and feuds and bloody raids. Not so here. When the homesteader
+comes down the river we are threading and, in a flood, colonization
+follows him, he will find British law established and his home ready.
+The most compelling factor making for dignity and decency in this
+border-country is the little band of red-coated riders, scarcely a
+thousand in number. Spurring singly across the plains that we have
+traversed since leaving Winnipeg, they turn up on lone riverway or
+lakeside in the North just when most wanted.</p>
+
+<p>Varied indeed is this man's duty,&mdash;&quot;nursemaid to the Doukhobor&quot; was a
+thrust literally true. His, too, was the task on the plains of seeing
+that the Mormon doesn't marry overmuch. He brands stray cattle,
+interrogates each new arrival in a prairie-waggon, dips every doubtful
+head of stock, prevents forest-fires, keeps weather records, escorts a
+lunatic to an asylum eight hundred miles away, herds wood bison on the
+Slave, makes a cross-continent dash from Great Slave Lake to Hudson Bay,
+preserves the balance of power between American whaler and Eskimo on the
+Arctic edge!</p>
+
+<p>At one time the roll-call of one troup of Mounted Police included in its
+rank and file three men who had held commissions in the British service,
+an ex-midshipman, a son of a Colonial Governor, a grandson of a
+Major-General, a medical student from Dublin, two troopers of the Life
+Guards, an Oxford M.A., and half a dozen ubiquitous Scots. Recently an
+ex-despatch-bearer from De Wet joined the force at Regina, and although
+the cold shoulder was turned on him for a day or two, he soon made good.
+One of the young fellows stretched before us, now going to Fort Smith to
+round up wood bison, was born in Tasmania, ran away from school at
+fourteen, sheared sheep and hunted the wallaby, stoked a steamer from
+Australia to England and from England to Africa, and in the early days
+of bicycles was a professional racer.</p>
+
+<p>Constable Walker, lying lazily on his back blowing blue spirals into
+the air, has in the long winter night made more than once, with dogs,
+that perilous journey from the Yukon to the Mackenzie mouth (one
+thousand miles over an unknown trail), carrying to the shut-in whalers
+their winter mail. On one of these overland journeys he cut off the tips
+of his four toes. His guide fainted, but Walker took babiche and,
+without a needle, sewed up the wound. On this trip he was fifty-seven
+days on the trail, during five days of which the thermometer hovered
+between sixty-two and sixty-eight degrees below.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a><h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">De win' she blow, blow, blow,</span><br>
+An' de crew of de wood scow '<i>Julie Plante</i>'<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Got scar't an' run below&mdash;</span><br>
+For de win' she blow lak hurricane<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bimeby she blow some more,</span><br>
+An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wan arpent from de shore.&quot;</span><br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Dr. Drummond</i>.<br>
+
+<p>This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The
+daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten
+underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to
+thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes
+behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive laundry. At
+dusk we had seen an empty scow floating down river, adrift from
+Athabasca Landing. In the middle of Grand Rapids she broke amidships,
+but held together until in the darkness she floated beyond our ken.</p>
+
+<p>Trouble of our own awaits us. With no one noting, an adventurous scow,
+with all her precious cargo, has pulled loose from her moorings. By the
+time the Cree watchman discovers that the &quot;<i>Go-Quick-Her</i>&quot; has taken the
+bit in her teeth, the runaway with tail-sweep set has turned the next
+corner of the Athabasca. Great excitement! Billy Loutit and Emile
+Fosseneuve borrow the Police canoe and go in chase. It is such a rough
+bit of water that we hold our breaths, for a false stroke means death to
+both; but that false stroke does not come. Billy Loutit knows this river
+as we know the borders and shrubs in our garden-bed.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0091"></a>
+<img src="images/img0091.jpg" width="366" height="231" alt="Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore" title="">
+<BR><B>Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>This accident causes everyone to look grave. The Edmonton value of the
+cargo is over two thousand dollars, but it is a loss that cannot be
+measured in dollars and cents. These wrecked goods, gaily sailing down
+the Athabasca, cannot be duplicated at some convenient grocery around
+the corner.</p>
+
+<p>We have learned that any untoward happening means a half day's delay.
+Philip Atkinson calls me to one side to suggest that it would be a
+&quot;clear waste&quot; to leave behind the eggs of &quot;that duck's nest I showed you
+the day we came.&quot; Atkinson is a half-breed with a Hercules-build who
+looks forty-five and owns up to sixty. He and I chatted over the mallard
+eggs and my collection of wild flowers, he respecting the preservative
+art and I in full awe of that art gastronomic of his which gulps the
+Mallards-in-embryo, sans fourchette, sans salt, sans ceremony.</p>
+
+<p>They are an interesting study, these half-breeds; it means much to each
+on which side of the English Channel his father had birth. When a
+Frenchman marries an Indian woman he reverts to her scale of
+civilization; when a Scot takes a native to wife he draws her up to his.
+Our crew live at Lac la Biche and were engaged last winter for their
+season's work at from twenty to forty dollars a month, with board and
+moccasins. They walked a hundred miles to Athabasca Landing to connect
+with their summer's job, and the absolute certainty of regular meals
+just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and
+four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual
+happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic
+term &quot;the law of heredity&quot; works out with these people, cut off from the
+lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the
+pre-civilization Indian.</p>
+
+<p>Philip, duck-stuffed but untroubled by &quot;that full feeling after eating,&quot;
+lights his pipe and looks back through the years. &quot;My father belonged to
+The Company, my mother was an Ojibway from the Lake of the Woods
+country. My father went back to the Old Country when I was seven,
+leaving me to an uncle to be educated, and I don't know 'B' from a
+bull's foot. He put me to work on the woodpile from morning till night.
+When my father came back after twelve years and found me ignorant, he
+cried like a baby. I have no education, but,&quot; with a contemplative
+puff, &quot;I have friends wherever I go.&quot; Philip is good to look at and he
+is a linguist, speaking Cree, French, and excellent English with a
+delightful Scotch accent. He is an ardent admirer of the H.B. Company.
+&quot;They always kept their word with a man, and when they had done with
+him, returned him without cost to his old home.&quot; Philip and his two sons
+were the first to shoot the Grand Rapids, and he tells us that this
+stretch of the Athabasca River has been used only twenty years. Before
+that time people from the North reached Winnipeg by the Clearwater.
+Philip is a Loyalist. During the half-breed rebellion of 1885 he carried
+dispatches to Middleton and Otter, going seventy-five miles one day on
+foot. He had his horse, &quot;a draught-horse as black as a crow,&quot; taken from
+him twice, got through the lines and stole another, and tells proudly
+how for his deed of valor he was presented with an Assomption belt.</p>
+
+<p>At last we are off, keeping sharp look-out for the lost scow. Buffalo
+River, where we pull up for the night, is a recognized camping-place.
+The men know where to put their hands on old-time tent-poles, the boys
+dig out shin-bones of the moose,&mdash;the relics of some former
+feast,&mdash;which they gnaw as a puppy mumbles an old bone.</p>
+
+<p>Another manifestation of gas is here. It bubbles up on the shore and
+through the water at the boat's bow, and as we strike a match the whole
+surface flames like the brandy on a Christmas plum-pudding. On the
+opposite side of the river are &quot;lobsticks,&quot; a new word to us and a new
+thing. To stand as a living totem-pole, the Indians select on a striking
+promontory a tall spruce and from a section of the trunk lop all the
+branches except two, which are left as wings. If the lobstick is to
+stand a monument to a certain man or party, the names of those to be
+honored are written in Cree on an attached slab. We were to notice
+lobsticks from point to point along the rest of our journey, some of
+them indicating good hunting-grounds or fishing-places back from the
+shore, but most of them memorials of happenings on the river.</p>
+
+<p>The Little Buffalo carries to the Athabasca its noisy current between
+two high escarpments, and on the shelf leading back from the banks of
+the main stream is a far-reaching plateau of splendidly-fertile land. In
+the scow next us the two young Crees who are preparing the food for our
+evening &quot;meat-su&quot; carry on a religious controversy as they slice the
+sow-belly. We gather that one has been taken into the Protestant fold
+and that the other follows the priests. Duncan Trembl&eacute; comes down and
+cuffs them both soundly, putting an end to the argument with, &quot;It's all
+the same as the other, just like the Hudson's Bay Company and the free
+trader. Each one tells you his goods is the best and the other is
+<i>nee-moy-yuh mee-wah-sin</i> (no good). It's that way with the God-goods of
+the white men. Each church tells you that his is the best, but they all
+come down to us in the same scow, both the priest and the missionary.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next morning we are all keyed-up for the rapids, and about six miles
+down we encounter the Brul&eacute;, the first one, and take it square in
+mid-channel. We ship a little water, but pass through it all too soon,
+for the compelling grandeur of the Brul&eacute; grips one. The river here is
+held between vertical walls of the reddest of red sandstone against
+which the lush greenery makes a striking contrast. Twenty miles below is
+the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but
+because the boiler of the steamer <i>Wrigley</i> was lost here and still
+remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as
+clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The
+tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes
+the Long Rapid <i>(Kawkinwalk Abowstick</i>), which we run close to its right
+bank.</p>
+
+<p>From the distance sounds the ominous roar of the Big Cascade. At quarter
+past four we reach the head of the swirling fall. The underlying cause
+of the Big Cascade is a limestone ledge which cuts the channel
+diagonally and makes ugly-looking water. We plan to run the rapid one
+boat at a time. The crews are doubled. Our steersman is alert,
+expectant, and as agile as a cat, his black hair switching in the wind.
+Sitting in the centre of the scow, as we do, the sensation is very
+different to that which one experiences in running rapids in a canoe.
+Then it is all swiftness and dexterity, for your craft is light, and, in
+expert hands, easily dirigible with one clever turn of the wrist. With a
+ten-ton scow the conditions change and you feel correspondingly more
+helpless.</p>
+
+<p>The great rapid stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer.
+With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to
+him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up
+for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a
+water-fence. For all we own in the world we wouldn't be anywhere but
+just where we sit. If it is going to be our last minute, well, Kismet!
+let it come. At least it will not be a tame way of going out. For the
+life of me I cannot forbear a cry of exultation. Then there is the
+feeling below one's feet which you experienced when you were a kiddie
+lying flat on your stomach coasting down a side-hill and your little red
+sled struck a stone. We, too, have struck something, but do not stop to
+ask what the obstruction is.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0096"></a>
+<img src="images/img0096.jpg" width="369" height="227" alt="The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills" title="">
+<BR><B>The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to
+photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good
+vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just
+time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr.
+Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as
+we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it
+was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.</p>
+
+<p>The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Trembl&eacute;, the pilot, dances in the
+sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the
+top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the
+men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way
+through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The
+Inspector says, &quot;Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste.&quot; The
+native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis,
+&quot;After you, Inspector.&quot; Then Pelletier says, sharply, &quot;Jump, I tell you,
+jump; there's no time for&mdash;Gaston-and-Alphonse business here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly
+things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows
+discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged
+goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has
+been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on
+the bank,&mdash;five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three
+minutes!</p>
+
+<p>A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward
+McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an
+hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden
+alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening
+swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along
+the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before
+we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the
+enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks
+into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded
+island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in;
+so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back
+forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and
+Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful
+site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of
+Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.</p>
+
+<p>Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would
+expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their
+world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of
+the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition
+of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr.
+Brabant says, &quot;Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for
+you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?&quot; &quot;Never mind,&quot;
+says Bob, &quot;I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the
+water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation.
+Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her &quot;special
+orders&quot; are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North
+not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of
+the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for
+hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes.
+Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of
+the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting,
+and, turning it over, says bravely, &quot;I think it will dry.&quot; Mathematical
+and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic
+edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are
+miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and
+Hudson's Bay blankets!</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the
+Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding
+to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put
+up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little
+pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of
+effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted
+together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly
+Sand-boys &quot;all in one delicious gravy.&quot; The Doctor is dazed, and offers
+to white and brown alike a tin box with &quot;Have a pastile, do.&quot; He wanders
+among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they
+accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially
+appreciates,&mdash;something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the
+Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on
+each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. &quot;Here are some
+authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and
+I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian
+Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I
+shall never be able to tell which it is.&quot; One by one the Doctor digs out
+from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,&mdash;a presentation &quot;Life of the
+Countess of Munster,&quot; also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved
+holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be &quot;as old as the
+Conqueror.&quot; There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which
+carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows
+the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under
+a side of bacon, is a print of &quot;my great-grandfather who discovered a
+cure for scurvy.&quot; A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in
+Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead
+along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0101"></a>
+<img src="images/img0101.jpg" width="400" height="244" alt="Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader" title="">
+<BR><B>Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader</b>
+</center>
+
+<p>Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad
+one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort
+McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and
+a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition
+to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a
+five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years
+with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their
+migrations and tribal feasts. We question, &quot;Are you not lonely,
+especially in the winter?&quot; But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as
+heroic. &quot;Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians
+are always coming and going, and they are full of interest.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees
+when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness
+consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is
+divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the
+black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox
+would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but
+varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral
+alpacas, all of us,&mdash;something between a sheep and a goat. But no less
+are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of
+his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the
+self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home.
+The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind
+Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow
+from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that
+she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and
+depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an
+assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due
+to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss
+Gordon translates. &quot;I am delighted that ladies have come such a long
+distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all
+white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to
+old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water,
+the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children,&quot; and
+the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. &quot;Be
+glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it.&quot; It is the
+advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the
+Winnipeg Hospital.</p>
+
+<p>We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair
+of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle&mdash;merely for effect,
+for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In
+one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church
+to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the
+hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured
+hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that
+twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store
+to go across and dress this wound.</p>
+
+<p>When a schoolboy takes to his bosom a <i>fidus Achates</i>, the first thing
+he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces
+us to her find,&mdash;nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of
+a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.</p>
+
+<p>During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as
+they had &quot;made little fur,&quot; entertaining them as courteously as you
+would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink
+thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden,
+bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman
+passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a
+Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just
+about three days.</p>
+
+<p>A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,&mdash;the reading of the
+rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a
+peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the
+latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern
+contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full
+fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the
+future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort
+McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the
+mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said,
+&quot;Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn
+medicine so that I could help these poor creatures.&quot; Her tone of
+unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the
+scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden,
+radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of
+pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for&mdash;a
+Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any
+one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of
+the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has &quot;another
+guess coming.&quot; The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a
+stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the
+potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally
+an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the
+wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of
+growing things.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0102"></a>
+<img src="images/img0102.jpg" width="364" height="197" alt="The Steamer Grahame" title="">
+<BR><B>The Steamer <i>Grahame</i></B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay
+Company's steamer <i>Grahame</i> meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going
+passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort
+McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the
+easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers
+are navigated against stream by &quot;tacking,&quot; that is, towing the boats,
+weary mile after mile, &quot;by the power o' man,&quot; the half-breed boatmen
+scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden
+craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written
+word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out
+to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The <i>Grahame</i>
+has its advantages,&mdash;clean beds, white men's meals served in real
+dishes, and best of all, a bath!</p>
+
+<p>On the <i>Grahame</i> we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus
+far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it.
+Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of
+Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have
+ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to
+rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole
+chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a
+resonant voice. He can recite the whole of &quot;Paradise Lost&quot; as
+faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr.
+Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to
+shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see
+only the surface and have to guess the depths.</p>
+
+<p>As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56&deg;
+40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, &quot;where we
+are at.&quot; In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far
+north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and
+the lone Pribilof, &quot;where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and
+the seals they breed for themselves.&quot; Crossing the junction of the
+Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of
+Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789
+traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its
+confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters
+of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat
+contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in
+latitude 58&deg; 36' North.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0104"></a>
+<img src="images/img0104.jpg" width="310" height="278" alt="An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that
+upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of
+fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank,
+out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein,
+building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much
+time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those
+ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and
+determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant
+derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may
+reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of
+striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while &quot;punching&quot; one of
+his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of
+limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine,
+poplar, and spruce.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0105"></a>
+<img src="images/img0105.jpg" width="308" height="404" alt="Tar Banks on the Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Tar Banks on the Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is
+exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for
+blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these
+banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while
+extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the
+river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are
+medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.</p>
+
+<p>Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at
+every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a
+twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically
+may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is
+a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of
+over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a
+section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and
+twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed
+through the sands.</p>
+
+<p>Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two
+miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles
+up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable
+odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said,
+&quot;Smells are surer than sounds or sights.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down
+this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the
+coming of the railroad can bring to light.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a><h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,<br>
+Their humble joys and destiny obscure.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Gray's Elegy</i>.<br>
+
+<p>At seven in the morning of Sunday, June 21st, we enter Lake Athabasca,
+and catch our first glimpse of Fort Chipewyan. An acceptance of the
+invitation, &quot;Come, shake your leg,&quot; has kept the men busy half the night
+over a hot sequence of Red River jigs among &quot;pieces&quot; on the lower deck,
+and we have this superb sweep almost to ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>The great lake-scape is blue and green and grey and opaline as the sun
+strikes it and the surface breaks to a south wind. Ours is the one craft
+on this inland sea, but overhead a whole navy of clouds man&#339;uvres, the
+ships of the ghostly argosy doubling themselves in the lake. As we draw
+in, the village takes shape. What haunts us as we look at the white
+houses, that crescent beach of pinkest sand? We have it! It is a print,
+an old woodcut of &quot;Russian America&quot; that we used to pore over in the
+days when one wore &quot;pinnies&quot; of flour-sacking, and &quot;hankies&quot; were made
+from meal-bags.</p>
+
+<p>At one end of the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay
+Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the
+other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples
+and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of
+Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little Church of England, and higher
+up and farther back the Barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
+The white-washed homes of the employ&eacute;s of The Company, little
+match-boxes dazzling in the sun, stretch from one end of the beach to
+the other. In among the half-breed populace stalk policeman and priest,
+red jacket keeping the dark-skinned people straight in this world and
+black robe laying out conditions for the world to come. So is Chipewyan
+fate chequered with the <i>rouge et noir</i> of compulsion and expediency.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0108"></a>
+<img src="images/img0108.jpg" width="364" height="263" alt="Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Fort Chipewyan is the oldest post in the North, and every boulder of red
+gneissic rock, if we could interrogate it, has a story to tell. Peter
+Pond, of the North-West Company, in 1778 built a post on the Athabasca
+River thirty miles to the south of the lake. The far-seeing Alexander
+Mackenzie, in the interests of the same company, sent his cousin
+Roderick ten years later to build Fort Chipewyan on the lake, and for
+over a century this was the entrep&ocirc;t and emporium of the whole North.
+The Hudson's Bay Company meanwhile were maintaining a post, Fort
+Wedderburne, not far away on Potato Island, and upon the amalgamation of
+the Companies in 1821 they took possession of the present Fort
+Chipewyan.</p>
+
+<p>This metropolis is one hundred and twenty years old. Chipewyan was doing
+business at the same old stand before Toronto was the capital of Upper
+Canada, while Ottawa was still unheard of, and when of Chicago not even
+the Fort Dearborn nucleus had been built. 1788! We wonder if the old ox
+that conveys our &quot;cassette&quot; and &quot;pieces&quot; up to the big gateway of The
+Company's quadrangle was a drawer of wood and drinker of water at that
+date. He looks as if he might have been. George III was reigning in
+England when Fort Chipewyan was built, Arkwright was making his spinning
+jenny, and Watts experimenting with the steam-engine. Sir Joshua
+Reynolds painted his pictures, Burns, a young man of twenty-nine, was
+busy with his ballads. In London a little baby saw the light of day,
+whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron. Three British boys might
+have been seen with arms thrown over each other's shoulders, &quot;dreaming
+greatly&quot;&mdash;Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and
+Wordsworth just eighteen. Across the Channel the French Revolution was
+at its height. Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Down on the
+Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had
+gone through the birth-throes of nationhood. It is a far call.</p>
+
+<p>Scraping the yellow lichens off the old sun-dial, we adjust our
+bearings. We are 111&deg; West of Greenwich and in latitude 58&deg; 45' North.
+Our parallel carried eastward would strike the Orkneyan skerries and
+pass through Stromness. All untouched by the development of that busy
+continent to the south which has grown up within its lifetime, Chipewyan
+is a little pearl of the periwigged days of the early Georges. From its
+red sands, tamarack swamps, and mossy muskeg one almost expects to see
+arise the forms of those great of old who outfitted here, making
+Chipewyan the base of their northward explorations. The ghostly company
+is a goodly one&mdash;Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Simpson, and Sir
+John Franklin (their honorary prefixes coming to them in the after days
+as reward of their labors), Back and Richardson and Rae, and in later
+days that young stripling curate who was afterwards to be known
+throughout the world of letters as Bishop Bompas, the &quot;Apostle of the
+North.&quot; Then there is the great unnamed horde who rested tired limbs at
+Chipewyan on their northward journeys, each on his own
+mission&mdash;fur-traders and hunters of big game, devoted nuns and silent
+priests, the infrequent scientist, and the hundreds of Klondikers, their
+hearts hot with the greed for gold. These all through the century have
+enjoyed as we now enjoy the spontaneous hospitality of this little bit
+of Britain which floats the Union Jack from its fort walls, and whose
+people, brown and white, when the belated news of the passing of
+Victoria the Great reached this her northern outpost, gathered on the
+beach and bewailed aloud their personal loss. We seem to hear again the
+far-flung cry &quot;The Queen is dead! The Queen is dead!&quot; from the
+half-breed runners coming in that Christmas Day across the winter ice.</p>
+
+<p>Mackenzie made Chipewyan his headquarters for eight years. It was from
+here he started on his voyage to the Arctic Sea in 1789, and three years
+later on that other history-making journey to the far Pacific. Sir John
+Franklin outfitted here for his two land-journeys&mdash;in July, 1820, with
+Dr. Richardson, and again in 1825. Chipewyan is a mine of interest. We
+almost begrudge time given to the dainty meals of our hostess, Mrs.
+William Johnson, and the hours spent between her lavender-scented
+sheets.</p>
+
+<p>In the loft above the office of the H.B. Company, in among old
+flintlock rifles and discarded ox-yokes, we browse through the daily
+records of The Company, old journals written by the Factors at the close
+of their day's work through the years and here preserved for our
+inquisitive eyes. Sitting on the floor, making extracts from these
+tomes, one has the half-guilty feeling of being caught poking into a
+tomb.</p>
+
+<p>On this page the ink is thin and one can see the old writer thawing out
+his frozen ink-pot of stone at the end of a tired day and sitting down
+to write his simple tale. Here are finger-marks where the blood of a
+buffalo gives a marginal note. The journalist had been called away from
+his writing to weigh and pay for some fresh meat. Drops from a tallow
+candle show the light of other days. A pressed mosquito of the vintage
+of 1790 is very suggestive. We picture the trivial round and common task
+of the man who writes, see him exchanging fathoms of tobacco for
+beaver-pelts in those long, cold winters, and eagerly hunger with him
+for the signs presaging the going-out of the ice and the coming-in of
+Spring. We follow out the short Summer with him and revel in its
+perpetual daylight. With him we make the fall fishery and shoot our
+winter's supply of waveys and southward-flying cranes. We wonder, as he
+wondered, what news the next packet will bring from the old folks in the
+Orkneys or the Hebrides. We study, as he studied, the problem of
+governing his servants, placating the Indians, and making enough fur to
+satisfy that inexorable Board of Directors back in London whose motto is
+&quot;Skin for skin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It has been a grim enough life as the author of this journal records it.
+He is far from those who direct his fate, and recognition and reward are
+slow in coming. Companionship and the gentle arts of &quot;outside&quot; are
+denied him. He must make his own world and rear within it his dusky
+brood, that they in honourable service may follow his round of &quot;work
+done squarely and unwasted days.&quot; What made the charm of this life to
+these men? It is hard to see. The master of the post was also master of
+the situation, and an autocrat in his community, a little Fur King, a
+Captain of Industry. A thing was law because he said it. And isn't it
+Caesar himself who declares, &quot;Better be first in a little Iberian
+village than second in Rome?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We get a delightful picture in an entry under the date of Wednesday,
+23rd May, 1827, when Sir John Franklin was on his way back to England at
+the end of his second journey.</p>
+
+&quot;To-day William McGillivary and Katherine Stewart, daughter<br>
+of Alexander Stewart, Chief Factor, were joined in holy wedlock<br>
+by Captain John Franklin, R.N., Commander of the Land Arctic<br>
+Expedition.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Great is the force of example, for five days later appears the entry</p>
+
+&quot;This evening the ceremonial of marriage took place between<br>
+Robert McVicar, Esq., and Christy McBeath. Captain Franklin<br>
+acted on the occasion as clergyman. The ceremony o'er, the<br>
+evening was agreeably spent in a family assembly.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Looking at these records, we are reminded of a not-very-well-known story
+of international courtesy which connects itself with the third and
+ill-fated journey of Franklin. Old Sir John, then in his sixtieth year,
+had sailed from England in an attempt at the Northwest Passage. Years
+passed and no word came from the explorer, and in 1852 the ice-desert
+was still mute.</p>
+
+<p>In this year, Sir Edward Belcher in the <i>Resolute</i> headed one of the
+many Arctic Relief Expeditions, subsequently abandoning his boat in the
+ice off Melville Island. Next year the American whaler <i>Henry George</i>
+met the deserted <i>Resolute</i> in sound condition about forty miles from
+Cape Mercy; she must have drifted through Barrow Strait, Lancaster
+Sound, and Baffin Bay. She was recovered, the Government of the United
+States bought her and with international compliments presented her in
+perfect condition to Queen Victoria in 1856. The old ship was broken up
+about thirty years ago, and from the soundest of her timbers a solid
+desk was made by direction of Queen Victoria, who presented it to the
+then President of the United States. This is the desk which stands in
+President Taft's reception room to-day, and on it the papers of eight
+administrations have been written.</p>
+
+<p>There is living as well as buried history in Chipewyan. A stroll from
+one end of its lacustrine street to the other is lush with interest. We
+call upon Colin Fraser, whose father was piper to Sir George Simpson.
+Colin treats us to a skirl of the very pipes which announced the
+approach of Simpson whenever that little Northern autocrat, during his
+triumphal progress through a bailiwick as big as Europe, made his way
+into a new fort.</p>
+
+<p>With the echo of the &quot;<i>Gay Gordons</i>&quot; in our ears we pass into the
+largest convent in the North country, managed by the Grey Nuns of
+Montreal. Sister Brunelle came into the North in 1866. Forty-two years
+in a convent-school of the Northland! It makes one gasp.</p>
+
+<p>These Indian schools, assisted by the Canadian Government, catch the
+little Indians in the camps and hold their prey on school-benches from
+the age of four to fourteen. One boy is dumb, another a hunchback. In a
+corner we came upon a poor old derelict of the camps, a Cree woman,
+paralysed and mentally deranged, who within these quiet walls has found
+harbour. The kiddies are taught one clay in French and the next day in
+English; but when they hide behind their spellers to talk about the
+white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan. What do they learn?
+Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes,
+grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in
+Southern schools. When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their
+skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep
+(young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish
+meals for a twelve-month to come. If fish be brain food, then should
+this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards,
+capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarships <i>ad lib</i>.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0115"></a>
+<img src="images/img0115.jpg" width="308" height="308" alt="Three of a Kind" title="">
+<BR><B>Three of a Kind</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was
+from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their prot&eacute;g&eacute;s, that the
+sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
+in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This
+wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.</p>
+
+<p>We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and
+immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot,
+with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty
+bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a
+recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these
+good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six
+o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light
+is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. &quot;What in the world do you
+do after six?&quot; I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not
+content to rest in idle laps. &quot;Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to
+give us light.&quot; Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through
+the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft
+a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their
+candles like Alfred of old.</p>
+
+<p>Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a
+stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations. At the Church
+of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from
+the leg of an injured Indian. Afterward we learn that the peripatetic
+patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in
+the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome.
+Poor chap, he died in the process! But while he lived he stimulated
+trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale. If
+there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have
+comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably
+fore-ordained.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting family lives next to the English Mission&mdash;the Loutits.
+The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company,
+and &quot;for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a
+rabbit-track.&quot; There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old
+journals reach. The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree
+and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day's generation is a family of
+striking young people&mdash;the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work
+and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding
+the strong men's records of the North.</p>
+
+<p>George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from
+Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids. His
+brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran
+with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in
+three days&mdash;a distance of two hundred miles at least. Once, when the
+river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow
+to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling
+upward in the night. The rivermen tell of George Loutit's quarreling
+with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his
+adversary out of the window. When he heard him slump, George immediately
+thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for
+Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away. He arrived there in time for
+noon luncheon next day.</p>
+
+<p>At the H.B. Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge. A
+French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is
+peltries and not souls that Pierre is after. His forebears were Irish
+McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of
+French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such
+entries as these:&mdash;&quot;Wyllie at the forge,&quot; &quot;Wyllie making nails,&quot; &quot;Wyllie
+straightening the fowling-pieces,&quot; &quot;Wyllie making sled-runners,&quot; &quot;This
+day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian.&quot; We step into the old man's
+smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a &quot;Good
+mornin',&quot; in richest Doric. The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation
+of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan. He was born
+in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World. Coming out
+to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he
+threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without
+seeing a city in America. Torontonians think the hub of the universe is
+their capital on Lake Ontario. A smart young man from Toronto filtered
+in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, &quot;Came from the
+Old Country, didn't you? What did you think of Toronto?&quot; &quot;Naething, I
+didna see the place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a
+two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone. In the
+forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of
+his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north,
+Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west. To him
+these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into
+luxuriousness with all its weakening influence. &quot;It was much better in
+the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil. Nowadays, when we
+have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are
+coming out!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>No one feels like smiling a smile of superiority in talking with old Mr.
+Wyllie. He has taught himself the gentle arts of gunsmithing and
+blacksmithing. The tools that we see all around us are marvels of
+mechanical skill and would be the joy of a modern Arts and Crafts
+Exhibition. His sledges and augurs, planes and chisels have been made by
+the old man out of pig iron which came as ballast in the holds of those
+old sailing ships which beat their way into Fort Churchill through
+Hudson Strait. The hand-made tools are set into convenient handles of
+moose-horn and bone. Clever indeed is the workmanship that Wyllie has
+done with them. The last triumph from this unique forge was the welding
+of the broken shaft of the little tug <i>Primrose</i>. The steamer <i>Grahame</i>
+was built at Chipewyan of whipsawn lumber, and much of her steel and
+ironwork was wrought on Wyllie's forge.</p>
+
+<p>Wyllie left the Scottish Isles when a mere lad, but they are still
+&quot;Home&quot; to him and he tells us that this autumn he is going back on a
+visit. It was a prototype of Wyllie's</p>
+
+&quot;From the lone sheiling and the misty island,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,</span><br>
+But still the heart, the heart is Highland,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And we in <i>dreams</i> behold the Hebrides,&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>who prayed &quot;O, Lord, we beseech Thee, send down Thy covenanted blessin'
+on the Muckle Hebrides, the Lesser Hebrides, and the adjacent islands
+of Great Britain and Ireland.&quot; Talking with the old gentleman, you are
+conscious of the innate moral strength rather than the mechanical skill
+of the craftsman. Instinctively you feel the splendid power of his
+presence and come out from his forge murmuring, &quot;Thank God I have seen a
+<i>man</i> this day.&quot; Wyllie belongs to the age of the old journals, to the
+days that bred Joe Gargerys and old Adams in whom appeared &quot;the constant
+service of the antique world.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0120"></a>
+<img src="images/img0120.jpg" width="575" height="355" alt="Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North." title="">
+<BR><B>Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North.</B>
+</center>
+
+<blockquote><tt>
+EXPLANATION OF PLATE<br>
+<br>
+A and C&mdash;<i>Muski-moots</i>, or bags used by the duck-hunter for his game.
+Made by Dog-Rib women, of <i>babiche</i>, or rawhide of the moose or caribou.<br>
+<br>
+B&mdash;Velvet leggings richly embroidered in violet-coloured bead-work, made
+by Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald, a full-blooded Loucheaux woman.<br>
+<br>
+D&mdash;Wall-pocket of white deerskin embroidered in silk. Made by a
+Rabbit-Skin woman at Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.<br>
+<br>
+E&mdash;Wall-pocket ornamented with porcupine-quill work, made by a
+Yellow-Knife Indian woman at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.<br>
+<br>
+F&mdash;<i>Fire-bag</i>, or tobacco-pouch, made of two claws of the black bear.
+The work of a Beaver Indian woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.<br>
+<br>
+G&mdash;<i>Fire-bag</i> of velvet ornamented with silk-work, made by Chipewyan
+woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.<br>
+<br>
+H&mdash;Velvet watch-bag embroidered in silk, made by Slavi Indian woman at
+Fort Providence, at the head of Mackenzie River.<br>
+<br>
+I&mdash;Watch-pocket of smoked moose-skin, embroidered in silk-work, made by
+a Cree girl at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca.<br>
+<br>
+J&mdash;Armlets ornamented in porcupine quills, made by a half-breed woman on
+the Liard River (a feeder of the Mackenzie).<br>
+<br>
+K&mdash;Three hat bands&mdash;the first two ornamented with porcupine quills, and
+the last in silk embroidery&mdash;made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac,
+Lake Athabasca.<br>
+<br>
+L&mdash;Beautiful belt of porcupine work, made by a half-breed woman at Fort
+Nelson on the Liard (a feeder of the Mackenzie).<br>
+<br>
+M&mdash;Armlets of porcupine-quill work, made by half-breed girl at Fort
+Chipewyan.<br>
+</tt></blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. and Mrs. William Johnson, with generous courtesy, have made us
+their guests while we stay, and their refined home is a clear delight.
+Mr. Johnson is as clever a man as Mr. Wyllie, but in other lines.
+Without ever having seen an electric light, he learned by study and
+research more about electricity than nine men out of ten know who go
+through Electrical Training Schools. With the knowledge thus gained he
+constructed and put into working use an electric-light plant at Fort
+Simpson on the Mackenzie. Far up here on the map, too, the &quot;Judge,&quot; as
+he is lovingly called, taught himself all about watches, and he is now
+Father Time for the whole Mackenzie District, regulating and mending
+every timepiece in the country. The corrected watches are carried to
+their owners by the next obliging person who passes the post, where the
+owner is notching off the days on a piece of stick while he waits. A
+watch, the works of which were extracted from three old ones and
+assembled within one case by this Burbank of Watchdom, found its way
+down to Chicago. The jeweller into whose hands it fell declared that
+among all his workmen there was not one who could have duplicated the
+job.</p>
+
+<p>Chipewyan is a bird paradise; the whole woods are vocal to-day. In the
+autumn, wonderful hunts are made of the southward-flying cranes, geese,
+and waveys, thousands of these great birds being killed and salted and
+put in ice chambers for winter use. If the mosquitoes were not so bad we
+would spend hours in the woods here with &quot;God's jocund little fowls.&quot;
+These sweet songsters seem to have left far behind them to the south all
+suspicion of bigger bipeds. We hear the note of the ruby-crowned kinglet
+(<i>regulus calendula</i>) which some one says sounds like &quot;Chappie, chappie,
+jackfish.&quot; The American red-start comes to our very feet, the yellow
+warbler, the Tennessee warbler, the red-eyed vireo, and the magnolia
+warbler, which last, a young Cree tells us, is
+&quot;High-Chief-of-all-the-small-birds.&quot; Rusty blackbirds are here with
+slate-coloured junco, and we see a pair of purple finches. We are
+fortunate in getting a picture of the nest of the Gambel sparrow and two
+of the nesting white-throated, sparrow. They are ferreted out for us by
+the sharp eyes of a girl who says her Cree name is
+&quot;A-wandering-bolt-of-night-lightning!&quot; At our feet blossom cinquefoil,
+immortelles, the dainty flowers of the bed-straw.</p>
+
+<p>It has been a full day, and by the way the &quot;permits&quot; are opening up in
+the settlement when we come back, promises to be a full night. These men
+have waited a whole year for a drink, and now the lids can't come off
+quick enough. &quot;Come, hurry up, Flynn, we're all as dry as wooden gods,
+we're so dry that we're brittle&mdash;we'd break if you hit us.&quot; &quot;Well, I'm
+hurrying; I'm as much in a rush as any of you; I'm so warped the hoops
+are falling off.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It doesn't take long to polish off the permits proper (or improper). By
+morning all this liquor, imported for &quot;medicinal purposes,&quot; is gone.
+Whoever in Chipewyan is thoughtless enough to get ill during the next
+twelve months must fall back on the medicine-chest of the English
+Mission or of the Grey Nuns. Anything strong will do for the creation of
+joyousness during the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days of the
+year&mdash;Jamaica ginger, lavender-water, flavouring extracts.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning the bon vivants of Chipewyan are down to essences of lemon,
+vanilla, and ginger, which have been specially imported as stimulating
+beverages. We ask if they are any good. &quot;Good? I should say so, and one
+bottle just makes a drink. Can I offer&quot; (politely) &quot;to exhilarate you
+ladies with vanilla?&quot; The most jovial of the celebrants tells of his
+early imbibition of red ink. &quot;I used to get a gallon of red ink with my
+outfit every year, and it gives you the good feel, but when this new
+Commissioner comes in he writes, 'I don't see how you can use a gallon
+of red ink at your post in one year,' and I writes back, 'What we don't
+use we abuse,' and next year he writes to me, 'It's the abuse we
+complain of,' and, with regretful reminiscence, &quot;I got no more red ink.&quot;
+The substitution of red tape for the carmine fluid that inebriates is an
+innovation not appreciated.</p>
+
+<p>The old records fascinate us. We spend every spare moment before the
+coming of the treaty party in transcribing choice bits from them. There
+were drinks and drinkers in these old days.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, Friday 1st. January</i>. All hands came as is customary to wish us
+the compliments of the season, and they were treated with cakes each, a
+pipe, and two feet tobacco. In the evening they have the use of the hall
+to dance, and are regaled with a beverage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, April 30. Poitras</i>, a Chipewyan half-breed, arrived, and
+delivered 81 made beavers in prime furs, though he says he has been
+sickly all winter. I therefore presented him with a complete clothing
+and a Feather.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, May 16th</i>. One of our Indians having been in company with
+Indians from Isle a la Crosse got married to one of their young women,
+consequently has followed the father-in-law and taken his hunt away from
+us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, August 13th</i>. One Indian, <i>The Rat</i>, passed us on the Portage,
+he was treated with a dram for 'Old Acquaintance' sake.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On New Year's Eve the old chronicler drops into verse. In tall thin
+letters in faded ink we read,</p>
+
+&quot;If New Year's Eve the wind blow south,<br>
+It betokeneth warmth and growth;<br>
+If west, much milk, and fish in the sea;<br>
+If north, much storms and cold will be;<br>
+If east, the trees will bear much fruit;<br>
+If northeast, flee it man and beast.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1831, January 1</i>. The thermometer this morning was 29 below cypher.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>1831, May 22</i>. They bring intelligence that <i>Mousi-toosese-capo</i> is at
+their tent, having lately joined them, without his family of two women
+and two children, who perished during the winter. From his frequent
+prevarication when questioned by the other Crees, they suspect he has
+murdered and eaten them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1831, May 30th.</i> The fellow has got too large a family for a Fort
+Hunter, he cannot feed them with unlimited Indulgence and supply us at
+the same time.&quot; [Would Mr. Roosevelt second this?]</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1831, June 19th</i>. Two Chipewyans came from the Long Point informing us
+that <i>Big Head's</i> son is dead, that <i>Big Head</i> has thrown away his
+property in consequence of the loss of his boy, and that he told them to
+beg a shirt and tobacco. The shirt, of course, I did not send, the
+scoundrel is not worthy of it. I merely sent him six inches of tobacco
+with reluctance. That cursed family is a perfect pest to the place, and
+it is my humble opinion that the hand of Providence sends them the
+present calamity for their ill deeds.&quot;[!]</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1834, November 27th.</i> A party of the Isle &agrave; la Crosse Indians with old
+<i>Nulooh</i> and <i>Gauche</i> cast up. They have not come in this direction for
+the sake of running about, some of their relations is dead, and in their
+own words they are travelling on strange lands to kill grief, not an
+unusual custom among the Northern Indians.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1865, October 23rd</i>. We were surprised yesterday at the arrival of a
+Protestant missionary, a Mr. Bompas from England; he came in a canoe
+from the Portage with Sylvestre and <i>Vadnoit</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1866, January 1st</i>. The whole Establishment breakfasted in the Hall
+and in the evening a Ball came off with great eclat. Two marriages also
+to-day, Francis Villebrun to Marie Cyre, and Baptiste St. Cyre, Jr., to
+Justine McKay&mdash;so that all things considered the New Year was ushered
+in with a tremendous row! Verily, times are improving in the North.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1866, January 2nd</i>. The men are rather seedy to-day after their
+tremendous kick-up of yesterday.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1840, January 25th.</i> The object of sending <i>Lafleur</i> to the Little
+Island is that he may procure a kind of willow that the Canadians call
+'Courmier,' the bark of which scraped and boiled in water has healing
+qualities which they think will be of great service for Hassel's
+complaint. Confidence in anything is half the cure.&quot;[!]</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1840, February 1st</i>. Hassel is still without much appearance for the
+better, and at his earnest request was bled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1841, December 31st</i>. The men from the Fishery made their appearance
+as usual at this time, and as usual, too, the best we had (which
+by-the-by is not great as will be seen by this journal) was served out
+to them. The other men had the time to themselves to prepare for the
+holiday of to-morrow, for the <i>Jour de Tan</i> is the greatest day of the
+Canadians in these distant Northern posts. To finish things properly
+there is still wanting the famous aqua vitae, which we are sorry to
+state is not in our means to furnish. Adieu the year one thousand eight
+hundred and forty-one!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1842, February 13th</i>. The Rev. Mr. Evans proposing to take his
+departure to-morrow for Isle a la Crosse edified us with a farewell
+service, several of the women and children were baptized, and Flett and
+Hassel were married to their wives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From the records we compile this Chipewyan calendar:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>March 17th, House-flies. April 8th, Grey goose seen. April 11th,
+Catkins. April 12th, Barking crows. April 19th, Blackbirds and
+mosquitoes. April 21st, Plover, two hawks, and a butterfly. April 22nd,
+Gulls, white waveys, robins. April 28th, White cranes. April 30th,
+Frogs, most of snow gone. May 2nd, Dark butterfly, four purple crocuses.
+May 4th, Frogs noisy, bumble bees. May 5th, Nearly clear of ice. May
+8th, Water from Peace River flowing into lake. An Eagle. May 10th, Sand
+martins. Ice drifting in channel in front of fort. May 20th, Swans
+passing north. May 21st, Trees bursting into leaf. July 11th,
+Strawberries and raspberries. August 18th, Cranes passing south. October
+11th, Small birds passing south. October 12th, First ptarmigan seen
+about the fort. October 24th, Lake in front closed up this morning.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Afar from stir of streets,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The city's dust and din,</span><br>
+What healing silence meets<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And greets us gliding in!</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;The noisy strife<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And bitter carpings cease.</span><br>
+Here is the lap of life,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Here are the lips of peace.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>C.G.D. Roberts</i>.</p>
+
+<p>For fresh woods and pastures new this Friday, June 26th! Our little
+&quot;bunch&quot; breaks up. Mr. Brabant and Mrs. Harding, of the Hudson's Bay
+Company contingent, go on in the <i>Grahame</i> to Smith's Landing, and with
+them the two detachments of the R.N.W.M.P. As we shake hands with the
+police party, we wonder what Fate has in store for each of us. Breaking
+off at Fort Resolution, Great Slave Lake, and trending eastward by canoe
+over unchartered ways, will they reach salt water on Hudson Bay as they
+hope?</p>
+
+<p>For our two selves, great good fortune is ours. The Canadian Government
+Indian Treaty party, consisting of Mr. Conroy in command, Mr. Laird as
+secretary, Dr. Donald, and Mr. Mooney in charge of the commissariat,
+with Constable Gairdner, R.N.W.M.P., as Escort, has just come down the
+Peace. To-day they pay treaty in Chipewyan, and this afternoon start
+for far Fond du Lac, at the eastern extremity of Lake Athabasca. The
+little H.B. tug <i>Primrose</i> will tow them and their outfit in a York-boat
+and a scow, and the captain has been persuaded to allow us, too, to take
+our blankets and come along, sleeping on the deck. The <i>Primrose</i> from
+stem to stern is not big enough to swing a cat in, but who wants to
+swing a cat? It is blue Lake Athabasca that we long to see; no white
+woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity and we would go if
+we had to work our passage at the sweeps of the scow.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0129"></a>
+<img src="images/img0129.jpg" width="310" height="310" alt="Lake Athabasca in Winter" title="">
+<BR><B>Lake Athabasca in Winter</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Athabasca Lake (whose name means &quot;In Muskeg Abounding&quot;), is two hundred
+miles long, with thirty-five miles at its greatest width. It lies in a
+general easterly and westerly direction. No survey has been made of the
+lake; its height above ocean level is seven hundred feet, and it covers
+perhaps three thousand square miles. Its chief feeder is the Athabasca
+River, down which we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by
+the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake
+Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts
+of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse
+wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation
+being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for
+six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable
+blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace and Athabasca Rivers
+open their icy mouths about May-day, parts ot the lake are not free for
+travel until mid-May. The lake freezes fast at Fort Chipewyan some time
+in November. Lying on the deck of the tug, we look down and take
+inventory of our odd tow. Just behind comes the scow. It holds wood for
+the engine, a long sled, a canoe, a &quot;skift,&quot; all this year's trading
+supplies for Fond du Lac, and half a dozen chained husky dogs. Trailing
+the scow is a York-boat carrying the treaty party and Mr. Harris.</p>
+
+<p>It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun
+is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock
+Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at
+the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well
+stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little
+deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the
+typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us
+from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for
+slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican
+Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them
+until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many,
+many hundreds of miles.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0131"></a>
+<img src="images/img0131.jpg" width="287" height="401" alt="Bishop Grouard" title="">
+<BR><B>Bishop Grouard</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On
+board the <i>Primrose</i> the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the
+wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch
+with him. &quot;I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to
+have neither chart nor compass.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, &quot;we just go by
+the power o' man,&quot; and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches
+us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in
+the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered
+adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.</p>
+
+<p>By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day.
+At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the
+scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five
+dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on
+the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In
+front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended
+midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of
+baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so
+far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of
+reindeer moss (<i>cladonia rangiferina</i>?), the <i>tripe de roche</i> of the
+North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its
+gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the
+odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian
+lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and
+acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and
+tonic.</p>
+
+<p>No orders are given when we land, and we study countenances and actions
+to guess the time-limit of our tether. For twenty-four hours we have
+wondered if there were trout in Lake Athabasca and if they would rise to
+the fly. With a borrowed rod we take a canoe and off the shadow of a
+cottonwood point try a cast at random. The gut carries three flies&mdash;a
+brown hackle, a coachman, with a Jock Scott at the tail&mdash;a rainbow
+aggregation. To the coachman we get a rise and it takes three of us to
+land him. There are no scales; so his weight must forever be unrecorded,
+but as we lay him out he measures just a trifle over twenty-three
+inches, as beautiful a lake trout as ever sent thrill up and down a
+sympathetic spine. Bye-and-bye this road we travel is going to be
+listed on the sporting routes of the world, and tired souls from the
+Seven Seas with rod and gun will here find Nepenthe.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0133"></a>
+<img src="images/img0133.jpg" width="364" height="245" alt="The Modern Note-book" title="">
+<BR><B>The Modern Note-book</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Clutching our catch, we step gingerly along an outstretched oar and
+climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and
+suggest turf rather than surf. &quot;Kick her up, Mac!&quot; &quot;Give her a kick
+ahead!&quot; &quot;Who-o-oa!&quot; On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac,
+clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All
+unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet us,&mdash;bent
+old crones, strong men, and black-eyed babies. For is not the coming of
+the treaty party the one event of the Fond du Lac year?</p>
+
+<p>Half way along the traverse of the lake we had crossed the
+inter-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern
+limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's
+Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak
+English,&mdash;Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler
+who would fain shepherd their souls.</p>
+
+<p>These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only
+at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the
+<i>moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers</i> (July) they will press back
+east and north to the land of the caribou. September,
+<i>the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns</i>, will find them camping
+on the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the
+<i>hour-frost-moon,</i> or the <i>ice-moon,</i> they will be laying lines of
+traps.</p>
+
+<p>We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians
+by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in
+its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned
+the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of
+Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present
+has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction,
+by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection
+had been loud and eloquent.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0135"></a>
+<img src="images/img0135.jpg" width="364" height="296" alt="Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian" title="">
+<BR><B>Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman
+whom he addresses as &quot;Josette.&quot; Their three girls are being educated in
+the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the
+grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with
+thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the
+latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter
+nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of
+the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with
+the great world of thought outside. &quot;Stone walls do not a prison make
+nor iron bars a cage.&quot; Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under
+birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of
+ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and
+Labrador tea <i>(Ledum latifolium</i>), we reach the H.B. garden where the
+potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little
+graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The
+inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father
+Beihler, who comes across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years
+the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in
+the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit
+hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was
+out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself
+wept. White women are a <i>rara avis</i>. Father Beihler wants to know how
+old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing
+wisely to the Kid, he assures me, &quot;They are not an-gell (angel) at that
+age,&quot; and says, &quot;I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a <i>woman
+chercher</i>.&quot; The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him,
+and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we
+have in common,&mdash;the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond
+du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so
+far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned
+warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0137"></a>
+<img src="images/img0137.jpg" width="368" height="216" alt="A Bit of Fond du Lac" title="">
+<BR><B>A Bit of Fond du Lac</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the
+trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The
+father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money
+to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served
+The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in
+England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here
+Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the
+tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.</p>
+
+<p>To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more
+interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form
+silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the
+Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and
+makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a
+contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass,
+become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string
+tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who
+used to &quot;make fur&quot; in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the
+extinct product of a past race that never existed.</p>
+
+<p>The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce
+of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the animal's skull
+to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and
+musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on
+sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in
+the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the
+animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her
+side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp
+she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.</p>
+
+<p>The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and
+they are perhaps the least unspoiled of &quot;civilisation,&quot; as their range
+is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie.
+To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled
+down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on
+the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have
+not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and
+sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the
+germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in
+the graves by the wayside.
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0139"></a>
+<img src="images/img0139.jpg" width="363" height="295" alt="Birch-barks at Fond du Lac" title="">
+<BR><B>Birch-barks at Fond du Lac</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two
+canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs
+following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary
+weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence
+the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind
+of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for
+moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are <i>cached</i>, and the trail strikes into
+the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and
+eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge
+wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his
+journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting
+incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps
+flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie
+Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.</p>
+
+<p>Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart
+of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral
+fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are
+lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his
+traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line
+of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an
+accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of
+the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small
+hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights
+come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far
+trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent streams, the
+Chipewyan trudges from trap to trap; if he finds fifty dollars worth of
+fur along the whole line he is content. It is not this lonely man who
+gets the high price, madame, for your marten stole or opera-cloak of
+ermine.</p>
+
+<p>On the trail the hunter may go hungry for two days and no word of
+complaint, just a tightening of the lips and L'Assumption belt, and a
+firm set to the jaw; but when a moose is killed life is one long supper.
+A jolly priest whispers of this confession from a son of the Church, a
+recent brand from the burning, &quot;O Father, I know that Christianity is
+true, the great, the strong religion. When I was a heathen Chipewyan and
+trapped with my mother's tribe I ate ten rabbits a day. But now I am a
+Christian, a good Catholic, seven rabbits are enough for me&mdash;I will eat
+no more!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In the early days the H.B. Company allowed its men <i>en voyage</i> five
+pounds of meat a day, and each kiddie three pounds. In British Columbia
+and the Yukon the ration was one salmon; up here on the Athabasca one
+wild goose or three big whitefish; on the Arctic foreshore two fish and
+three pounds of reindeer meat. This was the scheduled fare, but the
+grimness of the joke appears in the fact that each man had to run his
+breakfast to earth before he ate it.</p>
+
+<p>Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when
+the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt. The
+whole thing is a Louisiana lottery. The very next trap may hold a
+silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and
+a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr.
+Harris. As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the
+starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so
+long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond
+du Lac. In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating
+caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake. Caribou skins are in
+prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh
+or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk.
+About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance
+from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs
+with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother
+Church. Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear,
+and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty
+money and annual reunion in July.</p>
+
+<p>Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou
+(<i>rangifer articus</i>), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the
+bands of the dead and gone buffalo. Caribou go north in spring and south
+in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou
+form the advance line. They drop their young far out toward the seacoast
+in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow.
+The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make
+the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July. From this time they
+stay together till the rutting season is over late in October. Then the
+great herds of caribou,&mdash;&quot;la foule,&quot;&mdash;gather on the edge of the woods
+and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food
+afforded by the country of the larger pine trees. A month later the
+females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the
+uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the
+end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.</p>
+
+<p>This is the general rule. Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca
+Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the
+Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and
+westward branches of the caribou family. But the trend of this mighty
+migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and
+the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and
+divert them from their line of march. Individuals and scattered bands,
+indeed, have been known not to migrate at all. Fifteen years ago in the
+last days of July, in latitude 62&deg; 15' North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a
+herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand
+individuals. In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near
+Fort Rae on the ice. It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in
+the words of an eye-witness, &quot;daylight could not be seen through the
+column.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A priest, on the winter trail between Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a
+few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail
+crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till
+they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass
+through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat
+bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, &quot;At
+Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't
+think they will ever die out.&quot; Rae was the old meat-station for the Far
+North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three
+thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a
+caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without
+any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the
+wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.</p>
+
+<p>When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink
+teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will
+cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would
+be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish
+(<i>coregonus clupeiformis</i>) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to
+spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern
+waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are
+always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying
+with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the
+Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good
+fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some
+of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their
+chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The
+whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it
+is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live
+for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual
+mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is
+the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes
+daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our
+sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of <i>de
+gustibus</i>, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon
+the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping
+the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one
+would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear
+dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after
+all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had
+overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they
+broached cargo. &quot;Do you like these?&quot; &quot;Yes.&quot; &quot;You're a liar!&quot; On the
+Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his
+first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of
+Kennedy. He coveted one of the &quot;plums&quot; from our lunch-basket, and was
+much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. &quot;What are them?&quot;
+&quot;Olives,&quot; we elucidated; &quot;they come from Southern Europe by steamer.&quot;
+&quot;Do they?&quot; (slightingly). &quot;The one I et must have come steerage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern
+delicacies,&mdash;beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys,
+caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of
+these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest
+here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery,
+whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and
+freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish
+hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh
+firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the
+fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly
+gamy. This is the &quot;Fall Fishery.&quot; Winter fishing is done through holes
+in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The
+handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.</p>
+
+<p>As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the
+United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in
+Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an
+Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada
+from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was
+$1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its
+Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or
+ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game
+off his own bat.</p>
+
+<p>Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look,
+seeking in vain any trace of &quot;the wild Red Man.&quot; The <i>raison d'&ecirc;tre</i> of
+these annual &quot;treaty-payment parties&quot; is merely the acknowledgment on
+one side and the recognition on the other that the Northern Indian is a
+British subject protected by and amenable to British law. In addition to
+the present of five dollars per head each year, the Canadian Government
+sends in by the Indian Agent presents of fishing twine and ammunition,
+with eleemosynary bacon for the indigent and old. The chiefs strut
+around in official coats enriched with yellow braid, wearing medals as
+big as dinner-plates.</p>
+
+<p>From Edmonton northward to Fort Chipewyan the Indians are all Crees. At
+Fort Chipewyan the northern limit of the Crees impinges on the southern
+limit of the Chipewyan, but here at Fond du Lac the Indians are all true
+Chipewyans. The Chipewyan wife is the New Red Woman. We see in her the
+essential head of the household. No fur is sold to the trader, no yard
+or pound of goods bought, without her expressed consent. Indeed, the
+traders refuse to make a bargain of any kind with a Chipewyan man
+without the active approbation of the wife. When a Chipewyan family
+moves camp, it is Mrs. Chipewyan who directs the line of march. How did
+she happen to break away from the bonds that limit and restrain most Red
+brides? This is the question that has troubled ethnologists since the
+North was first invaded by the, scientific. We think we have found the
+answer. Along the shores of Fond du Lac we descry a long-legged wader,
+the phalarope. This is the militant suffragette of all bird-dom. Madame
+Phalarope lays her own eggs (this depository act could scarcely be done
+by proxy), but in this culminates and terminates all her
+responsibilities connubial and maternal,&mdash;&quot;this, no more.&quot; Father
+Phalarope builds the house, the one hen-pecked husband of all feathered
+families who does. He alone incubates the eggs, and when the little
+Phalaropes are ushered into the vale, it is Papa who tucks their bibs
+under their chins and teaches them to peep their morning grace and to
+eat nicely. Mamma, meanwhile, contrary to all laws of the game, wears
+the brilliant plumage. When evening shadows fall where rolls the
+Athabasca, she struts long-leggedly with other female phalaropes, and
+together they discuss the upward struggles toward freedom of their
+unfeathered prototypes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<h3>FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;On we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as swinging heel and toe,</span><br>
+We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to anywhere,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The tragic road to Anywhere but one dear year ago.&quot;</span><br>
+&mdash;<i>Service</i>.<br>
+
+<p>Everybody is to say farewell to Fond du Lac to-day, June 29th, so there
+is a hurried finishing up of loose ends. A loud yowl as of a lost soul
+letting go of life starts the lake echoes! No hand is staining itself in
+brother's blood. The treaty doctor, who visits these people, to use
+their own word, &quot;as a bird on the wing,&quot; has just succeeded in
+extracting a tooth for a Chipewyan bride, Mis&egrave;re Bonnet Rouge. Mis&egrave;re
+looks ashamed of her howl when the operation is over, and lisping,
+&quot;Merci very,&quot; bears off in expansive triumph the detached molar.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0148"></a>
+<img src="images/img0148.jpg" width="361" height="214" alt="Fond du Lac" title="">
+<BR><B>Fond du Lac</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Down at the lake edge, belly prone, men and women lap the water as dogs
+do, while the festive small boy from the Government bags of poor-house
+bacon is slyly licking the oozing fat. Of the taste of red-cheeked
+apples and chewing-gum he is guiltless; popcorn, bananas, and the
+succulent peanut are alike alien. This <i>pee-mee</i> or oil of bacon is
+delicious morsel enough for his red palate. We trade a brier pipe with
+young McDonald, a full-blood, for his beautiful hat-band of porcupine
+quills, and in the French of the North he confides to us, &quot;I have two
+boys. The mother can have the younger one to help her in the house, and
+the priest can teach him to be a white man if he likes; but the other
+one goes with me, no school for him. I will make him a hunter like
+myself.&quot; Last year McDonald went into the woods on New Year's Day and
+didn't return until June, when he came back with three hundred caribou.</p>
+
+<p>Father Beibler is carrying a cup of water up to a tepee where an old
+Indian lies dying, to whom he is giving extreme unction. The slanting
+sun strikes the tin cup and the big crucifix of the good Father, and so
+we leave Fond du Lac.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0150"></a>
+<img src="images/img0150.jpg" width="260" height="420" alt="Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian" title="">
+<BR><B>Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The man who tells the story crosses himself piously and immediately
+begins a bit of rag-time of the vintage of '08. We ask him where he
+heard the tune. &quot;O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the
+Mission.&quot; Canned culture even here! It is light enough to read on the
+deck at quarter past eleven. We chunk along through a lake of amethyst
+and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep. On the
+scow astern, sprawled on the season's output of fur, the men smoke and
+argue. In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast
+about their dogs, and discuss food. Two kindred souls may hark back to
+boyhood days and quote a page of Virgil or demonstrate on a bit of
+birchbark the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, but you overheard no
+discussion of elections or ward-politics, no chatter of the marketplace.
+That is all &quot;long ago and far away.&quot; To-night it is &quot;You know there are
+fellows in here who can run like hell. The world's record is beaten
+every winter.&quot; &quot;The world's record in lying, do you mean?&quot; &quot;No,
+running&mdash;a man can run one hundred miles a day in this country.&quot; &quot;Well,
+what makes a day?&quot; &quot;Twelve hours,&mdash;that is what I learned at school.&quot;
+&quot;No: there's twenty-four hours in a day.&quot; &quot;Well, a day, <i>I</i> take it, is
+as far as you can go without stoppin'&mdash;it never gets dark, so how is a
+man to know what's a day?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a
+whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada's national
+holiday. For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley,
+radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten
+inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter. Wild
+gooseberries are big enough to make delectable &quot;gooseberry fool.&quot; Who
+hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?</p>
+
+<p>Early in the morning we start north in the <i>Primrose</i>, cross Athabasca
+Lake, and enter the Rocher River. Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the
+Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant
+stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer
+day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living. Poplars
+and willows alternate with white spruce (<i>Picea canadensis</i>) fully one
+hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter. It is an ideal
+run,&mdash;this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith's Landing, and
+we make it in twelve hours.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0152"></a>
+<img src="images/img0152.jpg" width="368" height="267" alt="Smith's Landing" title="">
+<BR><B>Smith's Landing</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>&quot;How did Smith's Landing get its name?&quot; I ask the <i>Primrose</i> Captain.
+&quot;Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay,&quot; from the tightly-bitten black pipe
+leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At
+Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation
+in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort
+McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith
+the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total
+drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce
+of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this
+turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The &quot;free
+trader&quot; still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the
+H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.</p>
+
+<p>We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging
+swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had
+been in the North for years and was &quot;going out,&quot; the other had come from
+Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the
+beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the
+&quot;Rapid of the Drowned,&quot; and canoe and men went down. An old Indian
+woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, &quot;One arm lifted out of the
+river, the paddle pointing to the sky&mdash;a cry came over the water, and
+that was all.&quot; Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France
+where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the
+unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that
+remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who
+wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny
+which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves
+dotards dozing in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>At Smith's Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones,
+among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North
+and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a
+winter's study. Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates,
+R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass
+tacks. With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and
+making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a
+barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as
+coadjutor. Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head
+of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck,
+an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since.
+Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a
+prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to
+take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the
+Mosquito Portage and we do not.</p>
+
+<p>We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca
+mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's
+Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the
+mosquito. He tells us that they are &quot;of the order <i>Diptera</i>,&quot; &quot;sub-order
+<i>Nemocera</i>,&quot; and chiefly &quot;of the family <i>Culicidae</i>,&quot; and he also goes
+so far as to tell us that they &quot;annoy man.&quot; As we bump along in the
+muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert
+that &quot;the life of the adult insect is very short&quot; and that it is the
+female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that &quot;the
+natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant.&quot;
+We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on &quot;Mosquito&quot; out of some convent
+dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac. He is like the parson
+introduced by his friend of the cloth. &quot;Brother Jones will now give an
+address on Satan. I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the
+reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes
+to you <i>full of his subject.&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full
+of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a
+pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their
+digestion on an unnatural commissariat. And if the female mosquitoes do
+all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on
+Smith's portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into
+her own. We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a
+Slave River priest had said to us, &quot;These have not delicate
+sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper
+appreciation of <i>material things</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Opposition is the life of trade. For every vantage-point as big as a
+match-head on our face and hands the &quot;bull-dog&quot; contests with the
+mosquito. An interesting study is the &quot;bull-dog.&quot; He looks like a cross
+between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we
+went along to examine the different parts of his person under a
+microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm. The head of the
+insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he
+makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman
+enough to keep his tools always well sharpened. The Doctor was not
+&quot;long&quot; on the &quot;bull-dog.&quot; He told us that his Sunday name was
+&quot;<i>Tabanus</i>,&quot; and that was about all he could impart. The rest we could
+learn for ourselves by direct contact.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I have very little rancour against the &quot;bull-dog.&quot; He looks
+worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel
+him. Four-legged brutes find it different. On the Bloody Portage we
+overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying
+to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites.
+Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from
+Fort Smith. Moose in the North, maddened by the &quot;bull-dogs,&quot; often jump
+over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when <i>they</i>
+were possessed of devils.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, &quot;The
+deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs,&quot; ruminates audibly,
+&quot;Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs! How interesting! Jolly
+resourceful beggars, these Colonials.&quot; A literary scientist sending out
+copy from the North wrote, &quot;My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and
+bull-dogs,&quot; which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, &quot;My two
+greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bringing in our daily treasure-trove of flowers we can scarcely realise
+that at Fort Smith we are in latitude 60&deg; North, the northern boundary
+of the Province of Alberta and in the same latitude as St. Petersburg.
+One day we gathered careopsis, pretty painted-cups, the dandelion in
+seed, shinleaf (<i>Pyrola elliptica</i>), our old friend yarrow, and
+golden-rod. Another day brought to the blotting-pads great bunches of
+goldenrod, a pink anemone, harebells of a more delicate blue than we had
+ever seen before, the flower of the wolf-berry, fireweed, and
+ladies'-tresses. The third day we identified the bear-berry or
+kinnikinic-tobacco (<i>Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)</i> with its astringent
+leaves, and that dear friend of lower latitudes and far-away days, the
+pink lady-slipper. The last time we had seen it was in a school-room in
+far-off Vancouver Island where in early April the children had brought
+it in, drooping in their hot little fists. This same evening, watching a
+night-hawk careering in mid-air by the rapids of the Slave and enjoying
+its easy grace in twisting and doubling as with hoarse cry it fell and
+rose again, we were fortunate in literally running to ground its nest.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0157"></a>
+<img src="images/img0157.jpg" width="368" height="241" alt="A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing" title="">
+<BR><B>A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0158"></a>
+<img src="images/img0158.jpg" width="264" height="389" alt="Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company" title="">
+<BR><B>Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Fort Smith, as places go in this country, is an infant in age, having
+been established only thirty-four years. Resting on the edge of the high
+bank of the Slave, it enjoys an eternal outlook on those wonderful
+rapids. The river here is a mile wide. The sweep and eddy-wash of ages
+have cut out a deep bay, on the inner shore of which stand the buildings
+of The Company, the little Roman Church, the houses of the priests. Back
+of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of
+the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the
+hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being
+more &quot;dead&quot; than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great
+things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort
+Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality
+will soon send unction into the dry bones of the valley.</p>
+
+<p>At the foot of the high hill looms a monument to the initiative and
+commercial enterprise of the H.B. Company,&mdash;a modern steamship in the
+waters of a wilderness-country. Ours is to be the honor of making in her
+the initial journey to the Mackenzie mouth. It is impossible coming from
+the South to navigate the Slave River rapids by steam. Any boat
+ambitious to ply on the waters lying northward between Fort Smith and
+the Arctic must be either taken in in sections or built on the ground.
+With enterprise and pluck, the Hudson's Bay Company has just completed
+the construction at Fort Smith of the steamship, <i>The Mackenzie River</i>.
+Its great boilers and engines made in far factories of the south came in
+over the Athabasca trail on sleighs in winter. Down that whole distance
+of ninety miles of Athabascan rapids they floated on scows as we
+floated, and while human ingenuity is bringing north the iron bowels,
+skilful hands out of native timber are framing the staunch body to
+receive them.</p>
+
+<p>The builders of the big boat have had disasters which would have daunted
+any but the dogged Company of Fur-Traders. Two land-slides threatened to
+slice off and carry into the river the partially-made boat, a fire
+burned up the blacksmith shop and with it all the imported doors,
+window-sashes and interior finishings, so that she sails to-morrow with
+carpenters still at work. While the hull of this carefully modelled
+vessel is necessarily of light construction, with special steel to
+enable her to navigate safely the waters of the Mackenzie River,
+longitudinal strength has been adequately provided in the form of five
+lattice girders and by numerous hog-posts and ties, and the diagonal
+bracing of the bulkheads will provide ample transverse strength. The bow
+also has been made especially strong to resist the impact of ice, snags,
+etc. The hull is one hundred and twenty-five feet in length, twenty-six
+feet broad at the water-line, and five and one-third feet deep to the
+structural deck. The strength and safety of the hull are increased by
+five water-tight compartments. Propulsion is effected by a pair of
+modern stern paddle-wheel engines capable of being worked up to over two
+hundred and fifty horse power, giving her a speed of ten miles an hour.
+She has stateroom accommodation for twenty-two passengers, draws three
+and a half feet of water aft, and eats up half a cord of wood an hour.
+She will carry to the northern posts their trading-goods for the year.</p>
+
+<p>Within a day's ride of Fort Smith grazes a herd of four to five hundred
+wood bison, the last unconfined herd of buffalo in the world. Doubtless
+the wood buffalo were originally buffalo of the plains. Their wandering
+northward from the scoured and hunted prairies has not only saved them
+from extinction but has developed in them resistance and robust
+vitality. These bison appear darker and larger than their pictured
+cousins of the past. Probably the inner hair of these is finer and of
+thicker texture, a difference which the change of habitat to more
+northern latitudes would easily account for. The bison have two
+enemies: the grey wolf and the Indian, one an enemy <i>in esse</i>, the other
+<i>in posse</i>. The Government of Canada has prohibited the killing of the
+buffalo, and my opinion is that this law, as all other Canadian laws, is
+obeyed in the North. I questioned every one I talked with who lives on
+the rim of the buffalo-habitat, and the concensus of testimony of
+priests, H.B. men, settlers, traders, and Mounted Police, is that the
+Indians do not molest these animals. The arch-enemy of the wood buffalo
+is the timber wolf.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0161"></a>
+<img src="images/img0161.jpg" width="371" height="115" alt="The World's Last Buffalo" title="">
+<BR><B>The World's Last Buffalo</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to
+laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable
+mosquito-infested muskeg. An untoward frost is more to be feared by
+these great brutes than the attacks of any insect. Thirty-eight years
+ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a
+subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do
+not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated.
+In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North
+country. In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River
+and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay
+Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them
+for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort
+hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.</p>
+
+<p>In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past
+were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's
+first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake
+&quot;observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the
+river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind.&quot;
+In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance
+into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on
+the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated
+by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which
+occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.</p>
+
+<p>One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd
+of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has
+shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the
+buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now
+ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well
+as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning,
+conclusively prove.</p>
+
+<p>Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his
+magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of
+Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the
+flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he
+assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
+pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout
+to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the
+timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the
+native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's
+belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole
+season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but
+if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although
+always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith
+while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, &quot;There, it
+had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more.&quot; Shortly
+afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was
+held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a
+litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in
+both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.
+It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama
+as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison
+host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of
+the wolf. Archbishop Tach&eacute; tells of the persevering fortitude of a big
+wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle &acirc; la Crosse. Thirty days
+afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with
+trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through
+the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those
+weary miles.</p>
+
+<p>With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and
+a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are
+extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the
+stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise.
+There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no
+means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find
+their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap.
+Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as
+manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in
+1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the
+same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than
+doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to
+France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173
+worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.</p>
+
+<p>More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox
+and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver,
+seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw
+furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother
+Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred
+thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that
+number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured
+article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur
+clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole
+or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by
+snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half
+round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and
+pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who
+declared, &quot;I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow
+proud,&quot; would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this
+age.</p>
+
+<p>In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the
+fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are
+carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the
+scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the
+undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the
+nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big
+enough to market, it is &quot;heads I win, tails you lose.&quot; The United
+States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild
+animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on
+coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.</p>
+
+<p>What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the
+harmless fur-bearers. Several causes make against the extermination of
+these in Canada. The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the
+animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures.
+Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and
+putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of
+active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The
+fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of
+personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur
+popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its
+original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.</p>
+
+<p>What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in
+showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of
+the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function,
+and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a
+wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to
+the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little
+minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the
+last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end
+no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The
+exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This
+truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of
+reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove
+to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.</p>
+
+<p>The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away
+with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables
+inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape
+the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For
+lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk
+rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the
+horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with
+cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and
+incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and
+Northern travellers drink boiled tea <i>au natural</i>. Cows are the eternal
+feminine and will not be explained by logic.</p>
+
+<p>But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most
+valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is
+the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the
+bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies.
+&quot;How old is Ann?&quot; pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves
+patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes
+and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip
+or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits
+often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a
+cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his
+shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to
+the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox
+for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at
+Isle &acirc; la Crosse in latitude 55&deg; 30', about twenty years ago, an
+experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary&mdash;Burbanks
+got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were
+mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and
+black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was
+son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!</p>
+
+<p>We are told that Messrs. McDougall &amp; Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the
+distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt
+ever paid on the London market,&mdash;$1700, that it was one of the most
+beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to
+the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state,
+&quot;Of the American silver-fox (<i>Canis vulpes argentatus</i>) black skins have
+a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and
+by the nobles.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0168"></a>
+<img src="images/img0168.jpg" width="313" height="381" alt="Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage" title="">
+<BR><B>Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter
+he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the
+London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased
+finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one
+cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds
+with keen discriminating sight, &quot;Black's not so black nor white so very
+white.&quot; Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, &quot;The silver-fox is but a
+phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a
+difference&mdash;!&quot; Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we
+must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms,
+and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises
+greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative,
+the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat,
+Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.</p>
+
+<p>I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by
+the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the
+Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the
+river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game.
+He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without
+moving an eye-brow.</p>
+
+<p>At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican
+<i>(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)</i> which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave
+finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of
+continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came
+across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in
+the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island
+in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we
+were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found
+something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The
+plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are
+slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid
+matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so
+far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the
+illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without
+shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight
+sepulture and was not &quot;darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our
+bayonets turning.&quot; There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with
+conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and
+his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist
+robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on
+Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and
+neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified
+silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River
+pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest
+attempt to &quot;open to her young her tender breast.&quot; It is rank libel for
+Byron to state</p>
+
+&quot;Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream<br>
+To still her famished nestling's scream.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>And, when Keats states so sententiously in <i>Endymion</i>, &quot;We are nurtured
+like a pelican brood,&quot; he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a><h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,</span><br>
+Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the weird magic of old Indian tales.&quot;</span><br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Archibald Lampman</i>.<br>
+
+<p>A double cabin is assigned us on <i>The Mackenzie River</i> and the nightmare
+that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films
+vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water.
+Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg,
+still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction
+stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues
+into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the
+bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of
+sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the
+fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged
+race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated,
+and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having
+no popcorn, fizz, or Coney-Island red-hots to distribute, we did the
+next best thing,&mdash;became barkers and gave the calls that go with
+festivities. So now, as the boat swings out from the soft bank, it is a
+gay company of urchins who wave their caps and yell, &quot;R-r-r-red
+lemol-lade, everybody drinks it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There is only one Fort Smith! Established for three decades, it has as
+yet seen no wells dug. The people still climb that steep bank, carrying
+in pendant buckets from wooden shoulder-yokes water for the daily
+drinking and ablutions. At four o'clock in the afternoon, should you
+visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily
+procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,&mdash;the Aquarius sign of
+the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, &quot;Why should they
+bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats
+from Scotland to tote their water up the banks.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0172"></a>
+<img src="images/img0172.jpg" width="371" height="279" alt="The &quot;Red Lemol-lade&quot; Boys" title="">
+<BR><B>The &quot;Red Lemol-lade&quot; Boys</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At noon we reach the Salt River, twenty-two miles up, which is one of
+the most marvellous salt deposits in the world. The Salt River winds in
+crescent curves through a valley wooded with aspen and spruce, and the
+Salt Plains six miles in extent stretch at the base of hills six or
+seven hundred feet high. The salt lies all over the ground in beautiful
+cubes,&mdash;pure crystal salt. It is anybody's salt plain; you can come here
+when you will and scoop up all you want. These plains have supplied the
+North country with salt since first white men penetrated the country. At
+the mouth of the Salt River are the shacks of the present
+representatives of the Beaulieus,&mdash;a family which has acted as guides
+for all the great men who ever trended northward. They have been
+interesting characters always, and as we look in upon them to-day
+neither Beaulieu nor salt has lost his savour.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0173"></a>
+<img src="images/img0173.jpg" width="368" height="168" alt="Salt Beds" title="">
+<BR><B>Salt Beds</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Slave River from where it leaves Fort Smith to its embouchure in
+Great Slave Lake is about two hundred miles long, with an average width
+of half a mile, except where it expands in its course to enclose
+islands. The big boat behaves beautifully in the water, and on we slip
+with no excitement until about five o'clock, when a moose and her calf
+are espied, well out of range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the
+sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The
+captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at
+the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of
+Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach Fort Resolution.</p>
+
+<p>To Samuel Hearne, the Mungo Park of Canada, belongs the double honour of
+tracing the Coppermine River and discovering Great Slave Lake. Just one
+hundred and thirty-seven years ago on Christmas Eve, Hearne got his
+first glimpse of this magnificent inland sea which is cut through the
+centre by the parallel of 62&deg;, and which lies east and west between the
+meridians of 109&deg; and 117&deg;. No survey of Great Slave Lake has been made,
+but it is estimated to have a superficial area of 10,500 square
+miles&mdash;just one-third the size of troubled Ireland, and as great as
+Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.</p>
+
+<p>Great Slave Lake, lying wholly within the forested region, is three
+hundred miles long, and its width at one point exceeds sixty miles. At
+every place on its banks where the fur-traders have their stations
+ordinary farm-crops are grown. Barley sown at Fort Resolution in mid-May
+reaches maturity in a hundred days; potatoes planted at the same time
+are dug in mid-September. The gardens of Fort Rae on the North Arm of
+the Lake produce beets, peas, cabbages, onions, carrots, and turnips. As
+Fort Rae is built on a rocky island with a bleak exposure, this would
+seem to promise in some future day generous harvests for the more
+favoured lands on the south and west.</p>
+
+<p>The names given by the old fur-traders to their posts make the
+traveller think that in these North lands he, a second Christian, is
+essaying a new Pilgrim's Progress. At the south entry to the Lake we are
+at Resolution; when we cross it we arrive at Providence; away off at the
+eastern extremity is Reliance; Confidence takes us to Great Bear Lake;
+and Good Hope stretches far ahead down the lower reaches of the
+Mackenzie. Fort Resolution on the south side of Great Slave Lake, a
+little west of the mouth of the Slave, lies back of an island-sheltered
+entrance.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0175"></a>
+<img src="images/img0175.jpg" width="364" height="247" alt="Unloading at Fort Resolution" title="">
+<BR><B>Unloading at Fort Resolution</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The striking feature as we enter is an immense Roman Catholic Mission
+school in process of construction, to supplement the existing church and
+school of that faith. There is neither station of the Mounted Police nor
+Church of England here; their places are taken by two independent
+fur-trading concerns operating in opposition to the Ancient Company.</p>
+
+<p>We had been told that the children down North had the kiddies at Fort
+Smith and Chipewyan &quot;all skinned&quot; for politeness, and we find it even
+so. The good nuns are trying to make reputable citizens of the young
+scions of the Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife nations and are succeeding
+admirably as far as surface indications go. We approach a group of
+smiling boys arrayed in their Sunday clothes, awaiting a visit of the
+Bishop. With one accord come off their Glengarry bonnets, smoking caps,
+and Christie stiffs, and a row of brown hands is extended to greet us.
+Very trim the laddies look in their convent-made cadet-uniforms, as,
+standing at &quot;'Shun!&quot; they answered our every question with, &quot;Yes,
+missus,&quot; &quot;No, missus.&quot; When we ask their names, without tittering or
+looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens. Here
+they have once more their white brothers &quot;skinned&quot;; no civilised man,
+woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal
+name in an audible tone without feeling a fool. I have seen grizzled
+judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses,
+squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed
+them &quot;Archer Martin&quot; or &quot;Peter Secord&quot; or whatever it might be.</p>
+
+<p>It is certainly Old Worldish. We speak with Father Laity who, all
+unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail
+and reads his breviary. He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age
+that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war. The Father
+came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of
+the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow. The
+Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel.
+The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and
+shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole
+family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the
+pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this
+tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come
+across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. Afterward
+we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien
+Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to
+live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him
+by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means &quot;<i>A
+man born</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the
+five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of
+His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh. The Yellow-Knives were so named
+by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons
+of native copper. Each head of a family is issued an
+identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to
+year. A father &quot;draws treaty&quot; for his olive-skinned branches until each
+marries and erects a tepee for himself. Government Agent Conroy, big
+bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and
+gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book.
+Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun. There
+are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation. The <i>Fiddler Anns,
+Waggon-box Julias</i>, and <i>Mrs. Turkeylegs</i> of the Plains country are
+absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither
+waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0178"></a>
+<img src="images/img0178.jpg" width="363" height="274" alt="Coming to &quot;Take Treaty&quot; on Great Slave Lake" title="">
+<BR><B>Coming to &quot;Take Treaty&quot; on Great Slave Lake</B>
+</center>
+
+<p><i>Mary Catholic</i> comes along hand-in-hand with <i>Samuel the Worm</i>. Full of
+animal spirits is a group of four&mdash;<i>Antoine Gullsmouth,
+Tongue-of-the-Jackfish, Baptiste Wolftail,</i> and <i>The Cat's Son</i>. A
+little chap who announces himself as <i>T'tum</i> turns out to be <i>Petite
+Homme</i>, the squat mate of <i>The Beloved</i>. It would be interesting to know
+just how each of the next couple acquired his name, for neither
+<i>Trois-Pouces</i> and <i>Owl-Plucked-Out-His-Eye</i> bears evidence of abnormal
+conditions. On a whole the names are more striking than our John Smiths;
+Richard Roes, and Tom Browns, as for instance the next three&mdash;<i>Le P&egrave;re
+des Carriboux, Geroux the Eldest, Alixi To-rong-jo.
+The-man-who-stands-still</i> is evidently a stand-patter, while one wonders
+if it would be right to call <i>The-Man-Who-Walks-With-The-Red-Hair,</i> a
+Crimson Rambler.</p>
+
+<p><i>Carry-the-Kettle</i> appears with <i>Star Blanket</i> and <i>The Mosquito,</i> and
+the next man in line, who has the tongs from a bon-bon box stuck in the
+band of his hat, rejoices in the name of <i>Strike-Him-on-the-Back,</i> which
+somehow suggests the match-box in the hotel hall-way. As the dignified
+father, <i>Having-Passed-Many-Birthdays,</i> claims five dollars each for his
+four daughters, <i>Smiling Martin, My-Wigwam-is-White,</i> and the twins
+<i>Make-Daylight-Appear</i> and <i>Red-Sky-of-the-Morning,</i> we acknowledge that
+here again, in the art of naming, the Yellow-Knife has his white brother
+&quot;skinned.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Birth, dowry, divorce, death, each must be noted on the treaty ticket,
+with a corresponding adjustment of the number of dollar-bills to be
+drawn from the coffer. If a man between treaty-paying and treaty-paying
+marries a widow with a family, he draws five dollars each for the new
+people he has annexed. If there is an exchange of wives (a
+not-infrequent thing), the babies have to be newly parcelled out.
+Through all the family intricacies Mr. Conroy follows the interpreter
+with infinite patience and bonhomie. To the listener it sounds startling
+as the interpreter, presenting two tickets says, &quot;He married these three
+people&mdash;this fellow.&quot; &quot;O, he give dat baby away to Charles.&quot; When we
+hear in a dazed way that &quot;<i>Mary Catholic's</i> son married his dead woman's
+sister who was the widow of <i>Anton Larucom</i> and the mother of two boys,&quot;
+we take a long breath and murmur, &quot;If the angle ACB is not equal to the
+angle ABC, then how can the angle DEF be equal to the angle DFE?&quot; A
+young couple, looking neither of them more than sixteen or seventeen,
+return with a shake of the head five of the fifteen dollars proffered
+them, and the interpreter explains, &quot;Their little boy died&mdash;there's only
+two of them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gregory Daniels in a Scottish voice, which cannot quite hide its
+triumphant ring, pushes back his five dollars and demands forty-five. &quot;I
+got a wife and siven since last year, she's a Cree wumman.&quot; Another
+half-breed asks anxiously if he would be allowed to send for a &quot;permit&quot;
+like a white man if he refused to take treaty.</p>
+
+<p>One man with long black hair and a cheese-cutter cap creates
+consternation at the tent-door by claiming treaty for two wives and
+seventeen children. Mr. Conroy, scenting an attempt to stuff the
+ballot-box, produces seventeen matches, lays them at my feet on the
+tent-floor and asks <i>The-Lean-Man</i> to name them. He starts in all right.
+We hear, &quot;<i>Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish, Birdtail, Little Bone,
+Sweet Grass, Ermine Skin</i>,&quot; and then in a monotone he begins over again,
+&quot;<i>Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish</i>,&quot; and finally gives it up, eagerly
+asking the interpreter to wait &quot;a-little-sun.&quot; The drama of paying and
+recording has gone on for half an hour and we have quite forgotten
+<i>The-Lean-Man</i>, when back he comes with <i>Mrs. Lean-Man, Sr.</i>, and <i>Mrs.
+Lean-Man, Jr</i>. Each spouse leads her own progeny. Seeing is believing,
+and off <i>Lean-Man</i> goes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to
+see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at
+a box of stogies, and the clerk says, &quot;He can afford to blow in his wad
+on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter.&quot;
+They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put
+his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year
+because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he
+wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly
+the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two
+young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton
+with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed
+figures at ten shies for a quarter. &quot;Every time you hit 'em, you get a
+see-gar!&quot; They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it
+took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break
+the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, &quot;Them
+chaps pinked them dolls every time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a
+glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy's head. It is
+the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or &quot;De-deed.&quot; The
+lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kisses her
+gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The
+whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother
+at the open door.</p>
+
+<p>Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves
+down for an hour's rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light
+effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting
+sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued
+night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness.
+Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high
+point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts.
+The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over
+all a measureless silence. At three o'clock in the morning we haul into
+the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at
+the landing.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0182"></a>
+<img src="images/img0182.jpg" width="366" height="376" alt="On the Slave" title="">
+<BR><B>On the Slave</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole
+North&mdash;although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay
+River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls
+and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission,
+learning how to play the white man's game&mdash;jolly and clean little bodies
+they are. It looks like Christmas time. Parcels are being done up, there
+is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black
+eyes. Would you like to see the letters that <i>The Teaser, The Twin,
+Johnny Little Hunter</i>, and <i>Mary Blue Quill</i> are sending out to their
+parents? For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented
+soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are
+writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father's and
+mother's name. The soap has been bought with the children's pennies
+earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights.
+The parcels will be passed from one trapper's jerkin to another, and
+when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or
+lodge of the deerskin, <i>Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-Foam</i> and <i>Mr.
+Kee-noo-shay-o</i>, or <i>The Fish</i>, will know their boys and girls &quot;still
+remember.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten
+years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his
+quest here, and lived happily ever after. Their children are the most
+fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint
+at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and
+sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness,
+letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover
+the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in
+evergreen boughs for their summer bedding&mdash;a delightful Ostermoor
+mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in
+summer, and in the winter they haul hay. The hay causes our enquiry, and
+we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by
+some glacial drift of the long ago. And thereby hangs a tale. Charlie,
+an attach&eacute; of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day. As
+man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked,
+&quot;Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?&quot; &quot;Bill balked,&quot; was the laconic
+reply. Tuesday's question would bring the same response, &quot;Bill balked.&quot;
+And &quot;Bill balked,&quot; on Wednesday. Thursday it is&mdash;&quot;Bill didn't balk&quot;; and
+so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter
+days.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0184"></a>
+<img src="images/img0184.jpg" width="370" height="125" alt="Dogs Cultivating Potatoes" title="">
+<BR><B>Dogs Cultivating Potatoes</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60&deg; Fahrenheit, and the
+monthly mean for January, 18&deg; below zero. Vegetables of their own
+growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food
+supply of this thrifty Mission, one season's harvest giving them a
+thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of
+beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten
+thousand whitefish.</p>
+
+<p>Hay River has never been explored. It is supposed to head near the
+source of the Nelson and to flow northeast for three hundred miles
+before emptying, as we see it, into Great Slave Lake. This river marks
+the limit of those grassy plains which extend at intervals all the way
+from Mexico northward. Bishop Bompas, years ago, descended a long
+stretch of the river, discovering not far back from where we stand a
+majestic cataract, which he named the &quot;Alexandra Falls&quot; after the then
+Princess of Wales. He describes it as a perpendicular fall one hundred
+feet high, five hundred feet wide, and of surpassing beauty. &quot;The amber
+colour of the falling water gives the appearance of golden tresses
+twined with pearls.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Crossing Great Slave Lake, we think of Chant-la, Chief of the Slavis at
+Hay River. Bishop Reeves was anxious to convert him to the Christian
+faith, but had great difficulty in giving Chant-la a proper conception
+of the Trinity. The old man would not say he believed or understood what
+was inexplicable to him. Setting out once on a long journey, the cleric
+adjured the Chief to struggle with the problem during his absence. The
+Bishop returning, Chant-la came out in his canoe to meet him, eagerly
+reporting that all now was clear. &quot;It is like Great Slave Lake,&quot; said
+the old man. &quot;It is all water now, just like the Father. When winter
+comes it will be frozen over, but Great Slave Lake just the same; that
+is like the Son. In the spring when the ice breaks and the rain makes
+the snow into slush, it is still Great Slave Lake; and that is like the
+Holy Ghost.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Beyond Great Slave Lake, forty-five miles down the Mackenzie, we reach
+Fort Providence, as strongly French in its atmosphere as Hay River is
+British. Our coming is a gala day. The hamlet flies three flags, the
+free trader sports his own initials &quot;H.N.,&quot; the Hudson's Bay Company
+loyally runs the Union Jack to the masthead, over the convent floats the
+tri-colour of France. Fort Providence is hot. We walk to the convent and
+are hospitably received by the nuns. They call their Red flock together
+for us to inspect and show us marvellous handwork of silk embroidery on
+white deerskin. The daintiest of dainty slippers calls forth the
+question, &quot;Where are you going to find the Cinderella for these?&quot; A
+blank look is my answer, for no one in Providence Convent has ever heard
+of Cinderella! But then, convents are not supposed to be the
+repositories of man-knowledge (although a half-breed, on our passage
+across the lake, did whisper a romantic story of a Klondiker who
+assailed this very fortress and tried to carry off the prettiest nun of
+the north). The garden of the Sisters is a bower of all the
+old-fashioned flowers&mdash;hollyhocks, wall-flower, Canterbury bells, and
+sweet-William&mdash;and down in the corner a young girl of the Dog-Ribs
+discovers to us a nest of fledgling chipping sparrows.</p>
+
+<p>As we landed from the boat, Tenny Gouley dressed in his Sunday best had
+beamed, &quot;Nice day&mdash;go veesit.&quot; And &quot;veesit&quot; we did. Mrs. Herron, of the
+H.B. Company, has spent many years at Old Fort Rae, and her thoughts
+hark back to one severe winter spent there. She turns to the wife of our
+good Captain with, &quot;Hard living, Mrs. Mills, dry suckers.&quot; It is a short
+speech, but fraught with meaning. I honestly think a dry sucker (well
+sanded) the least succulent of all the impossible fish-dishes of the
+North. There are many young Herrons all as neat as new pins, the
+last&mdash;no, the latest, enshrined in a moss-bag. Tradition tells that
+once, when they were fewer in number, the father took the flock out to
+Winnipeg to school. The children cried so at the parting that Mr. Herron
+turned and brought them all back with him to the Mackenzie!</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0187"></a>
+<img src="images/img0187.jpg" width="370" height="260" alt="David Villeneuve" title="">
+<BR><B>David Villeneuve</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The most interesting man in all Fort Providence is David Villeneuve, one
+of the Company's Old Guard. He was anxious to be &quot;tooken&quot; with his wife
+and grandchild, and over the camera we chatted. David goes through life
+on one leg&mdash;fishes through the ice in winter, traps, mends nets, drives
+dogs, and does it all with the dexterity and cheerfulness of a young
+strong man. He tells of his accident. &quot;I was young fellow, me, when a
+fish-stage fell on me. I didn't pay no notice to my leg until it began
+to go bad, den I take it to the English Church to Bishop Bompas. He tole
+me de leg must come off, an' ax me to get a letter from de priest (I'm
+Cat-o-lic, me) telling it was all right to cut him. I get de letter and
+bring my leg to Bompas. He cut 'im off wid meat-saw. No, I tak' not'in',
+me. I chew tobacco and tak' one big drink of Pain-killer. Yas, it hurt
+wen he strike de marrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Heavens! Didn't you faint with the awful pain?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What? Faint, me? No. I say, 'Get me my fire-bag, I want to have a
+smok'.'&quot;</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_X"></a><h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h3>PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Never the Spirit was born: the Spirit shall cease to be never.<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Never was time, it was not; end and beginning are dreams.</span><br>
+Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the Spirit,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Death hath not touched it at all, though dead the house of it seems.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>We have just finished supper and are sitting reading on the upper deck
+about seven o'clock, when a cry comes from below, followed by the
+rushing back and forth of moccasined feet. In a flash Bunny Langford,
+one of the engineers, has grabbed a lifebuoy, runs past us to the stern,
+and throws it well out toward a floating figure.</p>
+
+<p>It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution
+just twenty-four hours before. Finishing his turn at stoking, he had
+gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen,
+carrying the hatch with him. At first we think nothing of the incident,
+as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him. As soon as the
+startled people realise what has happened the steamer's engines are
+reversed and a boat is lowered. We call out to De-deed to swim to the
+buoy, but he doesn't see it or doesn't understand. The black head gets
+smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again. Down it goes
+for the second time. A strange, constricted feeling comes into our
+throats as we cry out, &quot;Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming! They are
+almost up to you!&quot; The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but
+a dozen yards away. Will he hold up? As we look, the head sinks, <i>and it
+does not come up</i>. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of
+De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with
+grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles
+down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before
+us&mdash;the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the
+rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is
+well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the &quot;Little Lake&quot; of the
+Mackenzie, goes out with the current.</p>
+
+<p>The Mackenzie River, &quot;La Grande Rivi&egrave;re en Bas,&quot; as the people of
+Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the
+greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers
+the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of
+either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the
+Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little
+Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight
+miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion
+of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from
+source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep
+to two and a half to three miles.</p>
+
+<p>From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom
+exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as
+&quot;The Head of the Line.&quot; Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie,
+when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was
+at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains
+bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with
+muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of
+water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second.
+No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard
+a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for
+commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough &quot;white coal&quot;
+rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The
+Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range.
+The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the
+Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main
+river through passes in that range.</p>
+
+<p>At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated
+on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on
+their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course
+the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.</p>
+
+<p>We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River
+and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o'clock we are at
+Fort Simpson in latitude 62&deg;, the old metropolis of the North. Fort
+Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie,
+the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of
+the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it
+was known in fur annals as &quot;The Forks of the Mackenzie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its
+quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and
+try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In
+those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were
+received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes
+with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold
+stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front
+of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums
+have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in
+fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall
+unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a
+rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across
+the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the
+life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry
+feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and
+exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while
+the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history
+so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of
+the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent
+to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0192"></a>
+<img src="images/img0192.jpg" width="365" height="204" alt="Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson" title="">
+<BR><B>Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>&quot;I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice,
+bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or
+reptiles would be acceptable. They may either be skinned or placed in
+rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of
+the body to admit the spirits to the intestines.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most
+tickles my fancy.</p>
+
+<p>I think of the little group that we had forgathered with at Chipewyan,
+driven even in this year of grace to lavender-water and red ink, when
+permits run dry. One turns back the clock to the time of the Chartists
+and the year of the nuptials of the young Queen in England. We see up
+here on the fringe of things the dour and canny but exceedingly humorous
+Adam McBeaths, John Lee Lewises, and George Simpsons, the outer vedette
+of the British Empire; and, seeing them, get some half-way adequate
+conception of what a modicum of rum or &quot;strong spirits of any kind&quot;
+meant in the way of cheer at old Fort Simpson in those days. When we try
+to get a picture of one of these Hudson's Bay men gravely opening a
+shrew-mouse, mole, or &quot;other small quadruped,&quot; while his chum pours in
+the <i>aqua vitae</i> or precious conversation water, we declare that science
+asks too much.</p>
+
+<p>An outer stairway leading to the second story of a big building invites
+us. Opening the door, we find ourselves in the midst of an old library,
+and moth and rust, too, here corrupt. We close the door softly behind us
+and try to realise what it meant to bring a library from England to Fort
+Simpson a generation ago. First, there arose the desire in the mind of
+some man for something beyond dried meat and bales of fur. He had to
+persuade the authorities in England to send out the books.
+Leather-covered books cost something six or seven decades ago, and the
+London shareholders liked better to get money than to spend it. We see
+the precious volumes finally coming across the Atlantic in wooden
+sailing-ships to Hudson Bay, follow them on the long portages, watch
+them shoot rapids and make journeys by winter dog-sled, to reach Simpson
+at last on the backs of men. The old journals reveal stories of the
+discussion evoked by the reading of these books afterward as, along with
+the dried fish, deer-meat, and other inter-fort courtesies, they passed
+from post to post. Was never a circulating library like this one. And
+now the old books, broken-backed and disembowelled, lie under foot, and
+none so poor to do them reverence. Everything is so old in this North
+that there is no veneration for old things.</p>
+
+<p>It is but a few years since the founder of this library died, and his
+son now sits in his saddle at Fort Simpson. If you were to wander across
+the court, as I did to-day, and look into the Sales Shop, you would see
+the presentation sword of this last-generation Carnegie, ignobly slicing
+bacon for an Indian customer. <i>Sic transit gloria mundi</i>!</p>
+
+<p>What are the books which this sub-Arctic library sent out? We get down
+on the floor and gently touch the historic old things. Isn't it Johnson
+who says, &quot;I love to browse in a library&quot;? Judging by the dust and
+cobwebs, there hasn't been much browsing done among these volumes for
+years. Present-day Simpson has seldom &quot;fed on the dainties that are bred
+in a book.&quot; Here is a first edition of <i>The Spectator</i>, and next it a
+<i>Life of Garrick</i>, with copies of <i>Virgil</i>, and all <i>Voltaire</i> and
+<i>Corneille</i> in the original. A set of Shakespeare with exquisite line
+drawings by Howard shows signs of hard reading, and so does the <i>Apology
+for the Life of Mr. Colly Cibber</i>. One wonders how a man embedded in
+Fort Simpson, as a fly in amber, would ever think of sending to the
+<i>Grand Pays</i> for <i>Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy</i>, yet we find it here,
+cheek by jowl with <i>The Philosophy of Living or the Way to Enjoy Life
+and Its Comforts. The Annual Register of History, Politics, and
+Literature of the Year 1764</i> looks plummy, but we have to forego it. The
+lengthy titles of the books of this vintage, as for instance, <i>Death-Bed
+Triumphs of Eminent Christians, Exemplifying the Power of Religion in a
+Dying Hour</i>, bring to mind the small boy's definition of
+porridge&mdash;&quot;fillin', but not satis-fyin'.&quot; Two more little books with big
+titles are <i>Actors' Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of
+Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues</i>, and <i>The London Prisons, with an
+Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in
+Them</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But the book that most tempts our cupidity is <i>Memoirs of Miss A&mdash;&mdash; n,
+Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars</i>. We want
+that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the
+Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its
+silver mouths. We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we
+hunger to steal it. Jekyll struggles with Hyde. At last the Shorter
+Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it
+down and softly close the door behind us. And ever since we have
+regretted our Presbyterian training.</p>
+
+<p>At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an
+old cathedral. Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their
+kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic. We walk along the
+shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in
+washing clothes with washboards&mdash;the old order and the new. A little
+dive into the mosquito-ridden woods discloses a wonderful patch of
+Pyrola and a nest of Traills' flycatcher, and makes us wish that the
+minutes were longer and the mosquitoes fewer. What a beautiful tiling
+this Pyrola is, with its inverted anthers and the cobwebby margins of
+its capsule! Its bracted, nodding flowers run through all shades of
+white, pale yellow, and dark yellow.</p>
+
+<p>Down on the beach we chat with a prospector and his son, a lad of
+fifteen, who are building a skiff in which to ascend the Liard, hunting
+gold. Yesterday a Mr. and Mrs. Carl and a Mr. and Mrs. Hall passed us on
+the river. Outfitted for two years, they will prospect for gold in the
+Nahanni Mountains and toward the headwaters of the Liard. One of the
+couples has just come out from Glasgow and this is their honeymoon. We
+half envy them their journey. Can anything compare with the dear
+delights of travelling when you do not know and nobody knows just what
+lies round the next corner?</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0197"></a>
+<img src="images/img0197.jpg" width="310" height="310" alt="A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson" title="">
+<BR><B>A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The dogs at Simpson are &quot;wicked.&quot; Picking our way among them, I
+particularly approve this term of the natives, attributing as it does a
+human conception and malice aforethought to these long-legged wraiths.
+The first articulate sound an Indian child of the Mackenzie learns to
+make is &quot;Mash!&quot; an evident corruption of the French &quot;<i>Marche</i>.&quot; This is
+what Shakespeare meant when he speaks of &quot;a word to throw at a dog.&quot; A
+brown baby just emerged from the cocoon stage of the moss-bag toddles
+with uplifted pole into a bunch of these hungry mongrels and disperses
+them with a whack of the stick and the lordly &quot;Mash!&quot; of the superior
+animal. For our own part we are &quot;scared stiff,&quot; but follow along in the
+wake of our infant protector to a wee wooden church which staggers under
+the official title, &quot;The Cathedral of St. David.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0198"></a>
+<img src="images/img0198.jpg" width="307" height="380" alt="A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson" title="">
+<BR><B>A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We have had occasion to speak of the splendid service rendered to
+Northern and Western Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company and by the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police. A third factor through the years has been
+building Empire with these. Are we not as a people too prone to minimise
+the great nation-building work performed by the scattered missionaries
+in the lone lands beyond the railway? Ostensibly engaged in the work of
+saving souls, Canadian missionaries, both Roman and English, have opened
+the gates of commerce, prosecuted geographical discovery, tried to
+correct social evils, and added materially to our store of exact
+science. Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools
+established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to
+deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman,
+the last thing you ask is, &quot;To what church does he belong?&quot;
+Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running
+through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no
+Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton.
+The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide
+the field between them.</p>
+
+<p>The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure
+than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had
+two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade
+Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the
+wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan
+scribe merely as &quot;a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the
+Portage.&quot; In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between
+his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago,
+only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is
+literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world's map has
+ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his
+sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we
+might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from
+London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson's
+Bay forts, and substituting for Europe's vineyards and pleasant vales an
+unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.</p>
+
+<p>We are told that Bishop Bompas's father was Dicken's prototype for
+Sergeant Buzfuz. A new vista would open up to the counsel for Mrs.
+Bardell could he turn from his chops and tomato-sauce to follow the
+forty-years' wandering in the wilderness of this splendid man of God,
+who succeeded, if ever man succeeds, in following Paul's advice of
+keeping his body under.</p>
+
+<p>Bishops Bompas was one of the greatest linguists the Mother Country ever
+produced. Steeped in Hebrew and the classics when he entered the
+Northland, he immediately set himself to studying the various native
+languages, becoming thoroughly master of the Slavi, Beaver, Dog-Rib, and
+Tukudk dialects. When Mrs. Bompas sent him a Syriac testament and
+lexicon, he threw himself with characteristic energy into the study of
+that tongue. There is something in the picture of this devoted man
+writing Gospels in Slavi, primers in Dog-Rib, and a Prayer Book in
+syllabic Chipewyan, which brings to mind the figure of Caxton bending
+his silvered head over the blocks of the first printing-press in the old
+Almonry so many years before. What were the &quot;libraries&quot; in which this
+Arctic Apostle did his work? The floor of a scow on the Peace, a hole in
+the snow, a fetid corner of an Eskimo hut. His &quot;Bishop's Palace,&quot; when
+he was not afloat, consisted of a bare room twelve feet by eight, in
+which he studied, cooked, slept, and taught the Indians.</p>
+
+<p>They tell you stories up here of seeing the good Bishop come back from a
+distant journey to some isolated tribe, followed at heel by a dozen
+little Indian babies, his disciples for the days to come. Bishop Bompas
+lived in one continent, but manifested in two, keeping himself closely
+in touch with the religious and Church growth of the Old World. When the
+British press had been given over to any particular
+religious-controversial subject, and the savants had finally disposed of
+the matter to their own satisfaction, travelling out by summer traverse
+or winter dog-sled would come a convincing pamphlet by Bishop Bompas, to
+upset altogether the conclusions of the wranglers.</p>
+
+<p>There is one tale of this man which only those can appreciate who travel
+his trail. An Indian lad confides to us, &quot;Yes, my name is William
+Carpenter&mdash;Bishop Bompas gave me my name, he was a good man. He wouldn't
+hurt anybody, he never hit a dog, he wouldn't kill a mosquito. He had
+not much hair on his head, and when it was <i>meetsu</i>, when the Bishop eat
+his fish, he shoo that mosquito away and he say, 'Room for you, my
+little friend, and room for me, but this is not your place: go.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We call upon the present incumbents of the little church of St. David.
+They are young people, the Rev. and Mrs. Day, putting in their first
+year in this Northern charge. Their home with its spotless floors and
+walls papered with old copies of <i>The Graphic</i> and <i>Illustrated London
+News</i> is restful and attractive. The garden of the parsonage shows an
+amount of patient work on the part of some one. Potatoes eighteen
+inches high and peas twice the height of this, with turnips and cabbages
+and cauliflower are good to look at. There are records to show that,
+years ago, Fort Simpson produced tomatoes and decent crops of barley.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0202"></a>
+<img src="images/img0202.jpg" width="369" height="263" alt="Interior of St. David's Cathedral" title="">
+<BR><B>Interior of St. David's Cathedral</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Entering the little church we see the neat font sent here by Mrs.
+Bompas, &quot;In dear memory of Lucy May Owindia, baptised in this Church,
+January, 1879.&quot; Owindia was one of the many red waifs that the good
+Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took into their big hearts. Her story is a sad
+one. Along the beach at Simpson, <i>Friday</i>, an Indian, in a burst of
+ungovernable temper murdered his wife and fled, leaving their one baby
+to perish. It was not until next day that the little one was found,
+unconscious and dying. The Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took the child into
+their loving care. To the name Owindia, which means <i>The Weeping One</i>,
+was added the modern Lucy May, and the little girlie twined herself
+closely round the hearts of her protectors. When the time seemed ripe,
+Owindia was taken back to England to school, but the wee red plant would
+not flourish in that soil. She sickened and died. Hence the memorial and
+the inscription we read this July day. Much history of militant energy,
+much of endurance, and countless chapters of benevolence did the good
+Bishop write into the history of the North before, off on the Yukon side
+in 1906, &quot;God's finger touched him and he slept.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Missionaries of the present day are not without their troubles. Mrs. Day
+tells of potato-whiskey making in some illicit still back in the
+mosquito-woods, the results of which she fears; and, even as we speak,
+an Indian lunatic pokes his head through the palings of the
+potato-patch. From far back in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and from
+Fort Liard, the Hudson's Bay men have come to make their reports to Mr.
+Brabant at Simpson. They brought their wives and babies with them,
+brought also a quantity of beautiful porcupine-quill work, Fort Liard
+being one of the few places in the North where this art flourishes.
+Tomorrow they will start back, tacking against the stream, as the
+imported brides are doing before them.</p>
+
+<p>To dive into the journals of the past, of which the loft above the
+offices here at Simpson is full, is even more interesting than talking
+with the people of the present. We take 1837, the year which saw the
+accession in England of the young and well-beloved Queen, and from
+these musty books unearth a running commentary of what is doing in Fort
+Simpson in that year.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, January 1</i>. The people were brought into the Hall, and enjoyed
+their meal with great appetites, being also treated to a glass of wine
+and a fathom of tobacco and a pipe. Wind East.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, February 11</i>. Rabbits are numerous, but the ladies of the
+Establishment make no great effort in snaring them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, February 14</i>. Late last night arrived a woman, <i>Thawyase</i>, and a
+boy, the family of the late <i>Thoesty</i>. They have all come to take refuge
+here as they are starving. The woman at dusk decoyed old Jack away to
+camp in the woods&mdash;and the old fellow has found a mate.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One wonders if either <i>Thawyase</i>, the decoyed Jack, or the old
+chronicler was conscious of the fact that this was St. Valentine's Day.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, March 27</i>. Two geese have been seen to-day, the first this
+season.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 2</i>. <i>Marcel</i> sowed some oats. Mosquitoes begin to become
+annoying.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 5</i>. Wild fowl are beginning to frequent the small lakes of
+the neighbourhood. The willows and young trees are now budding forth
+beautifully.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 18</i>. <i>Hope</i> began to plough this morning with the bull, but
+as this is the first time he has been yoked, the day's work is found to
+be but poor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 19</i>. Felix and Roderick McLeod made twelve bags of pemmican
+to-day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>1837, May 21</i>. The Mackenzie River broke up to-day, and continued
+drifting pretty thick till evening.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 18</i>. Some of the Indians killed a bear before the door and
+it supplied us with a little fresh meat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 19</i>. Flies so numerous that we are under the necessity of
+putting our cattle into the stable, otherwise they will fall victims to
+the cruel insects.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 20</i>. Weather very suffocating, thermometer 85 above at
+three p.m., not as much as a cloud to be seen in the firmament and not
+the least air to afford any refreshment; this along with the solitude of
+the time is enough to make people dull. No Indian from any quarter: well
+supplied with ammunition last spring, they forget us when they can get
+their own mouths satisfied. Ashley grinding barley in the steel mill.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 21</i>. <i>Le Mari</i> has just brought in some fish and a little
+bearskin in order to get a chemise, he says he is not able to hunt
+without a chemise, as there are so many flies just now. I have taken it
+upon myself to give him the shirt on credit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Here a new hand writes the records, untrammelled by any orthographic
+rules.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 24</i>. Flys very numerus and trublsome to the Cattel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, July 11</i>. Starvan Indians going and coming ourly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, July 13</i>. Six squas arrived with plenty Bearrys&mdash;that's all they
+subsist on in this part of the River.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, July 26</i>. Barley is getting ripe. But small birds nip off the
+ends of the stalks as fast as it ripens.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, August 23</i>. Last night the bull broke into one of the gardens
+where oats was sown and eat the whole up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, September 18</i>. An Express arrived from Fort Norman with
+despatches from the Gentlemen of the Arctic Discovery Expedition, and it
+is most satisfying to learn that the first object of the Expedition was
+successfully accomplished: on the 4th August the Company's flag was
+planted on Point Barrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, September 19th</i>. <i>Louson</i> put parchment in the window-frames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, October 11</i>. Ice is forming since yesterday along the beach.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 1</i>. This being the holiday for All Saints, the men
+though no saints celebrated it off duty. The weather cold but fine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 2</i>. I have been these two days occupied with the
+blacksmith in making an oven, and this evening it being finished we give
+it a fair trial by placing a large trout in it for supper and it is
+found to answer most excellently.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 3</i>. Strong northwest wind with drift and cold. About
+one o'clock of last night the Aurora had a most unusual appearance,
+seemingly black in place of the white commonly observed and forming an
+arch from east to west, consisting of five streaks, here and there
+broken off.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1827, November 5</i>. Blacksmith making iron runners for our traineaux
+from old gun-barrels.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 30</i>. This being the anniversary of the Tutelar Saint of
+Scotland, we had in addition to our usual dinner a roasted swan and a
+moose-nose, a rice pudding, a cranberry tart, and a glass of wine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, December 1</i>. I was obliged to give four pounds of dried meat to
+the dogs for there are some that are almost dead and they et all the
+windows of the Forge.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, December 2</i>. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of
+insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and prevent
+them devouring themselves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>December 25</i>. Thermometer 35 below the cypher this morning, this being
+Christmas no labour done. Wind N.W.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1838, January 1</i>. The morning was ushered in by a salute fired by our
+people at the windows and doors, after which they came to wish us a
+Happy New Year&mdash;and in return, in conformity to the custom of the
+country they were treated, the men with half a glass of brandy each, and
+the women with a kiss, and the whole of them with as many cakes as they
+choose to take and some raisins. One of our gentlemen who had a bottle
+of shrub treated them to a glass, and after some chit-chat conversation
+they retired, firing a salute on going out. In the evening they played
+at Blind-man's-buff, concluding the f&ecirc;te by a supper in the Hall. I also
+gave each of the men a fathom of twist tobacco and a clay pipe.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XI"></a><h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;With souls grown clear<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In this sweet atmosphere,</span><br>
+With influences serene,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Our blood and brain washed clean,</span><br>
+We've idled down the breast<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of broadening tides.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>Chas. G.D. Roberts</i>.</p>
+
+<p>About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we
+push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and
+parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen
+present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.
+We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed
+into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet
+photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the
+Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we
+proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due
+northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the
+pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the
+river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so
+low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we
+impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the
+Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course
+for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0208"></a>
+<img src="images/img0208.jpg" width="359" height="223" alt="Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal
+mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow
+the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake
+Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A
+ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the
+pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed
+view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who
+understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have
+that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to
+attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when
+many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so
+blatantly dub &quot;progress.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence
+we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road
+to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to
+the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons
+passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the
+silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.</p>
+
+<p>Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded,
+and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's
+development and acceptance&mdash;banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings
+of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and
+unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the
+Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into
+its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the
+Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the
+Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams
+hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to
+the <i>inconnu</i> and the Indian.</p>
+
+<p>It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream
+to its mouth, &quot;discovering&quot; a river along whose shores centuries before
+had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race,
+wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or
+chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age
+follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time
+these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed &quot;the red men&quot; and &quot;the American
+Indian.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply
+turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl&mdash;gulls in great
+variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny
+laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers
+and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are
+to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the
+banks&mdash;the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid
+golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss
+dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash
+breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the
+swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of
+upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being
+modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.</p>
+
+<p>Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters
+begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly
+south to kinder skies, the <i>inconnu</i> hurry northward seeking the sea.
+Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's &quot;<i>Le convert du bon
+Dieu</i>,&quot; silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and
+ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering
+Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated
+fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the
+six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or
+unwitting of shelter.</p>
+
+<p>According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the
+ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds
+the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for
+him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut
+etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest
+it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his
+man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys
+upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues
+a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great
+hunter, man.</p>
+
+<p>In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the
+intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the
+Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke
+not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice
+of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power&mdash;the
+Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his
+children.</p>
+
+<p>Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is
+saying &quot;Spring,&quot; full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the
+open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the
+honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and
+darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary
+streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting
+ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and
+all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.</p>
+
+<p>Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and
+wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into
+a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever
+hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has
+always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along
+her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of
+life; their unvoiced prayer is, &quot;Give us our fish in due season.&quot; From
+the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and
+dipped and seined their sustenance&mdash;inconnu, jack-fish, grayling,
+white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice
+or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway&mdash;a trail worn
+smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast
+in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.</p>
+
+<p>Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and
+lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of
+recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the
+great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along
+these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph,
+self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the
+noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the
+keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife,
+Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand
+despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise
+was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the
+Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game
+of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a
+man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.</p>
+
+<p>About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and
+Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size.
+One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is &quot;just
+like a town.&quot; Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough
+record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will
+always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered
+the fringed gentian (<i>Gentiana crinata</i>) with its lance-shaped leaves,
+delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian
+is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and
+it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63&deg;. Purple
+asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse
+or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled
+flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and
+purple columbines already forming seed.</p>
+
+<p>Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance
+from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche
+Trempe-l'eau or &quot;The Rock by the Riverside,&quot; an outcrop of Devonian
+limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above
+the river. We come into view of the &quot;boucans&quot; or beds of lignite coal
+which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in
+1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his
+journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back,
+for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it
+would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would
+come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter
+monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there
+were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the
+Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their
+eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of &quot;small white buffalo&quot; which they
+hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the
+<i>Sass-sei-yeuneh</i> or &quot;Foolish Bear&quot; of the Slavis.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0215"></a>
+<img src="images/img0215.jpg" width="363" height="223" alt="Indians at Fort Norman" title="">
+<BR><B>Indians at Fort Norman</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast
+of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes
+into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in
+a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been
+in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the
+current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor
+against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is
+a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by
+the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.</p>
+
+<p>The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole
+of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the
+outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established
+winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water,
+probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave
+Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual
+shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and
+fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are
+surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very
+late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.</p>
+
+<p>March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three
+feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier
+water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs
+are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings
+blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September
+is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last
+of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre
+of the lake freezes over.</p>
+
+<p>When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one
+going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle &quot;Boyne
+Water.&quot; The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across
+the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the &quot;Nest of
+the Wind&quot; of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this
+great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in
+thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that
+the Great Spirit, &quot;in the beginning,&quot; spread out there to dry. We find
+Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning,
+the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and
+Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat
+coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to
+his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library,
+and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas,
+beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman
+lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the
+outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and
+pink-teas.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0217"></a>
+<img src="images/img0217.jpg" width="262" height="373" alt="Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman" title="">
+<BR><B>Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0218"></a>
+<img src="images/img0218.jpg" width="361" height="261" alt="The Ramparts of the Mackenzie" title="">
+<BR><B>The Ramparts of the Mackenzie</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path
+leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It
+is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of
+children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and
+awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb
+flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at
+lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the
+peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float
+between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass
+Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for.
+The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection.
+If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they
+have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a
+wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache
+of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when
+ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky
+replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.</p>
+
+<p>It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest
+spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,&mdash;the Ramparts. The
+great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here
+narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles
+forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred
+feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers,
+and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, &quot;turned on edge,&quot; flows,
+maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of
+the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring,
+the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a
+skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the
+cliffs above.</p>
+
+<p>As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian
+artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with
+the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted,
+our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of
+this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the
+picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn
+and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and
+envelopes the earth as with a garment,&mdash;the light that never was on sea
+or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to
+pass the portal into the Arctic World.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0220"></a>
+<img src="images/img0220.jpg" width="364" height="239" alt="Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth" title="">
+<BR><B>Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians
+has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting
+for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big
+steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their
+old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock,
+ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower
+down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed
+from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river;
+and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at
+midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle.</p>
+
+<p>The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say
+our &quot;joggafy&quot; lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar
+bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in
+America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the
+Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen
+silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there?
+Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his
+daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,&mdash;Mrs. Pierre la Hache.
+Tenny wears his &quot;other clothes&quot; and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for
+this is his home. &quot;It looks like a swan on the water,&quot; he says, when the
+first white houses come into view. &quot;You like it, do you not?&quot; &quot;Like it?
+Good Hope is God's Country!&quot; There is no place like home, even when it
+is the Arctic Circle!</p>
+
+<p>The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the
+dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the
+big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr.
+C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand
+servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the
+greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has
+continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition
+is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employ&eacute;s a pension
+after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely
+deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old
+gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to
+his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the
+younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up
+the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr.
+Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope
+Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.</p>
+
+<p>Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses,
+and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.
+Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back
+from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women
+call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to
+rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is
+hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list
+of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the
+unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss
+Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide
+world.</p>
+
+<p>We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of
+pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your
+throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine
+and <i>galettes</i>, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the
+window-ledge and look around the walls of the &quot;homey&quot; room we wonder if
+this really can be the &quot;Arctic Circle, 23-1/2&deg; from the North Pole,
+which marks the distance that the sun's rays,&quot; etc., etc., as the little
+geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday
+School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women,
+earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and
+girls&mdash;the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a
+pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there
+a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned
+hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend
+runs,&mdash;&quot;Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a
+bottle and a little loaf of bread.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first
+Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the
+first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: &quot;And
+how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?&quot; Quick came the
+girlie's reply, &quot;They had to leave The Company's service!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. &quot;We get a mail every
+year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail.&quot; This is to her
+the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A
+letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope
+crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it
+travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the
+Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by
+dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence
+the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good
+Hope on the Arctic Circle.</p>
+
+<p>We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and
+devotion to The Company,&mdash;these are the two key-notes of her character.
+Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made &quot;outside&quot;
+to Montreal when she was a young mother&mdash;it was just fifty years
+ago,&mdash;measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died,
+&quot;<i>Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants</i>!&quot; Some years after
+this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies,
+snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until
+it was torn from her by force.</p>
+
+<p>We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the
+whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable
+gardens are in evidence here,&mdash;potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages.
+Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's
+Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the
+store of the &quot;free-trader,&quot; he says, &quot;Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman,
+kindly, and dear, but she doesn't approve of me. She makes a point of
+not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why?&quot; we ask, much surprised.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh,&quot; with a laugh, &quot;you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B.
+Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns
+and a tail!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We step into the &quot;Little Church of the Open Door,&quot; and sit down and
+think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the
+mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see
+across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a
+transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a
+saint,&mdash;St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery
+outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts
+will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, &quot;Our Lady of
+Good Hope,&quot; the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri
+Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<h3>ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,<br>
+And out of my full heart,<br>
+Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold<br>
+The Infinite thou art.<br>
+What matter all the creeds that come and go,<br>
+The many gods of men?<br>
+My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>A Pagan Hymn</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber,&quot; said
+text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We
+didn't find him.</p>
+
+<p>It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel
+since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the
+true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a
+master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were,
+men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for
+tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.</p>
+
+<p>On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing,
+and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of
+the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and
+this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is
+always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his
+dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is
+a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he
+is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing
+with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little
+half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of
+good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly
+round the neck with, &quot;Everybody are my friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode
+on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to
+trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco,
+looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with
+him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures
+between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began.
+&quot;What for this fellow, huh?&quot; and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a
+little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or
+the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap,
+the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which
+looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each
+bargain sealed with a handshake.</p>
+
+<p>Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of
+animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours,
+the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a
+Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did
+when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same
+place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the
+claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0228"></a>
+<img src="images/img0228.jpg" width="311" height="383" alt="A Kogmollye Family" title="">
+<BR><B>A Kogmollye Family</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats
+while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to
+do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their
+names and to ask ours. &quot;Major Jabussy,&quot; &quot;Missa Blown,&quot; they got the
+names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into
+roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no
+one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this
+Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one
+exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair,
+the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in
+physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and
+Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six
+feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage
+and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has &quot;arrived&quot;; he has an
+air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms &quot;Outside&quot; you seldom see.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to
+the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the
+Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for
+the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from
+the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for
+the American whalers.</p>
+
+<p>One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the
+Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two
+wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did
+she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak
+the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big
+seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years
+followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of
+walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet
+sinks in a well.</p>
+
+<p>One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord
+the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot
+consistency which was his taste, she said, &quot;I'm not as young as I was,
+you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get
+another wife to help me with the work.&quot; Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon
+the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak,
+dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and
+as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a
+rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.</p>
+
+<p>How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire
+trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North
+family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but
+never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a m&eacute;nage of nicer
+adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of
+life, waggish and keen, &quot;quick at the uptak',&quot; as the Scotch say,
+presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing
+her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior
+economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet,
+dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and
+plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of
+height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a
+man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception
+where men of the world forgather.</p>
+
+<p>Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the
+Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet,
+the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple
+dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking
+back to Old World culture and distinction.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0231"></a>
+<img src="images/img0231.jpg" width="305" height="352" alt="Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family" title="">
+<BR><B>Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for
+her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy
+and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family
+fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps
+with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of
+her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the
+exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had
+brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the
+matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two
+school-girls.</p>
+
+<p>The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in
+vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were
+all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking
+Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If
+no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony
+there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?</p>
+
+<p>Kipling declares, &quot;There's never a law of God or man runs north of
+fifty-three.&quot; The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent
+quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He
+is his own man.</p>
+
+<p>In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of &quot;One
+man, One wife,&quot; allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and
+elsewhere, so that it may read, &quot;One man, one wife at a time.&quot; Are we so
+sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the
+Eskimo?</p>
+
+<p>Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread,
+in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On
+the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples;
+here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill
+as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of
+seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In
+many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women
+outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and
+provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo
+is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large
+families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now,
+the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and
+provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a
+floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and
+generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can
+comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from
+extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the
+Nunatalmutes?</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo
+equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a
+significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either
+the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment
+to the latitude of 68&deg; North and take cognizance of the fact that no
+seductive &quot;Want Columns&quot; in the daily press here offer a niche whereby
+unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as
+chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To
+keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own
+proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind
+is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all
+must have in order to live.</p>
+
+<p>Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a
+man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each
+partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness
+fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of
+human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle
+perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it
+seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?</p>
+
+<p>I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always
+content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit,
+nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a
+reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of
+seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely,
+but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the
+Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three
+winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her
+feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.</p>
+
+<p>In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate
+to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her
+brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast
+consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The
+ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests
+present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one
+needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as &quot;odours of Edom and
+offerings Divine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a
+retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight
+suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands
+above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a
+gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in
+the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the
+air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice
+repeated,</p>
+
+&quot;Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya&mdash;yae!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory
+and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride,
+pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.</p>
+
+<p>By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most
+admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most
+misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The
+Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known
+but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is
+an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line
+between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty
+miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four
+peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
+and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of
+Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days
+brought their most precious medium of exchange,&mdash;a peculiar blue jade,
+one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a
+tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so
+the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's
+ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.</p>
+
+<p>This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and
+merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old
+men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious
+oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and
+courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these
+Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of
+delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no
+red-hots nor &quot;fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled
+and f-five a bag!&quot;, but the Arctic concomitants of these,&mdash;boiled
+beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that
+smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in
+the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the
+counters that are different.</p>
+
+<p>Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down
+into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and
+fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the
+world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south
+were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that
+disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great
+Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771,
+followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives
+their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at
+Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band
+of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in
+1820 was more happy. He says, &quot;The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands
+in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile
+intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making
+bows.&quot; Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this
+tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, &quot;I called out '<i>Tima</i>'
+(Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out
+'<i>Tima</i>.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily
+by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white
+man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and
+they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up
+a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would
+eat it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian
+missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of
+such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited
+the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but
+rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John
+Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen,
+the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them,
+and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and
+his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo
+is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid
+moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.</p>
+
+<p>Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated
+religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to
+turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell
+to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, &quot;Goodbye, my
+dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never
+reach you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north,
+&quot;keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole.&quot; But the Eskimo
+has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and
+it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what
+it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast
+it doesn't drop below 55.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,&mdash;the land and the sea,
+with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his,
+that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the
+Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most
+insistent one would be, &quot;Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but
+hang on to your fish-net.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo
+and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the
+contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The
+Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together
+the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of
+revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the
+blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts
+Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but
+with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies,
+and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In
+the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of
+one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against
+misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo
+stays on the coast to-day because it is to him &quot;God's country&quot; and not
+because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.</p>
+
+<p>For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed
+the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different
+bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the
+Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the
+ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the
+season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the
+intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the
+Eskimo?</p>
+
+<p>Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta
+region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of
+that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever,
+consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling
+decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though
+consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian,
+measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal
+than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.</p>
+
+<p>What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them
+making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic,
+so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole
+horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but
+call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates
+once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and
+molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side
+of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the
+Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by
+marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the
+whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its
+changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of
+the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the
+Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo
+mothers, and, for &quot;floating fathers,&quot; marking their escutcheon with
+every nationality under the sun,&mdash;American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,
+Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all
+miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is
+different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a
+Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or
+Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.
+There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo
+&quot;wives&quot; outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.
+One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken
+&quot;outside&quot; by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or
+eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south
+to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the
+marriage-contract is &quot;good for this season only,&quot; and the wife and
+children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him
+with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.</p>
+
+<p>What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her
+people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of
+Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the
+erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she
+is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and
+capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man
+of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her
+second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she
+shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she
+again essays Hymen's lottery.</p>
+
+<p>Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share
+that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a
+child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the
+half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness
+forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall
+below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the
+ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity
+plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the
+blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see
+and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied
+and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in
+this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, &quot;The
+sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and
+fourth generation;&quot; it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own
+inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally
+descend in direct line.</p>
+
+<p>We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he
+approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of
+hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft,
+his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But,
+most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children.
+&quot;A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure,&quot; is a pretty theory,
+but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own
+footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the
+igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in
+and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe
+air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but
+there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive.
+He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his
+place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent
+entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no
+power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of
+doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden
+Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily
+even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered
+into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is
+but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be
+born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day
+meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the
+clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born
+while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from
+the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at,
+much less fuss over, the little stranger.</p>
+
+<p>Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown
+man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy
+to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the
+newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers
+around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes
+possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in
+twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to
+influence the character and destiny of the growing child.</p>
+
+<p>We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The
+summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its
+earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's
+back under her <i>artikki</i>, or upper garment, which has been made
+voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King
+Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a
+bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is
+wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother
+who first crooned in love and literalness,</p>
+
+&quot;By-o, Baby Bunting,<br>
+Daddy's gone a-hunting,<br>
+To get a little rabbit-skin,<br>
+To wrap his Baby Bunting in.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet.
+While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer
+enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a
+beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins
+pendant,&mdash;rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the
+floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and
+jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of
+hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young
+hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the
+culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in
+one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.</p>
+
+<p>A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns
+to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon
+the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as
+the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the
+Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being
+inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.</p>
+
+<p>The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not
+unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for
+twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a
+little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out
+every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At
+eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line
+on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an
+air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not
+think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with
+the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam,
+and says, &quot;The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their
+play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North,
+as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their
+vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no
+molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a
+walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was
+neither Rugby nor &quot;Soccer,&quot; but there seemed to be a good deal of
+tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball,
+down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft
+parts of his anatomy. &quot;You're angry, now,&quot; said a Major of the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. &quot;No, sir,&quot; said the under
+dog, with difficulty protruding his head, &quot;I never get mad when I play.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.
+It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated
+difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on
+each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his
+adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound
+by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to
+him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.
+All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a
+row of &quot;heathen&quot; Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind,
+for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted
+discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the
+ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball
+diamonds, and &quot;sport&quot; carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line
+of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and
+out among the camps of the Eskimo,&mdash;&quot;Self-reverence, self-knowledge,
+self-control.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0246"></a>
+<img src="images/img0246.jpg" width="329" height="267" alt="Farthest North Football" title="">
+<BR><B>Farthest North Football</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude
+imitations of their elders. And they play &quot;house,&quot; and &quot;ladies,&quot; and
+&quot;visiting,&quot; just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas;
+but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up
+in her mother's long dresses.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0247"></a>
+<img src="images/img0247.jpg" width="265" height="313" alt="Two Spectators at the Game" title="">
+<BR><B>Two Spectators at the Game</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in
+spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative
+of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time
+that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle
+are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the
+meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and
+south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the
+anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game,
+help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six
+months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever.
+The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any
+suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are
+finished and the new hunts not yet begun. &quot;I'll eat my hat&quot; is an empty
+threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing
+pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.</p>
+
+<p>At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me
+this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie
+Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and
+cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again
+indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken
+violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one
+little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained,
+alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young
+Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the
+silent camp.</p>
+
+<p>One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that
+little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing,
+waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies
+of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as
+its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went
+in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that
+A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too,
+and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have
+been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly
+compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0249"></a>
+<img src="images/img0249.jpg" width="367" height="291" alt="An Eskimo Exhibit" title="">
+<BR><B>An Eskimo Exhibit</B>
+</center>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><tt>A&mdash;Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>B&mdash;Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the
+missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word &quot;Lamb&quot; having no
+meaning to an Eskimo.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>C&mdash;Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>D&mdash;Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>E&mdash;Model of Eskimo paddle.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>F&mdash;Skin model of the <i>Oomiak</i> or Eskimo woman's boat.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>G and H&mdash;Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half
+a thimbleful of tobacco.</tt></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of
+loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had
+never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry
+admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he
+is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with <i>after</i> the fit of
+passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools,
+with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their
+wise papers on the training of &quot;the child,&quot; the Eskimo children we saw
+were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense
+of the word, more truly &quot;educated&quot; than many of our children are.
+Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained
+admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint
+of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the
+family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very
+nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the
+mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the
+fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national
+greatness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<h3>FORT MACPHERSON FOLK</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;I have drunk the Sea's good wine,<br>
+Was ever step so light as mine,<br>
+Was ever heart so gay?<br>
+O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee,<br>
+For this old joy renewed,<br>
+For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued<br>
+With sunlight and with sea.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>A Pagan Hymn</i>.<br>
+
+<p>On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow
+passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the
+steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants
+is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of
+running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial
+banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in
+the scow may sleep in peace.</p>
+
+<p>At Point Separation, 67&deg; 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the
+east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles,
+the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden
+sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred
+miles east and west.</p>
+
+<p>The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It
+was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and
+Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in
+their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later,
+Richardson, this time concerned with the <i>Plover</i> Relief Expedition of
+the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,</p>
+
+&quot;July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my<br>
+instructions, a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug<br>
+a pit at a distance of ten feet from the best grown tree on the<br>
+Point, and placed in it, along with the pemmican, a bottle containing<br>
+a memorandum of the Expedition, and such information respecting<br>
+the Company's post as I judged would be useful to the<br>
+boat party of the <i>Plover</i> should they reach this river. The lower<br>
+branches of the tree were lopped off, a part of its trunk denuded<br>
+of bark, and a broad arrow painted thereon with red paint. In<br>
+performing these duties at this place, I could not but recall to<br>
+mind the evening of July 3rd, 1826, passed on the very same<br>
+spot with Sir John Franklin. We were then full of joyous anticipation.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>As we look at these enduring lobsticks, we recollect that Commander
+Pullen, with two boats from the <i>Plover</i> in 1849, visited the depot and
+found the precious pemmican. We leave the Mackenzie proper for the
+present and enter the easternmost channel of its farthest north
+tributary, the Peel, and follow this considerable stream thirty-three
+miles to Fort Macpherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.</p>
+
+<p>Fort Macpherson has a striking site. To the east, spreads a rolling
+wooded plain of alluvial origin, containing thousands of lakes. The west
+aspect gives us an uninterrupted view of the wooded valley of the Peel,
+backed by a heathery slope with the northern Rockies on the far horizon.
+Due north, upstarts a peak of the Rockies known locally as Black
+Mountain&mdash;a dark barren spur two thousand feet in height. A winter trail
+from Macpherson to Arctic Red River cuts no fewer than thirty-three
+small lakes.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0253"></a>
+<img src="images/img0253.jpg" width="315" height="418" alt="Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs" title="">
+<BR><B>Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>On the beach to meet us are Mounted Police and Eskimo from Herschel
+Island, Church of England missionaries, traders of the H.B. Co., and
+Loucheux Indians. But here, as at Arctic Red River, it is that Polar
+gentleman the Eskimo who claims our attention. Let Sergeant Fitzgerald,
+R.N.W.M.P., stationed at Herschel Island, speak for the Kogmollye and
+Nunatalmute Eskimo. In his departmental report this officer states, &quot;I
+have found these natives honest all the time I have been at Herschel
+Island. I never heard of a case of stealing among them.&quot; He has been
+there five years. Up here on the Arctic the bare word of an Eskimo is
+accepted of all men. If he states to an H.B. Co. factor that he has an
+order from a whaling captain to get certain goods for himself, that
+unwritten order is honoured though it may date back two or even three
+years, whereas an order presented by a white man must be in writing and
+certified.</p>
+
+<p>Why should I enter the lists and take up icy spear for my Eskimo fellow
+British subject? Because he is so very worth while. Because through the
+years the world has conspired to libel him. Because within a decade or
+two he will have passed utterly off the map. And because it is so very
+much pleasanter to write appreciations than epitaphs. This man wins you
+at once by his frank directness; his bearing is that of a fearless
+child. The Indian, like Ossian's hero, scorns to tell his name, and on
+occasion will dodge the camera, but the Eskimo likes to be photographed.
+Young and old, they press to our side like friendly boys and girls round
+a &quot;chummy&quot; teacher, volunteering information of age, sex, and previous
+condition, with all sorts of covetable bits of intimate family history.
+You love the Eskimo because he is kind to his dogs and gentle to little
+children. His entire willingness to take you on credit is contagious,
+trust begets trust even in walrus latitudes.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0255"></a>
+<img src="images/img0255.jpg" width="367" height="278" alt="Two Wise Ones" title="">
+<BR><B>Two Wise Ones</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a clever chap. With no school-teacher, no
+school, no modern appliances, he does many things and does each
+admirably. He is a hunter by land and sea, a fearless traveller, a
+furrier, a fisherman, a carver, a metal-smith, and he takes in every
+task the pride of a master mechanic,&mdash;&quot;the gods see everywhere.&quot; The
+duties of the man and the woman are well-defined. The head of the
+Kogmollyc household is the blood-and-flesh-winner, the navigator of the
+kayak, the driver of dogs. It is he who builds the houses on the march,
+and when occasion requires he does not consider it <i>infra dig.</i> to get
+the breakfast or mind the baby. The wife dresses the skins, prepares
+the food, makes all the clothing, and the lord of the igloo demands from
+her the same perfect work that he turns out himself.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0256"></a>
+<img src="images/img0256.jpg" width="320" height="383" alt="A Nunatalmute Eskimo Family" title="">
+<BR><B>A Nunatalmute Eskimo Family</B>
+</center>
+
+
+<p>When an Eskimo wife has finished making her spouse a pair of waterproof
+boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up. If there is one
+little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her,
+and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways. Either she
+must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word,
+or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker.
+We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was
+no recrimination. No word was spoken on either side, the exacting
+husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.</p>
+
+<p>With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin. Her
+tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a
+repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden
+dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs. The whole performance
+was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.</p>
+
+<p>If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo
+foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many
+surprises would await her. Instead of asking for references from her
+last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her
+teeth. In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as
+important a factor as your hands. The reporter for the funeral column of
+an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of
+speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little
+ones, would call pathetic attention to, &quot;the tired and patient teeth
+worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household.&quot; A young
+wife's cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that
+shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the
+seagull and chew these into shape. You see, after the boots are wet
+each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with
+oil and chewed into shape. We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at
+this wifely duty. Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands,
+incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way
+round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking
+like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make.
+Solomon's eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70&deg;
+North would read, &quot;She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh
+willingly with her hands; she riseth also while it is yet night and
+cheweth the boots of her household.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove.
+The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of
+the woman are brought into requisition. The raw sealskins or hides of
+the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up
+and dried thoroughly. Before this stiff material can be worked up into
+garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically
+chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task. Creasing the hide along
+its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way
+along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way
+back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of
+the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.</p>
+
+<p>It falls to the lot of the woman, too, to do her share of boat-making.
+The men deftly fashion the frames of kayak and oomiak, using in their
+construction not a single nail or piece of iron, but fastening the wood
+together by pegs and thongs of skin. Then the women come on the scene,
+measure the frame, and sew green hides of the proper shape to fit,
+making wonderful overlapping seams that are absolutely watertight. As it
+is necessary to put the skin covering on while the hides are raw, the
+whole job has to be completed at one sitting. So a bee is held of the
+women of the communal camp.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0259"></a>
+<img src="images/img0259.jpg" width="367" height="157" alt="Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks" title="">
+<BR><B>Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks</B><BR>
+The scenes etched in the larger represent the events of one year of the
+carver.
+</center>
+
+<p>Where did the Eskimo get his versatile ability? Only the walrus knows.
+The whalers have inducted the Eskimo into the art of making
+cribbage-boards. They use for each board a complete tusk of
+walrus-ivory, covering the whole with a wealth of descriptive carvings
+illustrative of all that comes into the yearly round of an Eskimo's
+life,&mdash;ice-fishing, bear-hunting, walrus-sticking. So far as we could
+find out, the Husky's connection with cribbage ceased with his making
+these <i>edition de luxe</i> boards. He seemed himself to have gathered no
+inkling of the fine points of that game which one instinctively
+associates with Dick Swiveller as tutor and as pupil the little
+Marchioness, &quot;that very extraordinary person, surrounded by mysteries,
+ignorant of the taste of beer, and taking a limited view of society
+through the key-holes of doors.&quot; In the world outside, far from igloos
+and ice-floes, where people gather round cheery Christmas fires with
+&quot;one for his nob,&quot; &quot;two for his heels,&quot; and &quot;a double run of three,&quot;
+these ivory crib-boards are sold for from seventy-five to one hundred
+dollars each. We have two among our most treasured trophies, and with
+them an ivory ring beautifully formed which we saw made. Set in the ring
+is a blue stone of irregular shape which was fitted into its ivory niche
+with a nicety of workmanship that few jewellers could attain. I had
+fashioned for me also a gavel in the shape of a sleeping seal, made of
+fossil ivory from the Little Diomedes. The contrast of the weathered
+brown of the outside of the ivory with the pure white of the inner
+layers, when worked up into a carved design, gives the effect of cameo
+and intaglio combined.</p>
+
+<p>We tasted many new Eskimo dishes. When, on our return, we confessed that
+the brain of the seal served here is a delicious dish, we ran against
+the sensibilities of refined natures. But why is it cruder to enjoy
+seal's brains <i>&acirc; la vinaigrette</i>, than to tickle our taste with brains
+of the frolicking calf? The seal furnished a more equivocal dinner than
+this, nothing less than entrails <i>au naturel</i>, which our hostess draws
+through her fingers yard by yard in pure anticipative delight, each
+guest being presented with two or three feet of the ribbon-like <i>pi&egrave;ce
+de r&eacute;sistance</i>. The scene that jumps to our memory as we watch this
+feast of fat things is connected with food-manipulations in Chicago. It
+was down at Armour's in the stockyards that we had seen Polacks and
+Scandinavian girls preparing in the succulent sausage a comestible that
+bore strange family semblance to that which our friends are now eating
+before us, this linked sweetness long drawn out.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0261"></a>
+<img src="images/img0261.jpg" width="374" height="191" alt="Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo" title="">
+<BR><B>Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo</B>
+</center>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><tt>A&mdash;Eskimo soapstone lamp which burns seal-oil. The wick is of reindeer
+moss.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>B&mdash;Eskimo knife of Stone Age.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>C&mdash;Its modern successor, fashioned from part of a steel saw, with handle
+of ivory. This is the knife used by the women; note how the old shape is
+retained.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>D&mdash;Eskimo Tam O'Shanter. The band is of loonskins, the cap proper being
+carefully constructed from swans' feet. This admirably shows the
+cleverness of the Eskimo in adapting natural forms to economic use, each
+foot of the swan being a true sector of a circle.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>E&mdash;Old-time stone hatchet.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>F and G&mdash;Knives filed from saw-blades, with bone handles.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>H&mdash;Mortar for pulverising tobacco into snuff.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>I&mdash;Needle set in a wood handle, and by rapid rotary motion used to
+pierce ivory.</tt></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. John Firth, of the Hudson's Bay Company here, gives us much
+information regarding these people who for thirty-seven consecutive
+years have traded with him. The Kogmollycs have been here &quot;from the
+beginning,&quot; the Nunatalmutes moving into this region in 1889, driven out
+of their hunting grounds inland from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, by a
+scarcity of game. The two tribes live in peace and intermarry. The aged
+among them are respected. Criminals and lunatics are quietly removed
+from the drama. Supposed incurables commit suicide and in that act
+reach immediately a hot underground heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Nature to these Eskimo is especially benign. The junction of the
+Mackenzie and the Peel is covered with a forest of spruce, and even to
+the ocean-lip we trace foot-prints of moose and black bear. In the delta
+are cross, red, and silver foxes, mink and marten, with lynx and rabbits
+according to the fortunes of war. The Eskimo declare that, east of Cape
+Parry, bears are so numerous that from ten to twenty are seen at one
+time from a high hilltop.</p>
+
+<p>The Chauncey Depew of the Kogmollycs, the man with the best stories and
+the most inimitable way of telling them, is Roxi. It was Roxi who gave
+us the love story of his cousin the Nuntalmute Lochinvar. This young man
+wooed a maid. The girl's father had no very good opinion of the lad's
+hunting ability and was obdurate. The lover determined to take destiny
+into his own hands. A ravine of ice stretched between his igloo and that
+of the family to whom he would fain be son, and over the chasm a
+drift-log formed a temporary bridge. Lothario, one night, crossed the
+icy gully, entered the igloo of his elect, seized her in her
+<i>shin-ig-bee</i> or sleeping-bag and lifted the dear burden over his back.
+In spite of struggles and muffled cries from within, he strode off with
+her to his side of the stream. The gulch safely crossed, he gaily kicked
+the log bridge into the gulf and bore his squirming treasure to his own
+igloo floor. He had left his seal-oil lamp burning and now it was with
+an anticipative chuckle of joy that he untied the drawstring. We end the
+story where Roxi did, by telling that the figure which rolled out
+sputtering from the <i>shin-ig-bee</i> was the would-not-be father-in-law
+instead of the would-be bride!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIV"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<h3>MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Into this Universe, and <i>Why</i> not knowing<br>
+Nor <i>Whence</i>, like Water willy-nilly flowing,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,</span><br>
+I know not <i>Whither</i>, willy-nilly blowing.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>The Rubaiyat</i>.<br>
+
+<p>The Midnight Sun! The sun does not sink to the horizon, but pauses for a
+moment and rises again. Dawn and eventide are one. The manifestations of
+light ever since we left Athabasca Landing have been wonderful,
+uplifting. The supreme marvel of the Midnight Sun is not what we see but
+what we feel. Standing at this outpost of Britain's Empire, we give our
+imagination rein and see waking worlds and cities of sleep. As this red
+sun rises from its horizon-dip, it is the first of the unnumbered
+sunrises which, as hour follows hour, will come to the continents.
+Longfellow says:</p>
+
+&quot;Think, every morning where the sun peeps through<br>
+The dim, leaf-latticed windows of the grove,<br>
+How jubilant the happy birds renew<br>
+Their old, melodious madrigals of love!<br>
+And when you think of this, remember too<br>
+<i>'Tis always morning somewhere</i>, and above<br>
+The awakening continents, from shore to shore,<br>
+Somewhere the birds are singing evermore.&quot;<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0264"></a>
+<img src="images/img0264.jpg" width="368" height="219" alt="Home of Mrs. Macdonald." title="">
+<BR><B>Home of Mrs. Macdonald.</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>How do the people of Macpherson divide into day and night their
+largesse of light? By common consent four o'clock in the morning seems
+to be bedtime, and by four in the afternoon people are busying
+themselves with breakfast. <i>In Polar Circles, do as the Polars do</i>, is
+good advice, and we follow suit. Individuality is strongly marked at
+this metropolis on the Peel. Every one you meet is a mine of interest,
+and sharp contrasts present themselves. Mrs. Macdonald discusses fur and
+deer-meat with Jack Johnson. He is a trapper who plays the game alone
+and who last year was reduced to killing his favourite dog for food.
+Current report credits him with having &quot;killed his man in the Yukon.&quot;
+Mrs. Macdonald is a Loucheux woman who, at the age of fourteen or
+fifteen, married Archdeacon Macdonald of the English Church and for
+eight long years afterwards assisted him in his life work of translating
+the Gospels into the Loucheux language. She has come all the way from
+Winnipeg to the Arctic Circle to spend the summer visiting her people.
+We lose our hearts to her two sons, splendid fellows both.</p>
+
+<p>It is the Eskimo who brings both missionary and trader to Fort
+McPherson. Are these Eskimo, Christians? Are they <i>civilised</i>? These are
+the questions that confront us when we speak of these Farthest North
+Canadians. It is an age of classification. You cannot find a flower
+nowadays that some one has not tacked a Latin name to, and it goes by
+inverse ratio&mdash;the smaller the flower the longer the name. Every bird
+you hear sing, even though it stop but an hour to rest its tired pinion
+on its northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat.
+How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape? In the northeast of
+Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary. In Alaska,
+on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to
+its bosom. In between these two come the people we are studying. The
+Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to
+influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not
+Episcopalians. What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of
+integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one? Heathens?
+The question sets us thinking.</p>
+
+<p>The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as &quot;Any irreligious, rude,
+barbarous or unthinking class or person.&quot; This Eskimo is not
+&quot;irreligious,&quot; for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and
+an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death,
+and he accedes to Kipling's line without ever having heard it,&mdash;&quot;They
+that are good shall be happy.&quot; He is not &quot;rude,&quot; but exceedingly
+courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude.
+&quot;Unthinking&quot; he certainly is not. Six months' darkness within the igloo
+gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker
+has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated
+cobbler is your true philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>There remains but the one ear-mark, &quot;barbarous.&quot; The dictionary declares
+that barbarous means, &quot;not classical or pure,&quot; &quot;showing ignorance of
+arts and civilisation.&quot; On the first of these indictments our poor
+Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical. And what man dare
+pronounce on the purity of another? Then we come to &quot;arts&quot; and
+&quot;civilisation.&quot; In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every
+European who has visited him. The stumbling-block in this honest search
+for a tag to put on my people is the term &quot;civilisation.&quot; One is
+reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons:
+&quot;Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man's doxy.&quot; Was it not
+Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, &quot;I am conscious that life has
+been trying to <i>civilise</i> me for now seventy years with what seems to me
+very inadequate results&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>If &quot;Christianity&quot; with the Eskimo means taking him into the white man's
+church, and &quot;civilising&quot; means bringing him into close contact with
+white men's lives, then he has not yet attained the first, and has but
+little to thank the second for. Two years ago eighty of these people in
+one tribe died of measles, a white man's disease. A stray chaplain
+wandered into an encampment of Eskimo, finding his way from a whaling
+ship. He told the people of Heaven, its golden streets, pearly gates,
+and harp-songs, and it meant nothing to these children of frost. They
+were not interested. Then he changed his theme, and spoke of Hell with
+its everlasting fires that needed no replenishing. &quot;Where is it? Tell
+us, that we may go!&quot; and little and big they clambered over him, eager
+for details.</p>
+
+<p>Prayer as presented by the white man is recognised as an incantation
+which should bring immediate and literal results. An enquiring scientist
+was seated one day with Oo-vai-oo-ak, the two fishing through adjacent
+air-holes in the ice. Calling across to the white man, Oo-vai-oo-ak
+said, &quot;How is it, brother, have you any fish?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; replied the man of letters, &quot;I have taken nothing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Have you spoken to God this morning?&quot; asked the Eskimo in a
+business-like tone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; said the wilted Walton.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, that's what's the matter,&quot; returned Oo-vai-oo-ak; &quot;I always speak
+to God every morning before I go fishing. Once, when I went to Herschel
+Island, a missionary told me what to say. It always works. I have many
+fish.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The scientist, interested, queried, &quot;And do you do the same when you go
+duck-hunting or goose-hunting or when you are after seal?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; eagerly responded Oo-vai-oo-ak, dropping his line and pressing
+close to the geologist, &quot;Is there a prayer for duck, and for geese, and
+one for seal? The missionary never told me that. You teach it to me, eh?
+I like to make sure what to say to catch that fellow,&mdash;goose and seal.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But, unfortunately for both, the university man did not have the charm.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0268"></a>
+<img src="images/img0268.jpg" width="367" height="245" alt="Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge" title="">
+<BR><B>Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Broadly speaking, the Eskimo's theory of things, evolved from white
+spirits on the ice-floes or carried across in the age of the mastodon
+from sires and grandsires in Asia, does not differ materially from our
+own. There is a Good Spirit, called by different tribes Cood-la-pom-e-o,
+Kelligabuk, or Sidne, who dwells high in the zenith, and to whom it is
+good to pray. There is an Evil Spirit, Atti, symbolising cold and death.
+Their heaven is a warm underworld reached by entrances from the sea.
+Hell is a far, white, dreary plain. The Eskimo pray to Sidne; but it is
+wise to propitiate Atti or Tornarsuk, and in this last idea they but
+follow their Chinese or Tartar ancestors. In common with all nations,
+the Kogmollycs have a tradition of the flood. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the
+Elder said, &quot;This world once covered with the sea.&quot; Asked why she
+thought so, she replied, &quot;You have been down to the land of the
+caribou, eh? Little smooth stones from the sea are there, and shells.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The labrets or lip-ornaments, shirt-stud shaped effects worn in holes
+pierced in the cheek, strike us with interest. Is it too daring a
+conjecture to trace in these, which Eskimo men so sedulously cherish and
+resolutely refuse to talk about, a religious significance? The term
+&quot;Kelligabuk&quot; in a literal translation means &quot;Mastodon.&quot; This animal,
+whose bones not infrequently are unearthed from ice-floes, has been for
+all time venerated as a god of the hunting grounds. Is it too fanciful
+to suggest that the labrets are a sort of peripatetic idol carried
+around on the person as an imitation of the tusks of this God-Mammoth?</p>
+
+<p>East and south of the Mackenzie delta the Eskimo tell of a Supreme
+Goddess, Nuliayok, who was once a coy maiden and refused to marry a
+mortal. Wooed by a gull, she accompanied the bird to an inland home, to
+find instead of her dreams of delight a nest of sticks and rotten fish
+on a high-hung ledge. Jostled by the other fulmars, or gulls, who tried
+to push her off the rocks, she sent for her father. In the night-time he
+came and sailed with her over the water in an oomiak. The deserted
+fulmar-bridegroom, taking a leaf out of Prospero's book, raised a storm.
+The father, to lighten the craft and propitiate the storm-spirit at the
+same time, threw the poor bride over-board, and cut off her fingers as
+she clung to the boat. As the four fingers dropped into the sea they
+changed respectively into beluga the white whale, nutchook the common
+seal, oog-zook the big seal, and ibyl the walrus. After thus giving
+origin to the four great sea-friends of the Innuit, the Goddess
+Nuliayok let go the boat and went to the world beneath the sea, where
+she now lives in a whalebone house with a dog for husband. She cannot
+stand erect, but hunches over the ground, holding one foot under her as
+a baby does who has not yet learned to walk.</p>
+
+<p>It is to Nuliayok that the spirits of sea-animals go after staying three
+days by their dead bodies; and this is the reason why the Eskimo breaks
+the eyes of a killed seal. He does not want it to witness the indignity
+of seeing its own body denuded of its skin. This too is the <i>raison
+d'&ecirc;tre</i> of the ceremonies which every Eskimo punctiliously performs in
+connection with the animal he kills. Each animal has a soul or spirit to
+be offended or placated; if pleased, the spirit of the dead animal
+communicates with its living kin, who in turn will deem it an honour to
+be killed by such considerate folk as the ceremonious Innuit. Round the
+igloo fire we heard another tradition of Nuliayok. The Goddess of the
+Sea once gave birth to a litter of white and red puppies. These she put
+into two little water-tight baby-boots and set them floating before a
+north wind. The puppies landed on southern shores and became the white
+race and the red race, the Europeans and the Indians. The Innuit, of
+course, had lived from the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>We arrogate to ourselves the term of &quot;white race,&quot; but if these Eskimo
+were to wash themselves daily (which they do not do yearly) they would
+be as white as we are. They have fleshy intelligent faces and eyes with
+more than a suggestion of the almond-slant of the Oriental. The idea
+occurs to us that the full appearance of the cheeks of the women is more
+likely to be caused by the exercise of chewing skins and boots than by
+an accumulation of fatty tissue. The men are distinguished by the thin,
+straggling growth of beard and moustache which adorns their Asiatic
+progenitors. The labrets of the men are offset by the long pendant
+earrings of the women, which are made from H.B. Co. beads and shells
+brought by Alaska Indians from the Pacific, It is only the women who
+here tattoo their faces, the three long stripes extending from lower lip
+to the chin. The men crop their hair in the style of the tonsure of the
+monk. Neither man nor woman provides any head covering except the hood
+of the <i>artikki</i> or smock, which hood, fringed with waving hair of the
+carcajou or wolverine, hangs loosely at the back until called into
+requisition by a winter's storm or a summer's siege of mosquitoes.</p>
+
+<p>Eskimo clothing is much lighter in weight than it seems, and this is one
+reason why the Eskimo attach&eacute;s of every Arctic expedition have moved
+around with less exhaustion than their European or American leaders. A
+well-made Eskimo outfit of inner and outer suits, with mittens, socks,
+and boots, weighs about thirteen pounds, while one imported fur coat of
+European deerskin will alone weigh more than that.</p>
+
+<p>A custom noted at the afternoon whale-meets and pink-teas might
+fittingly find way into the latitudes where narrow toes and French heels
+obtain. Two ingenious young Kogmollyc belles had placed applique pockets
+mid-leg on their lower garments. When the walrus was passed round and
+conversation became general, the boots were slipped off quietly and one
+foot at a time was thrust for a resting spell into the pocket provided
+on the opposite trouser-leg. This act of easement was done deftly, and
+the neat action of instep boot-jack never lost its fascination for us.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0272"></a>
+<img src="images/img0272.jpg" width="292" height="419" alt="A Wise Man of the Dog-Ribs" title="">
+<BR><B>A Wise Man of the Dog-Ribs</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>All the way from boundary-line to ice-barrier we had seen Indians
+tricked out in grotesque garments borrowed from the white man and used
+in combination with their own tribal covering of skins and furs. These
+sun-bonnets and shepherd's-plaid trousers, silk hats and red-flannel
+petticoats, the trader had persuaded the child of the woods to buy. The
+debonair Eskimo is a re-incarnation of the bastard brother of Aragon's
+Prince, and, leaning his furry back against the North Pole, says with
+him, &quot;I smile at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no
+man's pleasure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business,
+laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0273"></a>
+<img src="images/img0273.jpg" width="297" height="380" alt="A Study in Expression" title="">
+<BR><B>A Study in Expression</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>You cannot induce an Eskimo to think he wants anything just because you
+have found that thing to your liking. There are two reasons for this.
+First, long experience in the most rigorous climate which the human race
+inhabits has taught this man what garments are the most suitable for him
+in which to live and move and have his being. Second, although the
+Indian may ape the white man as a superior being from whom eleemosynary
+grub and gew-gaws may be wheedled, the Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta
+considers himself to be the superior of every created being. The Eskimo
+knows what he wants; he is always sure of it, and there is no
+vacillating. When he comes into the H.B. Company's post to trade, skins
+are his currency, the pelts of the silver-fox his gold coinage. A good
+silver, or black-fox is worth here about one hundred dollars in barter.</p>
+
+<p>We saw a band of Nunatalmutes come into Fort Macpherson to do their
+summer shopping. They wanted English breakfast tea, superior rifles and
+ammunition, and a special brand of tobacco. Failing any or all of these,
+it was in vain that the Factor displayed before them the wares of John
+Bull, Uncle Sam, or Johnny Canuck, or any seductive lure made in
+Germany. Ig-ly-o-bok and Nan-a-sook-tok bought what they found to their
+liking, took small change out of two silver-fox skins, and put the
+remaining six pelts back into the wooden box which formed at once their
+savings bank and letter of credit for the season to come. The
+hungry-eyed H.B. man confided to us that two of these coveted pelts had
+been thus exhibited to him and thus tucked back into the Eskimo
+sinking-fund for three successive seasons.</p>
+
+<p>As regards weapons, we found Eskimo hunters in the transition stage. The
+old-time spears, four feet long and tipped with ivory, are still in
+active service. The bows, with arrows finished in copper, flint, and
+bone, have been relegated largely to the boys, while Krag-Jorgensen,
+Lee-Enfield, and other high-power guns are bought from American whalers.
+The fish-hooks which I got in friendly barter are interesting to any one
+born with angling blood in his veins. Beautifully fashioned of ivory,
+copper, bone, and beads, the contrivance is a sinker, bait, and hook,
+all in one. The daily baskets procured with this lure incontestably
+proves the Husky a judicious hooker.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo is a merger. Father Petitot shows us the close analogy
+between the Kogmollyc language and the tongues of eastern Asiatic
+tribes, ancient and modern. This Eskimo's speech, then, gives him a
+connection with the effete East (which is his west), while enamelled
+washbasins, with here and there a corrugated wash-board, prove that
+slowly but surely Canadian culture is reaching him from the south.</p>
+
+<p>With two modifications, this Eskimo is invariably truthful. Like the
+Indians to the south of him, seeking to please you by answering a
+question in the way that you desire, he will at times tell you an
+untruth, for it seems to him discourteous to answer your question other
+than in the way which you anticipate. For instance, if you say to Roxi,
+&quot;Wasn't that a grey goose we heard overhead?&quot; Roxi will readily assent,
+though he well knows it to have been a mallard duck, but he would spare
+your ignorance. Again, it is Eskimo etiquette to belittle your own
+success in hunting and, in so doing, be not literally truthful. When we
+place this delightful trait alongside the fish-stories we are familiar
+with, who would seek to change the heathen?</p>
+
+<p>Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of
+each other for better or for worse. It is an easy union entered upon and
+maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one
+manifest advantage,&mdash;Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When
+unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of
+the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes
+herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium
+attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam
+husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young
+Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways. She
+asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, &quot;No. You may go
+to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction,
+and I hunt.&quot; Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e.,
+the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six
+nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father,
+for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the
+ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was
+strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a
+tree handy he would have been lynched. This would have been the first
+lynching recorded in Canada. The feeling of the Eskimo community was
+that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the
+bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper
+state to her father's door or to let her have the dogs.</p>
+
+<p>In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in
+re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical
+ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores. The ceremonies which
+approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the
+importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of
+what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them
+grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out
+each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a
+freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony,
+replied, &quot;New light, new sun,&quot; showing his belief that the sun was
+yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to
+igloo reminds us of the &quot;first-footing&quot; of the Scottish village. The
+mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the
+old Lord of Misrule.</p>
+
+<p>About the season of Christmas, a great meeting is held in the igloo,
+presided over by the Angekok or medicine-man, who entreats the invisible
+powers for good fortune, immunity from storms, and a plenitude of
+blubber for the ensuing year. This invocation is followed by a family
+feast. Next day the ceremonies are carried on out-of-doors, where all
+from oldest to youngest form a ring-around-a-rosy. In the centre of the
+circle is set a crock of water, while to the communal feast each person
+brings from his own hut a piece of meat, raw preferred. This meat is
+eaten in the solemn silence of a communion, each person thinking of
+Sidne, the Good Spirit, and wishing for good. The oldest member of the
+tribe, a white-haired man or tottering dame, takes up a sealskin cup,
+kept for this annual ceremony, dips up some of the water and drinks it,
+all the time thinking of Sidne, the Good Spirit, while the others close
+their eyes in reverent silence.</p>
+
+<p>Before passing the cup on to the rest of the company that they may
+drink, the old man or woman states aloud the date and place of his or
+her birth, as accurately as it can be remembered. The drinking and
+thinking ceremony is performed by all in succession, down to the last
+naked baby cuddling in its mother's <i>artikki</i>, the little child that
+cannot yet speak. The solemn rite is brought to a close by the tossing
+of presents across the ring from one to the other, the theory being
+that, as they generously deal with others, so Sidne will deal with them
+in the coming year. So up here on the edge of things, among our
+&quot;uncivilised heathens,&quot; we have our Christmas presents and &quot;<i>Peace on
+earth, good will to men</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XV"></a><h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<h3>MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Man does not live by bread alone.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Exigencies of life have caused the Mackenzie Eskimo to formulate on
+vital matters an unwritten law to which each gives assent. Succinctly
+stated, this system of Northland jurisprudence runs thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>(a) Should a man, inadvertently or by malice aforethought, kill
+another, the wife and children of the man so killed remain a burden on
+the murderer so long as he or they live.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>(b) A drift-log found is treasure-trove, and belongs to the finder, who
+indicates possession by placing upon it a pipe, mitten, or personal
+trinket of some kind</i>. Whalers, missionaries and Mounted Police are a
+unit in testifying that precious flotsam of this kind has remained four
+or five years in a land of wood-scarcity without being disturbed.</p>
+
+<p><i>(c) No one must eat seal and walrus on the same day</i>. Thus a check is
+given to luxuriousness and the Eskimo is self-prevented from falling
+into the fate which overtook Rome.</p>
+
+<p><i>(d) All large animals killed are to be looked upon as common property
+of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them</i>.
+Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of
+the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's
+crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, holding
+all things in common.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo realises that the pleasure of life is in pursuit, not in
+acquisition. Where wants are many, joys are few; the very austerity of
+his life has made a man of him. Laying up few treasures for the elements
+to corrupt, accumulating no property except a little, a very little, of
+the kind designated by Wemmick as &quot;portable,&quot; he, to better and saner
+effect than any man, decreases the denominator of his wants instead of
+increasing the numerator of his havings. Surrounded by the palcocrystic
+ice, the genial current of his soul has not been frozen by that ice. An
+Eskimo family accepts life with a smile and, in the faith of little
+children, goes on its way.</p>
+
+<p>An old Scot once prayed, &quot;O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at
+this time the savin' grace o' <i>continuance</i>.&quot; Only one man has less need
+to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo.
+The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is
+spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are
+never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the
+little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no
+broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out
+dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning
+clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the
+opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the
+Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active
+ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.</p>
+
+<p>On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo
+attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live
+beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is
+happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother
+often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest
+of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and
+spreading over every life it touches.</p>
+
+<p>There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which
+we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his
+generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs
+met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man
+exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all
+carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or
+the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the
+leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his
+price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was
+dropped back into <i>artikki</i> recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy
+child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift.
+It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be
+scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who
+tried to beat down his price as &quot;the <i>cheap</i> engineer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little
+group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs,
+and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while
+the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men
+were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet
+nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our
+researches. The whalers call him &quot;Set-'em-Up,&quot; for his name bears the
+convivial translation, &quot;Give us a drink.&quot; &quot;You going to make better man,
+you get Outside&mdash;make him like Emmie-ray?&quot; As Emmie-ray pursues the
+tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue,
+with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of
+the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating
+Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.</p>
+
+<p>Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people,
+instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him
+for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the
+world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts
+of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be
+a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's
+blood.</p>
+
+<p>Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came
+originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees
+before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their
+predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon
+estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil,
+its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel
+wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has
+another unit&mdash;blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and
+Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your
+apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber
+and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season.
+These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at
+the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the
+white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has
+pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.</p>
+
+<p>At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous
+Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder,
+but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had
+whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the
+whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater
+part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and
+who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty
+Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi
+had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of
+the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry,
+and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into
+the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to
+the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the
+sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the
+dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking
+bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard
+the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on
+Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the
+ocean from another age and a far land, &quot;Thy necessity is greater than
+mine.&quot; Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the
+shores of many seas.</p>
+
+<p>Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of
+geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to
+the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination
+still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of
+rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if
+you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a
+thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was
+served, though he <i>would</i> eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a
+distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the
+gastronomic line he drew. &quot;Aw!&quot; replied he, &quot;No fellow eats owl, you
+know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all
+right. The crow's a kind of <i>rook</i>, you know, and every fellow eats
+<i>rook-pie.&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin
+in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable
+compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this
+people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him
+through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a
+hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the
+light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly
+pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal,
+then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This
+jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of
+food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his
+own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.</p>
+
+<p>Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a
+feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so &quot;bluggy.&quot; You feel
+differently about it at 70&ordm; North. You put prejudice far from you,
+comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese,
+and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with
+mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment.
+Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square
+there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.</p>
+
+<p>We had brought with us on our transport two years' provisions for the
+detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel
+Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated
+cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their
+commissariat. Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip
+bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick
+or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the
+tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old
+body herself. Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg,
+seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of
+desiccated vegetables. I know. I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed,
+&quot;Honesty <i>is</i> the best policy. <i>I've tried baith</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a
+bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back
+between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw
+or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes
+like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. If you have scooped shrimps
+from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a
+parasite.</p>
+
+<p>Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale
+which in life holds the baleen. What is whale-gum like? It tastes like
+chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber
+tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would
+liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a
+southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as
+lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled
+beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and
+gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and
+moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than
+pigs-feet.</p>
+
+<p>Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that
+overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You
+may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the
+musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's
+scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my
+vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw
+the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the
+association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat <i>must</i>
+taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first
+blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is
+that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing
+exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by
+cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much
+better frozen than cooked.</p>
+
+<p>Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much
+esteemed delicacy. During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide
+light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo. The
+blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in
+sealskin bags&mdash;the winter provision of gas-tank, electric
+storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this
+master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not
+centuries, the inventive adaptability of his &quot;civilised&quot; cousins. The
+blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its
+flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an
+inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land
+kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he
+has never seen. He doesn't eat it, but drops it into the cavernous
+recesses of his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of
+English undefiled. &quot;Disgusting,&quot; you say. It's all a matter of latitude.
+Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet
+of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer
+period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of
+an &quot;all-day sucker.&quot; These little babies have the digestion of an
+ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts
+until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at
+once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about
+as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little
+chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it
+with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled
+Fauntleroy on an imported apple. The Eskimo mother has no green apples
+to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon
+the troubled waters. Every day in the year her babies are crammed with
+marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.</p>
+
+<p>To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only
+vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their
+food is eaten. They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the
+marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised
+and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the
+Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen
+hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island
+sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis
+of the <i>Karluk</i>, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132
+ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked
+whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>Who are these people, and whence came they? Each little tribe is a book
+unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are
+confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they
+are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning
+himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation
+chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. &quot;<i>We used to know
+it.&quot; &quot;Our fathers have told us.&quot; &quot;This land-whale with its tail in
+front once lived in the land of the Innuit</i>.&quot; We are now the ones to
+become excited. Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had
+been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest. &quot;Where did
+your fathers see this animal?&quot; we asked. &quot;Here, in this country. In the
+ice his bones were hidden,&quot; said the old man. With this he relapsed into
+the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Mogg, of the whaling schooner <i>Olga</i>, two winters ago pursued
+his whaling operations far to the north and east. Ice-bound at Prince
+Albert Land, he stumbled upon a little settlement of Eskimo. These were
+completely isolated from and had had no communication with white men or
+any community of their own race. Only one of their number had seen a
+white man before&mdash;one old, old woman, the grandmother of the band. The
+captain of the <i>Olga</i> speaks Eskimo fluently, and to him this ancestress
+of the &quot;lost tribe&quot; had an interesting story to tell. She remembered a
+white man who came across the Great Sea from the west in &quot;a big kayak,&quot;
+and she extended her arms to show its size. Her people had given this
+stranger seal-meat and blubber and the &quot;Chief&quot; from the great ship had
+presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the
+seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very
+child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early
+fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage
+and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the
+little girl's questioning wonder,&mdash;&quot;Of what animal is this the skin?&quot;
+Thus does history manifest itself on the other side of the shield &quot;after
+many days.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Through the years, the Eskimo has fared better than the Indian. It
+would seem that the London Directorate of the H.B. Co. expected its
+servants within the Arctic Circle in the days that are past to do almost
+a Creator's part and make all things of nothing. The scanty provisions
+and trading goods from England which filtered in thus far were to be
+given to the Indians in exchange for furs, while the Factor and his
+people were largely expected to &quot;live on the country.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Cannibalism was not unknown. The winter of 1841-2 was an especially hard
+one. On the 18th March, 1841, J. William Spence and Murdock Morrison
+were dispatched with the winter express from Fort Good Hope to Fort
+Macpherson. During the second night out, while they were asleep in the
+encampment, they were knocked on the head by four starving Indian women,
+immediately cut to pieces, and devoured. It is further reported that
+these women previously had killed and eaten their husbands and all their
+children except one little boy. Of the two murdered Scots they ate what
+they could that night and made pemmican of what was over, reporting
+afterward that one was sweet but that the other, tasting of tobacco, was
+not so good.</p>
+
+<p>Father Petitot gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His na&iuml;ve
+words are, &quot;<i>Chie-ke-nayelle,</i> a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning
+fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his
+features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his
+youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine of 1841. He
+killed his young daughter with a hatchet-blow, cooked her like flesh,
+and ate her as a meat-pate. It is said that after one has partaken of
+human flesh, the appetite for it often returns. I hasten to add that
+<i>Chie-ke-nayelle,</i> in spite of the soubriquet <i>mangeur de monde</i> which
+is irrevocably rivetted to his name, has not succumbed to such an
+appetite. He is indeed an excellent Christian. Nevertheless, I would not
+like to camp with <i>Chie-ke-nayelle</i> in time of famine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another starvation story related by the good Father is not quite so
+ghastly. He tells us of one &quot;M. Finlaison of burlesque memory,&quot; who,
+when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of
+his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish
+reel. That was their dinner for the day,&mdash;instead of meat they had
+sound. The narrator adds, &quot;In America they would have lynched the
+too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed and
+applauded the master.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The winter of 1844 also was a season of distress. Referring to this
+year, a beautiful young Indian woman said to the sympathetic priest, &quot;I
+did not wish to eat the arm of my father. I was then a small child of
+eight, and I had not been able to see my old father eaten without crying
+out with loud screams. But my mother called to me in rage, 'If you do
+not eat of it, it is that you condemn us and hate us, then you will
+surely go the same way.' And I ate the flesh of my father, hiding my
+sobs and devouring my tears, for fear of being killed like him; so much
+was I afraid of the eyes of my mother.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another Indian woman confesses, &quot;I left my husband, a hunter at the
+fort, and took with me by the hand my only child, a boy of six, and
+directed my steps towards <i>Ka-cho-Gottine.</i> It was indeed far. I only
+knew the way by hearsay. Once I myself have eaten of my father, but now
+I am a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm
+in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days.
+Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on
+the final resurrection day?&quot; Here Father Petitot interpolates, &quot;Ah! if
+she had only read Dante!&quot; &quot;I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he
+was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart
+for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and
+knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death
+that awaited my only child. But what could I do?&quot; This story has a more
+comfortable ending than the previous one. We breathe relief in learning
+from the priest that the following night the little boy overtook his
+mother. He had walked all day and all night, following her snowshoe
+tracks. They went on together, the third day they snared some hares, and
+their troubles were over.</p>
+
+<p>Father Petitot tells of a Rabbit-skin Indian who found a mummified body
+in the forks of a tree near the Ramparts of the Mackenzie and who came
+running into the Mission, his hair on end with fright, asking excitedly,
+&quot;Did God make that man or was he made by the men of the Hudson's Bay?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another tale of his is of an Indian, <i>Le Petit Cochon</i>, who had a
+tape-worm and thought it was a whale. &quot;Unfortunate!&quot; exclaims the
+Father, &quot;possessed of a whale! That's the difference between <i>Le Petit
+Cochon</i> and Jonah.&quot; Sucking Pig said he would join the Church if the
+priest would rid him of the tape-worm. But we must use the words of
+Petitot himself, for they are too delicious to lose. &quot;Christmas night,
+1865, after midnight mass, <i>Le Petit Cochon,</i> carefully purged, both as
+to body and soul, by an emetic, two purgatives, and a good confession,
+content as a King, received holy baptism. I gave him the name of Noel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In starvation times, guests were not appreciated. Robert Campbell of the
+H.B. Company, writing from Fort Halkett in 1840, says, &quot;God grant that
+the time of privation may soon end, and that I may not see a soul from
+below till the snow disappears.&quot; These days of the early forties when
+England was engaged with the Chartist risings at home and her Chinese
+wars abroad, were surely parlous times up on this edge of empire. The
+Fort Simpson journals of February 4, 1843, record, &quot;The <i>Cannibal</i>, with
+young <i>Noir</i>, and others of the party of <i>Laman</i>, arrived this evening
+in the last stage of existence, being compelled by starvation to eat all
+their furs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Still these sonsy Scots kept a good heart and were able to jest at their
+misfortunes with the grim humour that belongs to their race. Neither
+empty larder nor other misfortune disheartened them. The recurrence of
+New Year's Day and the Feast of St. Andrew were made ever occasions for
+rejoicing. Up on the Pelly Forks under date of November 30th, 1848, the
+record reads, &quot;Though far from our native land and countrymen, let us
+pass St. Andrew's Day in social glee. So fill your glasses, my lads, and
+pass the bottle round.&quot; Three years later, on the same anniversary, the
+lines are, &quot;Very cold for St. Andrew's, and no haggis for dinner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And as January Ist ushers in the year 1845, the Factor at Fort
+Macpherson bursts into verse:</p>
+
+&quot;This day, Time winds th' exhausted chain<br>
+To run the twelvemonths' length again.<br>
+I see the old bald-pated fellow<br>
+With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,<br>
+Adjust the unimpaired machine<br>
+To wheel the equal, dull routine.<br>
+
+<p>Underneath the record a postscript appears, in another hand:</p>
+
+&quot;Oh let us love our occupations,<br>
+Bless the Co. and their relations,<br>
+Be content with our poor rations,<br>
+And always know our proper stations.<br>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XVI"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<h3>THE TALE OF A WHALE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>&quot;In the North Sea lived a whale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What is a whale? Well, although the whalers dub it so, it is not a fish,
+but is a true mammal, the last of the mammoth creatures that trod the
+earth and floundered the seas of a past age. The whale is the biggest,
+the meekest, and the most interesting of living animals. As we go north,
+we readjust all our ideas of distance and immensity. Rivers are longer,
+lakes more majestic, and whales bigger than we have ever dreamed.
+Examining a stranded whale at Herschel, we see the flippers to be really
+hands with four fingers and a thumb enveloped in a sheath, and
+rudimentary hind-legs are discovered under the tough skin. Without
+doubt, the ancestors of the whale were land mammals which became adapted
+to a littoral life, and in splashing round the shore acquired the habit
+of swimming. Subsequently carried out to sea, they became under the new
+environment the structure as we see it.</p>
+
+<p>Off the delta of the Mackenzie, the Circumpolar of Arctic Bowhead whale
+<i>(Balaena mysticetus</i>) is making his last stand. Unless a close season
+is enforced, this cetacean carrying round his ten thousand dollar
+mouthful of baleen will soon fold his fluked fins like the Arab and
+swing that huge body of his into line with the Great Auk, the
+Sea-Otter, the Plains Buffalo, and all the melancholy procession of
+Canadian Has-Beens.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0296"></a>
+<img src="images/img0296.jpg" width="367" height="265" alt="We Tell the Tale of a Whale" title="">
+<BR><B>We Tell the Tale of a Whale</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Whales divide themselves into two great classes: those furnished with
+teeth (the <i>Denticete</i>) and those in which the place of teeth is
+supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or &quot;whalebone&quot; of
+commerce (the <i>Mysticete</i> or <i>Balaenidae</i>). The members of the Baleen
+Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the
+Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality
+of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the &quot;Arctic
+Whale,&quot; &quot;Polar Whale,&quot; &quot;Greenland Whale,&quot; &quot;Bowhead,&quot; &quot;Right Whale,&quot; or
+&quot;Icebreaker.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to
+one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of
+exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons.
+Comparisons are illuminating. The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field
+Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in
+longitudinal measurement. The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen
+to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil
+each,&mdash;lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy! The eyes placed
+in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange. The
+tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of
+which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he
+feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil. The
+aorta is as big as a man's waist and, at each pulsation of the heart,
+spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood. The heart itself is more
+than a yard in transverse diameter. The toothed whales carry the teeth
+in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti
+or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca'ing Whale, the White
+Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as
+Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins. Only the toothed whale eats fish;
+the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life,
+called &quot;brit&quot; by the whalers. The Bowhead that we have come up to the
+Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria. He couldn't eat a herring
+if by that one act he might attain immortality.</p>
+
+<p>Whale errors die hard. Artists persistently depict the big animals as
+spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales
+breathe out air only from their lungs. They come to the surface for
+that purpose, the &quot;blowing&quot; being quite analogous to the breathing of
+land mammals. Noticing the condensation of a whale's breath up here in
+the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular
+blunder. Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale)
+bulls. &quot;At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea.&quot;
+Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything
+but common or seaside air.</p>
+
+<p>The Bowhead is hunted for his &quot;whalebone&quot;; the Cachalot or true Sperm,
+the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and
+spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>It is customary to call whales &quot;fierce,&quot; &quot;savage,&quot; &quot;murderous,&quot; but this
+is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate. Every family,
+however, has its black sheep. The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of
+sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales. One Killer taken
+up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals,
+and it choked to death on the fifteenth. Banded in Molly Maguire groups,
+the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in
+swimming off the Pribilofs. We have seen them, a pack of hungry
+sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale! A number of these brigands of the
+Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened
+mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead's tongue is
+eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles. At the approach of the Killer
+even sea-lions seek the shore. And the Alaska Indian who would pose as
+Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the
+crest of his totem.</p>
+
+<p>The American is more aggressive&mdash;shall we say progressive?&mdash;than the
+Canadian. The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his
+summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada. Each of these
+floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen
+thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been
+content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into
+their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0299"></a>
+<img src="images/img0299.jpg" width="360" height="267" alt="Two Little Ones at Herschel Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Two Little Ones at Herschel Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Is there much money in whales to-day? Are not oil and whalebone drugs in
+the market? Let us see. Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island
+anchorage. Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out
+from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter
+waiting-quarters. One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of
+outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit.
+In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer <i>Orca</i>, captured
+twenty-eight whales. The <i>Jeanette</i> in 1905 got ten whales and a calf,
+the <i>Karluk</i> got seven whales, the <i>Alexander</i> eight, the <i>Bowhead</i>
+seven. The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them
+thirty-three whales and one calf. At fifteen thousand dollars each (San
+Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very
+nearly half a million. Two years later the <i>Narwhal</i> took out fifteen
+whales, the <i>Jeanette</i> and <i>Bowhead</i> each four. Although the average
+bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far
+beyond that figure. A whale caught by Capt. Simmons of the ship <i>John M.
+Winthrop</i> carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its
+head,&mdash;$16,750! One of these at a time would be good fishing.</p>
+
+<p>The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American
+steam-whaler <i>Grampus</i>, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one
+whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go
+&quot;to the east'ard of P'int Barrow&quot; for this big whale; since that date
+the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five
+whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the &quot;bone&quot; (baleen) at
+two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a
+pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half
+millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the
+past twenty years, by the back-door route.</p>
+
+<p>Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert
+evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the <i>Narwhal</i>, in 1907
+lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen
+whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous,
+but that they are on the move east and north.</p>
+
+<p>The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San
+Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go
+into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible
+next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can
+stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its
+catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible;
+dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over
+again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks,
+and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a
+lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one
+twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one
+forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth,
+fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth.
+Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It
+looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco
+waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B.
+overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the
+vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come
+across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land
+or marine) induces in most of us.</p>
+
+<p>A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific
+route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a
+half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the
+whaling-fleet. &quot;The farther north the finer fur&quot; is a recognised law.
+The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns,
+ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the
+choicest furs this continent produces.</p>
+
+<p>The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this
+international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British
+Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver
+Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur
+bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would
+think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the &quot;feel&quot; of
+Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta
+claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs,
+feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60&deg; and the uttermost edge of
+things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be
+hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the
+rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by
+interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of
+these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.</p>
+
+<p>Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by
+deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its
+biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern
+Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon
+the shingle. &quot;As far as we go!&quot; This is essentially the Island of
+Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's
+last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings.
+We are in latitude 69-1/2&deg; N. and just about 139&deg; west of Greenwich; we
+are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in
+South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never
+dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above
+sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel
+at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is
+twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For
+six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice
+hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose
+from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for
+twenty years to make their home!</p>
+
+<p>The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one
+corner,&mdash;who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from
+Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste
+hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is
+interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily
+lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his
+boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the
+whaler picked up and attached to his m&eacute;nage the Eskimo from the mainland
+in little bunches <i>en famille</i>. Ensuing connubial complications brought
+the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from
+each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American
+citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax
+Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty
+whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.</p>
+
+<p>Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can
+winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a
+feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and
+automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers'
+quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest
+Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear
+panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.</p>
+
+<p>North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy
+arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief
+smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly
+desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that
+they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above
+ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between
+this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is
+nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid
+disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of
+America &quot;the ocean graveyard&quot; and &quot;the step-mother to ships.&quot; There have
+been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the <i>Penelope</i> off
+Shingle Point, the <i>Bonanza</i> off King Point, the <i>Triton</i> on the shores
+of Herschel itself, the <i>Alexander</i> near Horton River, a little
+missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship <i>The Duchess of
+Bedford</i>, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in
+Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the
+ocean of her quest.</p>
+
+<p>The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for
+miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with
+drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,&mdash;a boon more prized by
+them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps
+and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where
+whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.</p>
+
+<p>In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,&mdash;saxifrages, white anemones
+through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox
+dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight
+Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It
+sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the
+evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints
+and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish,
+shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature
+whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the
+short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds
+nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming,
+the &quot;cockshut light&quot; of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the
+morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the
+day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into
+activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are
+cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter
+deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the
+year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring &quot;leads&quot;
+in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend
+out in the track of the big Bowhead.</p>
+
+<p>Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for
+&quot;Outside&quot; got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel
+all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy
+threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are &quot;mounted&quot; in
+imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride
+here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got
+to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One
+able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a
+medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the
+request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the
+island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was
+signed &quot;T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.,&quot; and, after making it, the A.B., M.D.
+saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury
+spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes
+&quot;you never can tell.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size:
+they are &quot;suckers&quot; under a year, &quot;short-heads&quot; as long as they are
+suckled, &quot;stunts&quot; at two years, &quot;skull-fish&quot; with baleen less than six
+feet long, and &quot;size-fish&quot; at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A
+whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds
+enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the
+greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand
+years! A &quot;sucker&quot; who happened to be disporting round the British Isles
+when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring
+with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an
+Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps.
+Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a
+thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of
+Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual
+migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and
+salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads
+trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey
+in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept
+them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year
+by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in
+successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family
+of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm,
+excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change
+in the season of their amours.</p>
+
+<p>A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended
+motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds
+beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface
+horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same,
+a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale
+of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an
+hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five.
+Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that
+a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains
+23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead
+feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. He quaintly elucidates
+this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons
+would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in
+the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive
+and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.</p>
+
+<p>The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and &quot;long years
+afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke.&quot; Those who stick
+harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating
+rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in
+blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and
+a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage
+connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir
+John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the &quot;North
+Sea&quot; lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of
+having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of
+Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his
+inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked <i>Ansell Gibbs</i>.
+The <i>Ansell Gibbs</i> was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield
+Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871. Imagination sees opportunity in
+this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept
+apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern
+Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of
+utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's
+enamoured dolphin?</p>
+
+<p>Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday,
+while officers from three ships were &quot;gamming&quot; over their afternoon
+walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, &quot;I hear a Bowhead!&quot; There was
+much chaffing about &quot;Kelly's band,&quot; but Kelly weighed anchor and went to
+find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the
+bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made
+by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to
+give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice.
+Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the
+water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths.
+Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck,
+at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is &quot;gallied&quot; or
+stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but
+there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From
+the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out &quot;hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo&quot; of the
+hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that
+&quot;beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before
+slipping back to 'F' again.&quot; He assures us that, &quot;with the Humpback the
+tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a
+violin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year
+men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a
+mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they
+strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to
+the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He
+carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers
+and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the
+ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm,
+and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He
+had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0310"></a>
+<img src="images/img0310.jpg" width="364" height="221" alt="Breeding Grounds of the Seals" title="">
+<BR><B>Breeding Grounds of the Seals</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has
+entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have
+shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out
+strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a
+cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on
+Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention
+of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance
+which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which
+clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the
+harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the
+&quot;fish&quot; is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound,
+and hot air from the engine pumped into the &quot;proposition&quot; keeps it
+afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales
+in one day,&mdash;Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo say, &quot;There is no part of a seal that is not good,&quot; and the
+same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The
+viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear
+in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From
+the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields
+of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers
+for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn
+can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is
+absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the
+Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more
+than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders
+find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the
+Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward
+and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now,
+enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow
+fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she
+must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like
+it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will
+bear the legend, &quot;Whale cream soda&quot; and &quot;Best Whale Milkshake.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the
+whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of
+ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.</p>
+
+<p>What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and
+flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all
+the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made
+from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone
+horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a
+dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last
+generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never &quot;broke its mighty heart&quot;
+in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible
+steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new
+avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers
+of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine
+filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the
+manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and
+elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this
+writing advertises:</p>
+
+WHALEBONE TEETH $5<br>
+A GREAT DISCOVERY<br>
+THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST<br>
+AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN<br>
+DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH<br>
+Guaranteed ten years<br>
+YOU BITE CORN OFF THE COB<br>
+
+<p>Spermaceti, the solid waxy body carried round in the Cachalot's head in
+solution, is a valuable whale-product. Bland and demulcent, spermaceti
+is employed as an ingredient in ointments, cosmetics, and cerates.
+Spermaceti candles of definite size form the measure of electric light,
+giving rise to the phrase &quot;of so many candle-power.&quot; Present-day
+spermaceti is both a saving and a destructive agent. Large quantities of
+it are used in Europe in the manufacture of ecclesiastical candles, and
+part of the same consignment may help to make self-lubricating
+cartridges.</p>
+
+<p>Most valuable of all whale-products, the costliest commodity on this
+earth ounce for ounce with the one exception of radium, is ambergris. As
+amber was once considered &quot;the frozen tears of seagulls,&quot; so ambergris
+for ages puzzled the ancients. Some called it &quot;the solidified foam of
+the sea,&quot; with others it was a &quot;fungoidal growth of the ocean analogous
+to that on trees.&quot; When people in the old days came across anything
+exceedingly costly they wanted to eat it, on the same principle which
+makes the baby put each new gift into his mouth. So we have historic
+record of pearl soup a la Cleopatra, and dishes dashed with ambergris.
+Milton sings of,&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;Beasts of chase, or fowl of game,<br>
+In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,<br>
+Grisamber-steamed.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>What is this choice tidbit? It is a morbid secretion of the intestines
+of the sick Sperm-whale, and sells for from thirty to forty dollars an
+ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a
+dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or
+cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island
+beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that
+solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy
+odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a
+floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In
+pharmacy, it is regarded as a cardiac and anti-spasmodic and as a
+specific against the rabies. For years it has been used in sacerdotal
+rites of the church; and suitors of old times sought with it to charm
+their mistresses. The dying sperm, spouting up the ghost, offers of his
+very vitals to aid the lover and serve the church.</p>
+
+<p>Fascinating are the finds of ambergris. The barque <i>Sea-Fox</i> of New
+Bedford, in 1866, off the coast of Arabia, took a one hundred and
+fifty-six pound mass of ambergris, which was sold to the Arabs of
+Zanzibar for ten thousand dollars in gold. The <i>Adeline Gibbs</i>, in the
+same year, took one hundred and thirty-two pounds from a bull-sperm
+south of St. Helena, and sold the hunk for twenty-three thousand
+dollars. Three winters ago an Arctic whaling-crew put into Seattle, and
+there leaked out the interesting story of how, not recognising the
+priceless unguent, they had greased their oars, masts, and knee-boots
+with &quot;a big lump of ambergrease.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In modern whaling not an ounce of the carcase is cast as rubbish to the
+void. The intestines make a soft kid which takes any dye and is largely
+used for artistic leather-work. The size of these immense strips makes
+possible splendid belts for machinery with a minimum of joinings. The
+chemically-macerated bones are turned into an &quot;indestructible&quot;
+crockery-ware which is far more enduring than anything made of
+vegetable-fibre. The Beluga gives us the best shoe-strings in the world.
+You can lace your shoes with a Beluga lace for two years and be sure it
+will not break the morning you are in an especial hurry to catch an
+inter-Reuben train.</p>
+
+<p>An interest attaches to living whales which outweighs the fascination
+with which we study their dead parts. Each species of the whale
+propagates with one of its own species only. The fidelity of whales to
+each other exceeds the constancy of birds. The whale mother gives birth
+to one calf, and in extremely rare cases two calves, producing every
+second year, the young being born between the end of March and the
+beginning of May. When the mother suckles her young she throws herself
+on one side on the surface of the sea and the calf regularly feeds at
+the breast (like a young Eskimo) for nearly two years. During this time
+the baby is extremely fat and the mother correspondingly emaciated.
+Perhaps nothing in nature is more touching than the devotion of a female
+whale to its wounded young. Whalers harpoon the babe at the breast so
+that they may afterwards secure the dam. In this case, the mother joins
+the wounded young under the surface of the water, comes up with it when
+it rises to breathe, encourages it to swim off, assists its flight by
+taking it under her fin, and seldom deserts it while life remains.</p>
+
+<p>Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the
+thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities
+in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great
+Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to
+restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which
+has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a
+thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant
+generations of man grow another one to take its place.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XVII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<h3>SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,<br>
+That blaze in the velvet blue.<br>
+They're God's own guides on the Long Trail&mdash;<br>
+The trail that is always new.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+<i>Kipling</i>.<br>
+
+<p>A tax on tea caused the revolt of the thirteen Colonies, a taunting load
+of tennis-balls lost France to the Dauphin. Eighty years ago on this
+Arctic edge, white beads, or the lack of them, lost a lucrative
+fur-trade, alienated the Loucheux and caused the death of whites.
+&quot;Trifles make the sum of human things.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The old records tell the story. John Bell from Fort Good Hope, under
+date of August 14th, 1827, writes to the Factor at Fort Simpson:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The beads sent in for the Loucheux trade are not sufficiently large to
+please them. I request you will endeavour to send in the largest size
+for the trade of the ensuing year. A specimen of the kind wanted I send
+enclosed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Factor at Fort Simpson, under date of November 22nd of the same
+year, writes to the Governor and Chief Factors at Montreal:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I now forward a specimen of the common white beads wanted for the trade
+with the Loucheux Indians. It is their request and I hope it will be
+attended to. I would not venture to make the demand, were it not from
+conviction that without this favourite article these Indians look with
+indifference on the best of our goods. No other ornamental article is
+ever asked for or wanted by these natives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The same official on March 15th, 1828, pleads with Montreal:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The white beads demanded for the Loucheux trade I hope will be sent,
+and of the size according to sample enclosed. May I use the freedom of
+representing the importance of getting this article to the liking of the
+Indians, to come up by the Montreal canoes and be ready for outfit 1829?
+Three kegs will contain the quantity required, 200 to 250 pounds.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again on the 29th of November, 1829, he writes Montreal:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The White Beads asked for the trade with the Loucheux are not according
+to the order sent, 15 pounds only of the quantity received (200 pounds)
+are of the proper size, the remainder being the same as those in outfit
+1825 so much complained of. They will not be satisfactory to the
+Indians. We request you will be pleased to make a strong representation
+to their Honours at Home that this article be sent according to order
+and sample. We now conceive to say anything further would be tiresome.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Fort Simpson Factor on March 19th, 1830, reports to Montreal:</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>&quot;The goods came. The white beads was too small and not according to
+order or sample asked for. The Indians would not take them and left the
+Fort dissatisfied.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Trader at Fort Good Hope augments the story by recording that the
+Indians would be better pleased in trade with two small kegs of the
+special beads they wanted than with half a ton of any other trade goods
+which London could manufacture and send out. The sequel of the story is
+that, disappointed time and again in not getting their favourite beads,
+the Loucheux Indians failed to bring in the autumn supply of meat to
+Fort Good Hope and in consequence, before the snows of the winter of
+1831 had melted, many of the white men attached to that post died of
+starvation.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0319"></a>
+<img src="images/img0319.jpg" width="369" height="225" alt="The Keele Party on the Gravel River" title="">
+<BR><B>The Keele Party on the Gravel River</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We had gone North with the birds in spring and now, as we turn our faces
+homeward, the first migrants with strong wing are beginning their
+southward flight. Our travel is against current now, for we make slower
+time than we did coming in and consequently see more of the passing
+shore-line. The last specimens we gather within the Arctic Circle are
+the blue blossoms of the flax. In them we see the earnest of many a
+cultivated farm of the future. The days are getting perceptibly shorter
+and one by one the old familiar constellations come back in the
+heavens. We find it a relief to have once more a twilight and a
+succeeding period of dusk. Yet are we loath to leave this fascinating
+North with its sure future, its quaint to-days, and all the glamour of
+its rich past.</p>
+
+<p>We had just passed Fort Norman when the sharp eyes of an Indian
+deck-hand saw three figures on the beach ahead. Pulling in at the point
+where the Gravel River joins the Mackenzie, we find a regular Robinson
+Crusoe group,&mdash;Mr. J. Keele, of the Dominion Government Survey, and his
+two associates. Going in on the Yukon side, Mr. Keele's task has been to
+cross the Divide between the Yukon and the Mackenzie, mapping the rocks.
+The only white man they had seen in sixteen months was a French priest
+who had passed yesterday, and whose knowledge of current events in
+Canada and Europe was scanty. They were glad to see us. A moose-skin
+boat showed how they had run the rough Gravel; the meat of two moose
+smoked over the camp-fire; their dogs were fat. These are men who know
+the woods&mdash;no hard-luck story here. It needs only Friday's funny fat
+umbrella to complete the picture, with the goat scampering in the middle
+distance.</p>
+
+<p>Coming on board, the surveyors are greedy for newspapers, and we in
+return learn somewhat of that great slice of land which they are the
+first to traverse. The Gravel River is two hundred and fifty-five miles
+long, with &quot;white water&quot; all the way. The force of the current may be
+appreciated from the fact that it is forty-four hundred feet above the
+sea-level at the Height-of-Land, and only four hundred feet here where
+it enters the Mackenzie. All along the banks of the Gravel are moose,
+mountain sheep, and caribou. The winter cabin of the party was built on
+the Ross River and there, during the past winter, they experienced a
+temperature of 54&deg; below. A party of this kind must be to a large extent
+self-supporting, as it would be impossible to carry from the outside
+food for such a long sojourn. Speaking with Mr. Keele, one is forcibly
+struck with the fact that what the technical schools teach their
+students forms but a small part of the equipment of the man who would do
+field work in Northern Canada&mdash;packing, tracking, hunting, and breaking
+trail,&mdash;each man must do his share of these.</p>
+
+<p>The Keele party on the great watershed, as they travelled east, crossed
+two families of Mackenzie River Indians going westward to hunt, on the
+west side of the ridge, the marten and the beaver. It was 32&deg; below, and
+cold. The whole families were on the march, a little baby tucked in the
+curve of the sled, and tottering on foot an old, old woman, bent and
+wrinkled and scarcely able to move. As the Indians were on their return
+journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again.
+But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow
+falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in
+the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many
+journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering
+capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of
+hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that
+luxurious garment. In order that one might be warmly clad, many have
+gone cold, more than one sad, tired, old head has lain down for the last
+time by the lonely camp-fire.</p>
+
+<p>Sad is the lot of the Indian woman of the North. Fated always to play a
+secondary part in the family drama, it is hard to see what of pleasure
+life holds for her. The birth of a girl baby is not attended with joy or
+thankfulness. From the beginning the little one is pushed into the
+background. The boy babies, even the dogs, have the choicer bed at
+night, and to them are given the best pieces of the meat. The little
+girl is made to feel that she has come into a world that has no welcome
+for her and her whole life seems to be an apology. You read it in the
+face of every Indian girl or woman you meet, from the shrinking pathetic
+little figure in the camp to the bent old crone, whose upturned face
+with its sadly acceptive look gives you the flicker of a smile.</p>
+
+<p>Storm-stayed at Wrigley Harbour at the entrance to Great Slave Lake, we
+have some splendid fishing,&mdash;jackfish, whitefish, loche, inconnu, &quot;and
+here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling.&quot; Within an
+hour I get fifteen graylings to my own rod. Collectively they weigh just
+a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the
+fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish.
+Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and
+the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had &quot;The Complete Angler&quot;
+for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the
+catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the
+grayling is eating fit only for &quot;anglers and other honest men.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The traverse of Great Slave Lake in the teeth of a wind is not without
+its interest, for the new steamer has yet to be tried in the waters of
+what practically amounts to an open sea. She behaves well, and brings
+us dry-shod into Fort Rae.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0323"></a>
+<img src="images/img0323.jpg" width="339" height="257" alt="The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake" title="">
+<BR><B>The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We are the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae, and we
+afford as much interest to the Indians as they afford us. Lone Fort Rae,
+clinging to the Northern Arm of Great Slave Lake, was noted in the past
+as a &quot;meat-post.&quot; It supplied the Mackenzie District with dried
+caribou-meat, and formed an outfitting point for the few big game
+hunters who trended east from here into the Barren Grounds seeking the
+musk-ox. Its foundation dates back to some time before the year 1820. We
+cross a bridge of clever Indian construction and sit for a while to muse
+on a flat boulder of primal rock. This stands as bell-tower to a quaint
+bell cast in Rome and bears an inscription to some dead and gone Pope.
+The missionary priest over half a century ago paddled in here bringing
+the Gospel to the Dog-Ribs.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0324"></a>
+<img src="images/img0324.jpg" width="272" height="284" alt="The Bell at Fort Rae Mission" title="">
+<BR><B>The Bell at Fort Rae Mission</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The musk-ox <i>(Ovibos moschatus)</i> is a gregarious animal which would
+appear to be a Creator's after-thought,&mdash;something between an ox and a
+sheep. The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the
+appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd. The
+present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and
+between the meridians of 86&deg; and 125&deg;. As it is the most inaccessible
+game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being
+hunted to extinction. Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed
+like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up
+wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees
+fit. Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle
+and horns outside, to meet a common danger. The robe of the musk-ox is a
+rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being
+very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base. According to
+the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April. The
+mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a
+sheltered place for the cradle. Three days after its post-natal burial
+it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf's
+burden.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0325"></a>
+<img src="images/img0325.jpg" width="373" height="289" alt="The Musk-ox" title="">
+<BR><B>The Musk-ox</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to
+Fort Resolution. Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the
+topics of conversation. Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk,
+and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and
+deposited at the front door of the H.B. Co. Factor there&mdash;a cow but no
+cow-food. All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North. She was
+fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her
+kind. One of Mr. Keele's men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which
+ate bacon-rinds with a relish. The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb
+trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become
+burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish
+enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead. A dog in
+the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the
+asphodel meadows. I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner
+probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to
+work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.</p>
+
+<p>From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories
+from the outgoing traders. We learn that when the church was still
+young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the
+wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were
+to be considered fish, or flesh. Rome evidently was not &quot;long&quot; on North
+American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever
+by declaring said tails &quot;fish&quot; and not flesh. This is why you can
+discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and
+commit no sin.</p>
+
+<p>The stories give us some idea of the difference between winter and
+summer travel across Great Slave Lake. Captain Mills tells of two Indian
+women, one old enough to have a daughter of forty, who drove a dogsled
+one hundred and forty-eight miles from Providence to Rae, in four days.
+The older one walked ahead of the dogs and made the trail while the
+other drove. Coming back, it took them five days, and the old woman
+explained, &quot;We didn't make such good time, as we had a man with us.&quot; It
+was her son-in-law whom she brought back with her.</p>
+
+<p>A striking picture is given us of a woman who walked alone from Hay
+River to Province on snowshoes, taking thirteen days to do it. She had
+no matches, and carried her fire with her, keeping it alight in a little
+copper kettle. This, of course, necessitated her guarding it very
+closely and stopping to renew the fire from time to time; for if the
+burning wood was once permitted to die down, her life in that intense
+cold would go out with it.</p>
+
+<p>How cold does it get? Mr. Campbell Young, of our little group, says that
+he has been out when a thermometer&mdash;one obtained from the U.S.
+Meteorological Station&mdash;registered seventy-six degrees below zero, and
+has worked in weather like that. &quot;I've been trapping in that
+temperature, when of course the weather was absolutely still, and I tell
+you I'd rather be out in seventy-six below than to cross Smith Portage
+with the mosquitoes.&quot; Mr. Christie, of the Keele Survey Party, says,
+&quot;Last winter I had to go out and get a moose for the camp, and on the
+second day I met the Mounted Police boys who told me it had been
+seventy-five below. I had started out when it was quite mild, only
+forty-five below. You know when it is below fifty, for then your breath
+begins to crackle, and that's a sure sign.&quot; Mr. John Gaudet says, &quot;I
+was driving last winter on Lesser Slave Lake when it was sixty-four
+below. Yes, it was quite cold.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At Resolution we see once more our old friend Dr. Sussex, happy and
+busied among his Indians. It is just hail and farewell. The little &quot;red
+lemonade&quot; kiddies are the first to greet us as we come into Fort Smith,
+and here everybody goes visiting. Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald tells us
+that her grandfather had two wives, and was the father of twenty-two
+children. She says she and her brother are glad of this, as it gives
+them so many friends in all parts of the country; and we notice that at
+every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit&mdash;a cousin
+here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling
+cards and little friendly gifts up here is a &quot;musky-moot&quot;; the more
+formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may
+stay a day or two, is a &quot;<i>skin-ichi-mun.&quot;</i> Visiting a little on our own
+account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the
+gaudy calendars of the advertiser have not yet made their way. Each man,
+foolish enough here to want a calendar, marks out his own on pencilled
+paper. We come across an H.B. Journal of the vintage of 1826 where the
+reckless scribe introduces two Thursdays into one week, acknowledging
+his error in a footnote with the remark, &quot;It is not likely that the eye
+of man will ever read this record.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At Fort Smith we leave the steamer <i>Mackenzie River</i> to take passage in
+the <i>Grahame</i> from Smith's Landing, and once more essay the Mosquito
+Portage. We find our winged friends in fine fettle. Their eyes are not
+dimmed, their strength not abated. For miles we notice blackened and
+dead stems of young spruce, cut off as if by machinery, at a uniform
+height of two and a half feet from the ground. The top of the dead stem
+shows the depth of the snow when the rabbits, running along the surface,
+had nibbled off and eaten the growing spruce. A fur-trader at our side
+says, &quot;While at Fort Macpherson I noticed that the ice always melted in
+the spring in Peel's River before it did in the Mackenzie. It would
+break up in the Peel about the Queen's Birthday and begin to go out.
+Reaching the Mackenzie, it came up against a solid mass of unbroken ice
+which sent it back to flood the whole country. It was a curious
+experience to paddle round in a canoe for miles and miles where one had
+set rabbit snares but a few weeks before. The poor rabbits themselves
+were at a loss, for no kind monition apprised them of the coming flood.
+We could see whole colonies of them,&mdash;each a shipwrecked sailor on his
+own little raft of bark, buffeted here and there with the stream and
+peering out across the swollen waters, like Noah's dove, seeking some
+green thing.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+<h3>TO MCMURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Think o' the stories round the camp, the yarns along the track&mdash;<br>
+O' Lesser Slave an' Herschel's Isle an' Flynn at Fond du Lac;<br>
+Of fur an' gun, an' ranch an' run, an' moose and caribou,<br>
+An' bull-dogs eatin' us to death! Good-bye&mdash;good luck to you!&quot;<br>
+<br>
+
+<p>Our arrival at Chipewyan is opportune. Honorine Daniels, unceremoniously
+known as 'Norine among her friends (and they are legion), is about to
+join hand and fortune with one of the Mercredi boys. 'Norine owns a
+cottage in her own right, and to-night under her roof-tree there is to
+be a wedding-dance. We wait round, hungering for an invitation, finally
+to be told largely, &quot;You don't need no invitation, everybody goes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We go with the crowd. The room is full to overflowing. Babies are
+deposited on the benches along the wall, dogs look in at the window. The
+air is heavy with mosquitoes and tobacco-smoke. But joy reigns. Nobody
+is too old or too obese to dance. Old Mr. Loutit and lame Jimmy Flett
+each secures a sonsy partner. There are three fiddlers, and these
+relieve each other in turn, for fiddling, beating time with your
+moccasin on the earthen floor, and &quot;calling out&quot; is hard work for one
+man. There are but two kinds of dances,&mdash;the Red River jig, and a square
+dance which probably had for honourable ancestors the lancers on the
+father's side and a quadrille on the mother's.</p>
+
+<p>Endurance is a sign of merit in the Red River jig. A man or woman steps
+into the limelight and commences to jig, a dark form in moccasins slips
+up in front of the dancer, and one jigs the other down, amid plaudits
+for the survivor and jeers for the quitter.</p>
+
+<p>It is the square dance that interests us, our attention being divided
+between watching the deft forms in the half light and listening to the
+caller-off. <i>Louie-the-Moose</i> first officiates. His eyes look dreamy but
+there is a general's stern tone of command in his words:</p>
+
+&quot;Ladeez, join de lily-white han's,<br>
+Gents, your black-and-tan!<br>
+Ladeez, bow! Gents, bow-wow!<br>
+Swing 'em as hard's ye can.<br>
+<br>
+&quot;Swing your corner Lady,<br>
+Then the one you love!<br>
+Then your corner Lady,<br>
+Then your Turtle Dove!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Over and over again Louie reiterates his injunction, to the
+accompaniment of pattering moccasins and a humming chorus from door and
+windows. There are phrases of variation, too. We catch the words,
+&quot;<i>Address your pardner,&quot; &quot;Adaman left,&quot; &quot;Show your steps,&quot; &quot;Gents walk
+round, and all run away to the west</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then Michel Manvil takes hold of the situation. He stands up to it, and
+we hear</p>
+
+&quot;Ladies round ladies, and gents all so!<br>
+Ladies round gents, and gents don't go!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Why should they, we wonder!</p>
+
+<p>The third fiddler is a full-blooded Chipewyan. In some dancing academy
+in the woods he has learnt a &quot;call-off&quot; all his own, and proud indeed is
+he of his stunt. We manage to copy it down in its entirety, fighting
+mosquitoes the while and dodging out into the open now and again for a
+little air.</p>
+
+&quot;'Slute your ladies! All together!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ladies opposite, the same&mdash;</span><br>
+Hit the lumber with yer leathers,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Balance all, and swing yer dame!</span><br>
+Bunch the moose-cows in the middle!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Circle, stags, and do-si-do&mdash;</span><br>
+Pay attention to the fiddle!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swing her round, an' off you go!</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;First four forward! Back to places!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Second foller&mdash;shuffle back!</span><br>
+Now you've got it down to cases&mdash;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swing 'em till their back-teeth crack!</span><br>
+Gents, all right, a heel and toeing!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swing 'em, kiss 'em if you kin&mdash;</span><br>
+On to next, and keep a-goin'<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Till you hit your pards ag'in!</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;Gents to centre; ladies round 'em,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Form a basket; balance all!</span><br>
+Whirl yer gals to where you found 'em!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Promenade around the hall!</span><br>
+Balance to yer pards and trot 'em<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Round the circle, double quick!</span><br>
+Grab and kiss 'em while you've got 'em&mdash;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hold 'em to it; they won't kick!&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>The perspiring musician pushes his instrument into the hands of <i>Running
+Antelope</i> and turns to us with, &quot;There's another verse, but I don't
+always give it.&quot; We ask him to repeat it for us, but he seems a little
+at a loss. &quot;It's hard to call it out without the fiddle. When yer
+playin' you just spit it out&mdash;the words come to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is August 6th at Chipewyan, and once again we are at the parting of
+the ways. Every one we know is heading for &quot;Outside&quot; by way of the
+steamer <i>Grahame</i> and the Athabasca scows. Our own ambition is to make a
+traverse of the great Peace River Country before the snows. We have had
+no mail since last May, and the temptation to follow the multitude as
+far as McMurray in the hope of finding letters there is too strong to be
+resisted. We will then return and try to perfect arrangements for the
+Peace.</p>
+
+<p>The outgoers are a cosmopolitan and happy &quot;bunch,&quot;&mdash;Major Jarvis,
+R.N.W.M.P., fur-traders galore, three Grey Nuns and a priest, Mr. Wyllie
+and his family bound for the Orkney Islands, fifty-four souls in all,
+without counting the miscellaneous and interesting fraternity down on
+the lower deck among the fur-bundles.</p>
+
+<p>It is essentially a <i>voyage de luxe</i>. When Mr. Keele imagines a place is
+good, the steamer stops and we all gather fossils. When lame James, the
+steward, our erstwhile jig-expert, is about to serve coffee, he pokes
+his head over the side and orders the engines stopped that we may drink
+the beverage without spillage. The beardless prospector buys tinned
+peaches from the commissariat, opens them with a jack-knife and passes
+them round the deck with impartiality and a
+to-hell-with-the-man-that-works smile. Who would envy kings?</p>
+
+<p>We arrive at McMurray in time for treaty-payment. Tethered horses at the
+tepee-poles, store-dolls for the babies, and unmistakable &quot;Outside&quot;
+millinery prove the prosperity of these Crees, and proves also their
+proximity to Edmonton. One little group looks tattered, out-at-heel,
+and hungry,&mdash;a Cree widow presenting her four offspring that they may
+receive the annual payment. The officials within the treaty tent declare
+the youngest baby an illegitimate child and will pay it no treaty,&mdash;it
+&quot;has no name.&quot; I catch the anxious look in the mother's eye. Five
+dollars goes a long way when baby bodies have to be fed and clothed. The
+situation is crucial. Without a sponsor, the priest will not name the
+baby. With no name, it cannot draw treaty. I conclude to father the
+child, as its own (un)lawful father will not. My offer to give my name
+to the girlie, after due deliberation of Church and State, is accepted.
+Under the name of Agnes Deans Cameron the Cree kiddie is received into
+the Mother Church and finds her place on the list of treaty-receiving
+Indians&mdash;No. 53 in the McMurray Band. May she follow pleasant trails!</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0334"></a>
+<img src="images/img0334.jpg" width="364" height="222" alt="A Meadow at McMurray" title="">
+<BR><B>A Meadow at McMurray</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Back of McMurray lies a lush land. We tread a path a full mile in length
+leading to meadows where, belly-high, the horses graze. Every yard of
+our way is lined with raspberry bushes bent with their rich, red burden.</p>
+
+<p>While the furs are being transferred from the <i>Grahame</i> to the scows,
+the working of our typewriter is a matter of much wonderment. Old Paul
+Fontaine, a half-breed who thinks he is a white man, first looks through
+the door, then comes into the dining hall where we are, takes his hat
+off, and watches respectfully. Then, with an air of great conviction,
+&quot;This is the first time I ever see that. It is wonderful what man can
+do&mdash;wonderful. There is only one thing left to be done now&mdash;and that is
+to put the breath of life into a dead body.&quot; Solemnly putting on his
+hat, he turns and walks out.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Loutit, another fellow-passenger attracted by the click of the
+machine, comes in and recounts her arts, wild and tame. In winter she
+goes off in dog-cariole, traps cross-foxes off her own bat, shoots
+moose, and smokes the hide according to the ancient accepted mode.
+Coming home, she takes the smoked hide and works upon it silk embroidery
+of a fineness which would be the envy of any young ladies' seminary in
+Europe or America. She weaves fantastic belts of beads and sets the
+fashion for the whole North in <i>chef d'oeuvres</i> of the quills of the
+porcupine. She is a most observant &quot;old wife.&quot; Watching, fascinated, the
+lightning play of the machine, &quot;Much hard that, I think, harder than
+bead-work, eh?&quot; Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to
+find out how the dickens when you strike capital &quot;A&quot; at one end of the
+keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small &quot;o&quot; at the other
+end. There is something uncanny about it, and our stock goes up.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0336"></a>
+<img src="images/img0336.jpg" width="369" height="258" alt="Starting up the Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Starting up the Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We confess to being a little homesick as we wave farewell to the half
+hundred passengers in the familiar scows embarked for their two hundred
+and thirty-eight mile journey up the Athabasca. It will be a tiresome
+enough trip, though, for every foot of the way the big boats will have
+to be tracked (towed) by teams of half-breeds scrambling along the
+shore, now on land, now splashing in the water. The party will have the
+mosquito as companion on the sorrowful way and it will take them four
+weeks to make Athabasca Landing, the distance which in the spring we
+dropped down in little over a week. We send letters home, and with
+hand-shaking all round bid farewell to Mr. Wyllie, the Grey Nuns, and
+the rest.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0337"></a>
+<img src="images/img0337.jpg" width="282" height="387" alt="On the Clearwater" title="">
+<BR><B>On the Clearwater</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Our way back on the <i>Grahame</i> to Chipewyan is not without adventure. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon we run up hard and fast on a batture!
+There is no swearing, no shouting of orders. The deck-hands from long
+experience know exactly what to do. The engines are reversed and, in
+their efforts, seem to speak Cree, for we catch the sound of the
+familiar &quot;Wuh! Wey!&quot; But it is no go. The sun sinks behind the bank,
+over the tops of the poplars floats a faint rosy glow which fades into
+purple and then into black, and we are still there hard and fast. The
+drifting sand piles up against us, and, in scows, the whole cargo is
+removed. The captain throws out a kedge-anchor, and in a mysterious way
+we pull ourselves off by hawsers, as a man lifts himself by his own
+boot-straps.</p>
+
+<p>We have head-winds all the way. At four o'clock on the morning of August
+14th, stress of weather causes us to run in under the lee of an island.
+We tie up at the base of some splendid timber. Spruce here will give
+three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground. With an improvised
+tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big
+poplars (rough-backed). The first ran seven feet three inches, the
+second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches. Within
+view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and
+interspersed with them were spruce with a base-girth scarcely less.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at Chipewyan, we are able to arrange to be taken up the Peace in
+the same little tug <i>Primrose</i> which had before carried us so safely to
+Fond du Lac.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIX"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<h3>UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;What lies ahead no human mind can know,<br>
+To-morrow may bring happiness or woe.<br>
+We cannot carry charts, save the hope that's in our hearts<br>
+As along the unknown trail we blithely go.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>When we leave Chipewyan August 17th, the fall hunt of waveys has already
+begun. We learn afterwards that the Loutit boys alone made a bag of
+sixteen hundred of these birds which, salted down, form a considerable
+part of the winter food of the old Fort. Mrs. William Johnson comes down
+to see us embark. She has overwhelmed us with generous kindness at our
+every visit to Chipewyan, kindness we cannot soon forget. It is a small
+group which now starts out in the little tug on the bosom of the mighty
+Peace,&mdash;Major Routledge, R.N.W.M.P., Mr. and Mrs. John Gaudet with their
+two olive-branches &quot;Char-lee&quot; and &quot;Se-li-nah,&quot; now returning to Lesser
+Slave Lake from a visit to Fort Good Hope, Miss Brown and myself.</p>
+
+<p>This part of the journey we are to enjoy more keenly than all that has
+gone before. Rising on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, the
+Peace River is the largest affluent of the Mackenzie, being already a
+splendid stream when it cuts through that range. With but one break, the
+Peace River affords a nine hundred mile stretch of navigation, and we
+can justly describe the country through which it flows as a plateau in
+which the river has made for itself a somewhat deep valley. Extensive
+grassy plains border it on both sides, and north of Fort Vermilion
+country of this character extends to the valley of the Hay River.
+Crossing the Quatre Fourches, an offshoot of the Peace at the Lake
+Athabasca edge, we turn our faces due west to a land of promise. The
+Mackenzie River and the banks of the Great Slave may some day afford
+homes to a busy and prosperous populace, but there are many fertile and
+more accessible lands to be settled first. With the Peace River Country
+there is no conjecture, for it is merely a question of the coming of the
+railway. Given a connection with the world to the south, the district
+watered by the Peace will at once support a vast agrarian population.
+The advance riders are already on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>It is not our intent to go to the expense of using a steamer for our
+whole journey up the Peace. Scows will allow us to proceed more
+leisurely and to see more as we go, so the second day we turn the
+steamer back and transfer ourselves and our belongings into a little
+open craft or model-boat <i>The Mee-wah-sin.</i> We have a crew of five men,
+one on the steering-sweep and four to track, and in this wise we make
+our way for three hundred miles up the great river to Fort Vermilion.
+One day we improvise a sail and so make fifty miles in a favourable
+wind, but, with this exception, every other mile of the journey is by
+patient towing.</p>
+
+<p>Incidents are many. The first morning after we turned back the little
+tug, the Kid and I left the slow trackers behind and were glad to
+stretch ourselves in a long forenoon's tramp along the sandy beach. The
+mosquitoes were practically gone and for the first time all summer one
+could really enjoy the woods, where a tang of autumn in the air made
+every breath a tonic draught. Exulting in the fact that we were alive,
+we turned a sharp corner and came suddenly face to face with a grey
+wolf, loping along at a swinging pace at the water's edge, muzzle close
+to the ground! To make the story worth telling, one should have
+something to say of &quot;yawning jaws&quot; and &quot;bloodshot eyes&quot; and &quot;haunches
+trembling for a spring.&quot; But this grey wolf simply refused to play that
+part. He took one look at us, evidently didn't approve, and turned up
+from his tracks quietly into the cottonwoods above. As we on our side
+had brought neither gun nor camera from the <i>Mee-wah-sin</i>, we are unable
+to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture. <i>Sic transit lupus</i>!</p>
+
+<p>A week out from Chipewyan, where the Swan River makes into the Peace, we
+came one glorious afternoon upon a camp of Crees, the family of the
+<i>Se-weep-i-gons</i>. They had just killed two bears. We bought the skins
+and a large portion of meat from them, and Mrs. <i>Se-weep-i-gon</i> very
+kindly added to the feast of fat things some high-bush cranberries &quot;in a
+present.&quot; As an excuse for listening to their soft voices, before we
+left the camp we asked the name of every member of the little group,
+scratching the list down on a piece of birchbark. The Crees evidently
+considered this an official ceremony, for after we had paid our score
+and shaken hands with everybody from Grandpa to the latest baby and were
+well out in mid-stream, Mrs. <i>Se-weep-i-gon</i> came running down to the
+bank to call us back. Rowing to the shore we found that she had
+remembered one more child whose name she wanted to add to the list. She
+assured us that this one too had a little brass cross hanging round his
+neck, so we will be sure to know him if we meet him in the woods.</p>
+
+<p>We lived for the next two days on bear-meat and cranberries.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0342"></a>
+<img src="images/img0342.jpg" width="370" height="261" alt="Evening on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Evening on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>So one wonderful day follows another as our little boat is towed first
+against one bank then another of this majestic stream. The forest growth
+is a marvel. We measure one morning three of the spruce trees to which
+our tent-ropes are tied, and get for base measurement six feet eight
+inches, five feet two inches, and five feet respectively. The trees
+averaged ninety feet in height and would give perhaps one thousand feet
+to each tree. The autumn tints on the willows and alders of the high
+river-banks are indescribably beautiful. We pass through one hundred
+miles of a veritable field of the cloth of gold. We look out of our
+tent-flaps at night on this living glory, and wake up to it again with
+each new morning sun.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday evening at dusk we slip into the Hudson's Bay post where the
+Little Red River makes into the Peace, the dear home of Tom Kerr, his
+Scottish wife, and their four bairns. Let me try to give the picture.
+Tom had been off all day cutting meadowgrass, and now wended his way
+home with a load of it in a little Old Country cart drawn by a wall-eyed
+mare. At her side frisked a foal, and two great stag-hounds ran back and
+forward between the master and his home by the riverside. Three children
+bounded out to greet their father. &quot;Oh! Daddy, Daddy, the red coo broke
+away from the byre and is far awa on the ither side o' the burn!&quot; Here,
+in a nutshell, you have the difference between the Mackenzie River of
+to-day and the Peace River. On the Mackenzie, swarthy forms are in
+evidence, Cree and French is spoken on all sides, there are no great
+fields of waving grain, and the dog is the only domestic animal. On the
+Peace is an essentially white race, cows, chickens, trustworthy old
+nags, porridge for breakfast, &quot;the tongue that Shakespeare spake,&quot;
+rendered in an accent born far ayont the Tweed. Right across the mouth
+of the Little Red River, Tom Kerr has a fishing scine. We go down with
+him to lift it, after the cows have been brought back to the narrow
+path. The net yields seven fish and they are of five different
+species,&mdash;trout, ling, sucker, jack-fish, and something else that Tom
+calls a &quot;Maria.&quot; Daily this net is set, and for three hundred and
+sixty-five days every year it furnishes food for the family, in summer
+in the flowing water, and in winter under the ice. You couldn't starve
+at Little Red River if you wanted to. This is one of the most beautiful
+spots in the whole North Countree. Long after Tom and we and Mrs. Tom
+are under the gowans, and the little Kerrs possess the land, there will
+be populous cities along the Peace, and millionaires will plant their
+summer villas on the beauteous spot where we now stand.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0344"></a>
+<img src="images/img0344.jpg" width="274" height="373" alt="Our Lobsticks on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Our Lobsticks on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Bidding the bairns good-bye, we press onward on our way, Tom Kerr
+accompanying us. A great honour awaits us round the next corner, when
+the boatmen announce that they are going to make us each a lobstick. We
+land, as pleased as Punch over the suggestion. We now know what it feels
+like when the philanthropist of a village takes his after-dinner walk
+through the square and sees the sparrows drinking from the memorial
+fountain surmounted with his own bust, done in copper, life-size. It
+takes fully two hours to trim the trees into significant shape, but the
+beauty of this particular kind of Cook's Tour is that you go down when
+you like and stop when you want to. The lobsticks furnished, the men
+form a circle and discharge their muskets in salute, and on we go. We
+learn that the ethics of lobsticks is that each of these men, should
+Fate take him past this point again, will salute the lobstick just made
+and send a strong thought across the spruce-tops to us. There is a
+reverse to the shield. Should we, at any time before this journey ends,
+fail to make good, the men on the return voyage will cut the lobstick
+down. We are going to make no impertinent enquiries regarding the
+ulterior fate of these family trees. Is it not sufficient glory to say,
+&quot;On the Peace River we <i>had</i> a lobstick&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>The Chutes of the Peace! These will live forever with the Ramparts of
+the Mackenzie as the two most majestic visions which the whole North
+Land gave us. We had not been prepared for that wonderful spectacle
+which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars
+for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its
+great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite
+across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet
+and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara,
+yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this
+land so pregnant with possibilities, a land which, though it echo now
+only the quiet foot of the Cree, is so unmistakably a White Man's
+Country, intensifies the sense of majesty and power which here takes
+possession of us. The men talk of the water-power furnished by the great
+falls, and hazard guesses of the future economic purposes to which it
+will be put. For our own part, our one wish is to get away from the
+noise of even these subdued voices and in silence feast our very souls
+on this manifestation of the power of God. The thoughts that we feel
+cannot be put into words. Why attempt the impossible?</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0346"></a>
+<img src="images/img0346.jpg" width="366" height="268" alt="The Chutes of the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>The Chutes of the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Our way lies beyond this, and the Chutes have to be overcome. These
+half-breeds know exactly what to do in every emergency which arises.
+Only one of the men has traversed this river before, and he gives
+orders. We strip our little <i>Mee-wah-sin</i> of her temporary masts and
+canvas awning and take out all our belongings. Everybody works. A
+purchase is obtained by throwing a pulley and rope over a nearby jack-pine, and the boat is pulled
+out bodily from the water. Then the crew drag her along the shore well
+beyond the head of the rapid, and we make camp.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0347"></a>
+<img src="images/img0347.jpg" width="367" height="264" alt="Pulling out the Mee-wah-sin" title="">
+<BR><B>Pulling out the Mee-wah-sin</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>These delicious nights within the tent are memories that will remain
+through all the years to come. It is cool and silent and productive of
+thought. We are selfishly glad that fifty people went out by Athabasca
+ways, leaving to us all the mighty reaches and pleasant pastures of the
+Peace. The midnight is flooded by a glorious moon, and the thoughts born
+this afternoon of that stupendous fall have driven sleep far away.
+Opening the tent-flap, I slip through the camp of sleeping Indians to
+the edge of the fast-flowing stream. The feeling is insistent here which
+has been ever-present since we entered this valley of the Peace&mdash;here is
+the home prepared and held in waiting for the people who are to follow.</p>
+
+&quot;Listening there, I heard all tremulously<br>
+Footfalls of Autumn passing on her way,<br>
+And in the mellow silence every tree<br>
+Whispered and crooned of hours that are to be.<br>
+Then a soft wind like some small thing astray<br>
+Comes sighing soothingly.&quot;<br>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XX"></a><h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<h3>VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and cheerily wise,<br>
+With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes,<br>
+Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,<br>
+Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood,<br>
+Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,<br>
+As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Service</i>.<br>
+
+<p>It is on August 27th, in the evening, that the crew, all slicked up in
+their Sunday-go-to-meetings, draw us up on the beach of the City in the
+Silences, this Past-in-the-arms-of-the-Present,&mdash;Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+The first thing to meet our eye is the red roof of the flour-mill of the
+H.B. Co., a picture of progressiveness set in a living frame of golden
+wheat, the heavy heads nodding to the harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Vermilion is an old post of the Old Company. Alexander Mackenzie on his
+way to the Pacific found people at work here far back in 1792. The
+Vermilion of to-day stands a living monument to the initiative faith and
+hard work largely of one man, Mr. Francis D. Wilson, who has had charge
+of H.B. Co. interests here for nineteen years. Mr. Wilson found this
+place a fur-post on the edge of civilisation, and he has made of it a
+commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre. And his example has
+been contagious, for the half-breeds around him have become farmers, the
+Indians who traded furs a dozen years ago now buy harness and ploughs
+and breach-loading guns from The Company, paying for the same with wheat
+of their own growing.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0350"></a>
+<img src="images/img0350.jpg" width="362" height="237" alt="The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Vermilion is in latitude 58&deg; 30' N.,&mdash;that is, about four hundred miles
+due north of Edmonton, and on practically the same parallel as
+Stockholm. The flour-mill that we now inspect is the most northerly
+wheat-mill on this continent, and it has been running for five years. It
+is the roller process, with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, the
+motor-power being a 40 H.P. Corliss engine. The wheat which feeds these
+rollers is all grown in nearby fields, and the resultant flour is
+consumed by the people of the lone posts of the Peace and the lower
+Mackenzie. Two years ago the H.B. Company paid to farmers, all of whom
+lived within a radius of five miles from the mill, the sum of $27,000
+spot cash for their wheat. An electric plant lights the mill and fort
+buildings, affording fifty six-candle-power lights.</p>
+
+<p>Right up to the door of the mill extends the sixty-acre wheat-field of
+the H.B. Company, from which Mr. Wilson computes that he will this year
+thrash two thousand bushels. If the H.B. wheat-field were to sell the H.B.
+mill these two thousand bushels at $1.25 a bushel (the ruling
+Vermilion price), there would be a net profit of $1500, after paying all
+expense of culture, to the credit of one branch of Mr. Wilson's
+commercial institution. For thirty years, wheat, oats, barley, and
+vegetables have been grown in Vermilion, not as an experiment, but as
+regular commercial crops. Cereals are sown late in April or early in
+May, and the harvest is gathered in August. More than once, wheat has
+matured in eighty-six days from seed-sowing to seed-garnering.</p>
+
+<p>Vermilion farmers boast sulkies and gang-ploughs and the latest geared
+McCormick, Massey-Harris, and Deering farm implements,&mdash;self-binders and
+seeders. Everything is up-to-date. We ourselves counted fifteen
+self-binders at work. And grain is not the whole story. The farmers own
+thoroughbred Ayrshire stock and splendid horses. I happened to be at the
+garden of the Church of England Mission when the potato-crop was being
+harvested, and found that seven bags of seed planted in the middle of
+May produced one hundred bags by the end of August. Five potatoes that I
+gathered haphazard from one heap weighed exactly five and one-half
+pounds. I photographed and weighed a collection of vegetables grown by
+Robert Jones on the Dominion Experimental Farm.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0352"></a>
+<img src="images/img0352.jpg" width="364" height="307" alt="Articles Made by Indians" title="">
+<BR><B>Articles Made by Indians</B>
+</center>
+
+<BLOCKQUOTE>
+<p><tt>A&mdash;Wall-pocket of white deerskin, embroidered in silk-work, and bordered
+with ermine&mdash;the work of a Cree woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>B&mdash;Gloves of white deerskin embroidered in silk, the work of a Slavi
+woman on the Liard River (a branch of the Mackenzie).</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>C, D, E, F, G, H, I&mdash;Moccasins as worn respectively by the Crees,
+Chipewyans, Slavis, Dog-Ribs, Yellow-Knives, Loucheux&mdash;all the work of
+the women.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>J.&mdash;Flour bag from the mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace, the most
+northerly flour-mill in America.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>K&mdash;Sinew, from close to the spine of the moose&mdash;used by the women of the
+North instead of thread.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>L&mdash;Very valuable net of willow-bark made by an old squaw at Fort
+Resolution. This is almost a lost art, and harks back to the pre-string
+days.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>M&mdash;The &quot;crooked knife&quot; or knife of the country.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>N&mdash;Match-box made from a copper kettle by an old Beaver Indian at Fort
+Vermilion-on-the-Peace.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>O&mdash;<i>Babiche</i>, or rawhide of the moose or caribou&mdash;&quot;the iron of the
+country.&quot;</tt></p>
+</BLOCKQUOTE>
+
+<p>One cauliflower weighed eight pounds, half a dozen turnips weighed nine
+pounds each, and twenty table beets would easily average six pounds
+each. The carrots and onions were sown in the open in mid-May and were
+as inviting specimens as I have ever seen. Tomatoes ripened in the open
+air on this farm on July 13th. Peas, sown on May 23rd and gathered on
+August 12th, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel. Experimental plots
+of turnips gave sixteen tons to the acre, and white carrots twelve tons.
+Apple-trees and roses we found flourishing on this farm, with
+twenty-five varieties of red, black, and white currants. The wheat story
+is of compelling interest. Preston wheat, sown on May 6th and cut on
+August 22nd, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel; Ladoga wheat, sown
+on the last day of April and cut on September 5th, ran sixty-four pounds
+to the bushel also, and early Riga weighed sixty-three pounds. In the
+garden of the R.C. Mission we were presented with splendid specimens of
+ripened corn and with three cucumbers grown in the open air, which
+weighed over a pound each.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0353"></a>
+<img src="images/img0353.jpg" width="364" height="249" alt="The Hudson's Bay Store" title="">
+<BR><B>The Hudson's Bay Store</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in
+extent than the whole of Belgium. There are probably a million acres of
+land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops
+like those cited. Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there
+are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white. They
+all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by
+hunting, trapping, and freighting. The settlement boasts two churches,
+two mission schools, and two trading stores,&mdash;a happy, prosperous, and
+very progressive community. Everything in the place points to this
+conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>The H.B. Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing
+$1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the
+monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats. This
+sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer <i>Peace River</i>,
+built here four years ago of native timber. She is a hundred and
+ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half
+feet and carrying forty tons burden. She can accommodate thirty
+passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes
+fifteen knots an hour. The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this
+boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.</p>
+
+<p>Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one
+man's logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of
+Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill. Edmond Paul's logs in
+one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at
+the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber. The biggest log in this raft was a
+twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which
+cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.</p>
+
+<p>Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and
+arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful
+of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and
+seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what
+has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole
+country spring when it is given rail communication with the
+plains-people to the south?</p>
+
+<p>Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious
+autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.
+Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these
+walls? Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and
+stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us
+to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home. It is a modern
+house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of
+hollyhocks on all sides. The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace,
+here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty. To the visitor who
+steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the
+reading man and the clever artificer. Scientific works of reference,
+good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged
+travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and
+human-nature, for five long months. The office furniture, hand-made of
+native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson's individual work in both
+design and execution. Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also
+a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these
+carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any
+one in the settlement, whether fort employ&eacute; or not, who cares to come in
+here for a quiet hour to read.</p>
+
+<p>Kipling says, &quot;You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile,&quot; but the
+Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line. In a corner of
+the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history. The
+honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of
+Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a
+sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by
+portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton. It
+carries on it the name of John Broadwood &amp; Sons, London. Mrs. Wilson
+tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house
+to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance.
+The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of
+the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod
+Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and
+the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B. Co., has put in a
+life of loving service among the people of Vermilion. Her knowledge of
+medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of
+need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother
+and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion.
+These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly
+kindness.</p>
+
+<p>Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with
+the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper. The country
+furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and
+bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made
+butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies
+whose four constituents&mdash;flour, lard, butter and fruit&mdash;are products of
+the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid
+fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild
+game&mdash;moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs,
+and mallards. Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen
+different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry,
+blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon. The salt comes from
+Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion
+beets if there should arise a market. What more would you? The
+Vermilionese on his fertile acres is as independent of the world outside
+as is the Eskimo in his Arctic igloo. The farm of Sheridan Lawrence,
+exhibiting its wide-stretching wheat-fields, some heads of which counted
+seventy-one kernels, with its patches of one-pound potatoes, twelve-foot
+sunflowers, and its quiverful of happy, tow-headed children, gives as
+sweet a picture of Canadian thrift and happiness as one would wish to
+see. Indeed, happiness seems to be the keynote of Vermilion, whether we
+seek it within the fort walls of the H.B. Co., on the fat acres of the
+farmers, or within the folds of Protestant or Roman Mission.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0357"></a>
+<img src="images/img0357.jpg" width="281" height="335" alt="Papillon, a Beaver Brave" title="">
+<BR><B>Papillon, a Beaver Brave</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We carry away with us two pictures, that we like to cherish, of the
+convent kiddies of Vermilion. The first thing we saw when we peered
+round a corner of this old-fashioned building was the bright face of
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury playing see-saw with a dozen wide-grinning
+Slavi babies. When the morning came when we were to bid reluctant
+good-bye to Vermilion and all its spontaneous kindness, the last sight
+that met our eyes before we turned the corner of the Peace was the whole
+convent force of Vermilion perched high on stumps and fence-rails,
+wishing us <i>bon voyage</i> with fluttering pocket-handkerchiefs, while
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury, on a ladder, surmounted the crowd and waved
+her farewells with a table-cloth.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXI"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<h3>FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>&quot;'Tis a summer such as broods<br>
+O'er enchanted solitudes,<br>
+Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods,<br>
+And with lavish love outpours<br>
+All the wealth of out-of-doors.&quot;<br>
+&mdash;<i>James Whitcomb Riley</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0359"></a>
+<img src="images/img0359.jpg" width="367" height="201" alt="Going to School in Winter" title="">
+<BR><B>Going to School in Winter</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the
+little <i>Mee-wah-sin,</i> and in the tiny tug <i>Messenger</i> of the H.B.
+Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we
+puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around
+us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing
+cranes are flying.</p>
+
+<p>Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months
+of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect
+and created for herself a warm place in every heart. Se-li-nah, though,
+makes it impossible for us to pose as brave endurers of hardships. Each
+night and morning she carries her little pack on and off shore, takes
+her share of pot-luck at <i>meat-su,</i> and is never cross. Bless the
+kiddie! If ablutions seem to her a work of supererogation and our daily
+play of toothbrush furnishes all the fascination of the unknown, still
+hers is the right stuff for pioneer lands and she has lessons to teach
+us in pluck and endurance.</p>
+
+<p>The first night out from Vermilion we made camp after dark and, on
+waking, found that in our blankets we had lain directly across four new
+bear-tracks. Moose-tracks are plentiful at every stopping-place, so we
+see to it that both guns and camera are primed. At eight next morning we
+pass Not-in-a-gu Seepee. Some Indians hail us, asking for tea, and from
+these we learn that ten families who made this their winter camp last
+season bagged eighty moose among them.</p>
+
+<p>At half-past two our chance came. To get away from the noise of the
+engine, the Kid and I had moved our work directly after breakfast to a
+flour-laden scow that we had in tow, and I was dictating this story to
+the machine when the sharp eyes of Showan in the distance spied a moose.
+He was on the shore cropping willows. It had been generously agreed that
+if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine, so in excited
+whispers the news is telegraphed to our end of the scow and my rifle is
+handed up. The fireman slows up on the engine, but still its throbbing
+sounds distressingly loud as we creep up on the feeding moose and scan
+the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are
+high,&mdash;perhaps one hundred and fifty feet&mdash;and sheer, but there are two
+gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly
+creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,&mdash;a
+regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those
+animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet
+biscuit. And now at last he sees us. I fire, and the shot just grazes
+his spine. Will he take to a gully? No, he plunges into the river
+instead and we follow him up in the little tug. One more shot is
+effective, and I have killed my premier moose. &quot;Cruel!&quot; you say. Well,
+just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat, as, with
+the exception of Vermilion's flesh-pots, we have done, and then find out
+if you would fly in the face of Providence when the Red Gods send you a
+young moose! To illuminate the problem I transcribe the menu of one
+sample week of the summer.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0361"></a>
+<img src="images/img0361.jpg" width="372" height="256" alt="My Premier Moose" title="">
+<BR><B>My Premier Moose</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>This is the literal &quot;dope sheet&quot; of the camp cook:</p>
+
+<p><i>Monday</i>:&mdash;Dried caribou and rice.</p>
+
+<p><i>Tuesday</i>:&mdash;Salt fish and prunes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Wednesday</i>:&mdash;Mess-pork and dried peaches.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thursday</i>:&mdash;Salt horse and macaroni.</p>
+
+<p><i>Friday</i>:&mdash;Sow-belly and bannock.</p>
+
+<p><i>Saturday</i>:&mdash;Blue-fish and beans.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sunday</i>:&mdash;Repeat.</p>
+
+<p>Dragged ashore, the moose proved to be a male of two prongs, about
+eighteen months old, and weighed perhaps four or five hundred pounds. A
+full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton. We are
+to learn that there are many viewpoints from which to approach a moose.
+The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo and Mrs. Gaudet each eloquently
+argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it,
+and Se-li-nah, looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in
+Cree, &quot;<i>Marrow</i> is nice.&quot; Poor young stripling of the Royal House of
+Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!</p>
+
+<p>The first thing Baptiste does is to plunge his penknife into the back to
+see how deep the fat is. We had noticed this testing process before. A
+bunch of feathers is always plucked off the new-killed bird that one can
+immediately gauge the gastronomic niche at which to set one's waiting
+stomach. No more voyaging to-night. The moose is cleaned and skinned.
+Mrs. Gaudet draws the skin. I claim the head. A little Indian boy, who
+with his mother had been added to our ship's crew at Carcajou Point,
+appropriates the kidneys, which he proceeds to roast in the ashes.
+Ten-year-old Bill evidently likes his devilled kidneys rare, for within
+three minutes we see him prancing round the camp, nibbling his dripping
+dainty from the point of an impaling stick.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0363"></a>
+<img src="images/img0363.jpg" width="363" height="225" alt="Beaver Camp, on Paddle River" title="">
+<BR><B>Beaver Camp, on Paddle River</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Having sat round the barbecue half the night, we pull out late the next
+morning. And now, apprised by moccasin telegraph, we are all on the <i>qui
+vive</i> to catch sight of a floating bride. A fur-trader attached to &quot;The
+French Company&quot; at Vermilion has been out on six months' leave and is
+bringing in a bride from Paris. We are to expect them to cross our
+course on a raft, floating in with the current of the Peace as we make
+our way upstream. We see the raft. All is excitement. We direct the
+steersman to draw close in, and the men prime their rifles for a salute.
+She is not visible,&mdash;floating brides on the Peace shrink evidently from
+being the cynosure of passing eyes. Our men fire their salute, the
+steersman on the raft looks puzzled when we, smiling our sympathy, peer
+over the edge of his craft, and see, instead of the Parisian bride,&mdash;a
+load of Poland pigs for Vermilion! It is the wrong raft. The real bride
+passes us in the gloaming ten hours later, when it is too dark to get a
+satisfactory photograph!</p>
+
+<p>On the evening of September 22nd we arrive at Peace River Crossing, or
+Peace River Landing, just a week out from Vermilion. Our course from
+there has been almost due south. We turn the little <i>Messenger</i> back
+here and regretfully bid good-bye to our staunch and friendly boatmen.
+No people in the world could be pleasanter to travel with than these
+splendid men of the North. Indefatigable and ready for any emergency,
+they know their business and are always master of the situation;
+moreover, nature has dowered them with an intuitive delicacy as rare as
+it is pleasing. Through all these weeks, intensely interested as they
+are in everything that is new, never for a moment have they intruded
+upon us or our doings. At night there is not a man of them who will not
+walk a quarter of a mile through the woods rather than pass between our
+occupied tent and the camp fire. But let us offer to show them pictures
+or to explain the workings of the camera or the typewriter and it is a
+different story, for then every man Jack drops his oar or tump-line and
+rushes to our side like an excited schoolboy.</p>
+
+<p>Peace River Crossing is in latitude 56&deg; N. and longitude 117&deg; 20' W.
+From that far-off day in spring when we first touched the Clearwater we
+have been following in the historic footprints of Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie. We now take a day off, with the object of locating
+Mackenzie's last camp on the Peace, which he reached in 1792 and from
+which, in the spring of 1793, he started west across the map seeking an
+unknown route to the Pacific Ocean. We find the remains of that camp. It
+is in the corner of a potato-field a little way beyond Peace River
+Crossing and on the opposite side of the river. Only the foundations of
+the walls are left and the crumbling bricks of two old chimneys.
+Mackenzie was the first man to cross the continent from sea to sea north
+of the latitude of Mexico, and it was from this point where we stand
+that he launched his ambitious canoe. There is no more historic spot on
+the continent than that on which we stand this September day, and as yet
+it is all unmarked of commemorative stone or recording tablet. The lost
+camp had never been photographed until we brought our inquisitive camera
+to bear upon it.</p>
+
+<p>I stoop and pluck from where it nods behind the old chimney a wild
+larkspur, and as I half-mechanically count its forty-two seed-pods, I
+try hard to throw back my thoughts to the year 1792,&mdash;one hundred and
+sixteen years. It is a far call! Canada is tardy in her recognition of
+her early builders of Empire. Our cousins to the south would appear to
+be more appreciative. In song and story and by a memorial World's Fair
+the people of the United States have honoured the discoveries of Lewis
+and Clark, but Mackenzie crossed the continent a full dozen years in
+advance of these explorers.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0366"></a>
+<img src="images/img0366.jpg" width="279" height="405" alt="The Site of old Fort McLeod" title="">
+<BR><B>The Site of old Fort McLeod</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where,
+amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company,
+a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is
+Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the
+noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours
+of dawn and &quot;when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the
+grey.&quot; He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if
+he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting
+whisper, but its burden is ever the same.</p>
+
+&quot;Something lost behind the Ranges,<br>
+Lost and waiting for you: Go!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to
+Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty
+and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his
+name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought
+uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not
+pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in
+astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for
+a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791.
+His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western
+Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of
+Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves &quot;somewhere&quot; far beyond
+the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong
+determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort
+Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we
+stand. The breaking of the spring ice of 1793 sent him forth on the
+quest of that Northwest Passage by Land.</p>
+
+&quot;O Young Mariner,<br>
+Down to the harbor call your companions,<br>
+Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas,<br>
+And, ere it vanishes over the margin,<br>
+After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>We have not time to recount the chapters of the story, to name the
+streams ascended, the boiling gorges passed, the discontent allayed, the
+encouragement given, the lonely night-watches when the leader himself
+looked for comfort to his new-found stars. The Fraser was discovered,
+traced for a while; and then, striking westward, Mackenzie heard the
+beat of the surf upon the rocks, and came out from among the pines to
+the silver Pacific sparkling in the sun. It was a sweet day in summer's
+prime, and as the gulls cried overhead and the sun mixed scent of
+seaweed with balsam breath from in-shore, we can imagine but not divine
+the feelings of that brave man who had thrown himself face-downward on
+the sand and from whose presence the awed companions stole silently
+away. We remember the words of another builder of Empire,&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;Anybody might have found it,<br>
+But God's whisper came to me.&quot;<br>
+
+<br>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<h3>PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+
+&quot;A haze on the far horizon,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The infinite tender sky,</span><br>
+The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the wild geese sailing high,&mdash;</span><br>
+And all over upland and lowland<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The charm of the goldenrod.</span><br>
+Some of us call it Autumn,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And others call it God.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>W.H. Carruth</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is
+here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good
+Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they
+left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs
+twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons,
+which weigh over ten pounds each.</p>
+
+<p>To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies
+present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and
+the Pouce Coup&eacute;. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square
+miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water
+are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been
+damaged by frost.</p>
+
+<p>Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande
+Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande
+Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square
+miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their
+cattle longer than six weeks each winter.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0370"></a>
+<img src="images/img0370.jpg" width="371" height="255" alt="Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Pouce Coup&eacute; would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace
+River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves
+the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in
+mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September.
+Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give
+abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in,
+tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and
+pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the
+naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn,
+and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This
+is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and
+the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that
+tickle his palate,&mdash;blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries,
+willow-berries, and saskatoons.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0371"></a>
+<img src="images/img0371.jpg" width="364" height="223" alt="Fort Dunvegan on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort Dunvegan on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles
+south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in
+our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand
+miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the
+suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost
+all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times
+and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us
+through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open
+glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us
+bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this
+land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail
+is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and
+tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are
+fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the
+very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this
+Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling
+amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56&deg; N. I pluck
+a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.</p>
+
+<p>Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser
+Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer
+civilisation,&mdash;the &quot;civilisation&quot; of Chicago! A strong desire possesses
+us to about-face and back to the woods again.</p>
+
+<p>It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we
+intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into
+sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,&mdash;men, women,
+children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering
+flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look
+up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the
+south,&mdash;one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty
+picture,&mdash;the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns
+with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. &quot;It is the <i>Man with
+the Hoe</i>,&quot; I murmur. &quot;Yes,&quot; assents the Kid, &quot;and <i>The Angelus at Lesser
+Slave</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey.
+Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear
+delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the &quot;horse
+latitudes&quot;&mdash;though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey
+leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page.
+The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat
+and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs.
+Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole,
+this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses'
+mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the
+act making possible the writing of this &quot;immortal work&quot;!</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0373"></a>
+<img src="images/img0373.jpg" width="362" height="230" alt="Fort St. John on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort St. John on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody
+rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a
+gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed
+on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey
+and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in
+Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly
+rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at
+dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the
+latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the
+vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant
+bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year.
+To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot
+straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the
+healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0374"></a>
+<img src="images/img0374.jpg" width="367" height="281" alt="Where King Was Arrested" title="">
+<BR><B>Where King Was Arrested</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in
+which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and,
+driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph
+giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0375"></a>
+<img src="images/img0375.jpg" width="368" height="200" alt="Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons" title="">
+<BR><B>Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,&mdash;tall, straight,
+fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch
+blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one
+granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His
+grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a
+century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He
+married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the
+time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the
+notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to
+lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum,
+he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the
+flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy.
+It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can
+navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this
+Scots-Sioux,&mdash;strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party
+of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching
+Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who,
+too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec
+Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating
+sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile,
+of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of
+the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec
+has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, &quot;Do
+not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young
+fellow of the H.B. Co. says, &quot;It's beastly bad form to ask any man who
+comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a
+wilful-missing, that's his privilege.&quot; However, fate has thrown in our
+way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan
+up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down
+at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or
+less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise
+herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon
+make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs.
+Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0377"></a>
+<img src="images/img0377.jpg" width="280" height="267" alt="Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron" title="">
+<BR><B>Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty
+years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged
+eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little
+brothers and cousins, <i>en famille</i>, they pitched off from Little Red
+River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger
+men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was
+seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it,
+and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless,
+they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who
+nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.</p>
+
+<p>How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the
+woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her
+clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little
+children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters
+who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat
+came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike
+became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate
+of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her
+sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket
+between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make
+Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful
+experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each
+feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out,
+thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping
+companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas.
+The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then
+the sister died. <i>How</i> she died God and the watching stars alone know.
+Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as
+food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but
+admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.</p>
+
+<p>Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language
+which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same
+word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own
+volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human
+imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony
+undergone by these poor creatures&mdash;women and children with affections
+like our own&mdash;shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel
+camp of death!</p>
+
+<p>Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a
+recluse, shunned of all Indians as a &quot;Wetigo&quot; or &quot;Cannibal.&quot; A friend
+was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon
+Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years
+passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is
+The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been
+born.</p>
+
+<p>As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly
+caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the
+Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat
+difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is &quot;even
+as you and me.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+<h3>LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;I hear the tread of Nations yet to be,<br>
+The first low wash of waves where soon shall roll a human sea.&quot;<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0380"></a>
+<img src="images/img0380.jpg" width="363" height="276" alt="A Peace River Pioneer" title="">
+<BR><B>A Peace River Pioneer</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Taking passage on the steamer <i>Northern Light</i>, we leave the settlement
+of Lesser Slave Lake, this world-in-small, on the first day of October,
+and, from here to Athabasca Landing, travel in company with Mr. J.K.
+Cornwall, President of the Northern Transportation Company. Between the
+time of our journey and this writing, Mr. Cornwall has been returned as
+Member of the Alberta Legislature for the district we are now
+traversing. He certainly knows his constituency better than most
+representatives do. There is scarcely a mile of these unmapped ways that
+he has not tramped alone; not an Indian guide in the North can last with
+&quot;Jim&quot; for a week, in summer, or on snow-shoes. When some Lesser Slave
+half-breeds were told that Mr. Cornwall was going to run for the
+legislature against Allie Brick, one of them said, &quot;Jim wins. Allie
+Brick can't run. Not much fun in that race. No man on Peace River can
+run like Jim.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cornwall's pronouncement on the North Country can be taken as
+authoritative. He says, &quot;Practically all the timber of any commercial
+value between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains is in these
+northern watersheds. This timber will be a very important factor in the
+coming development of Prairie Canada to the south, and fortunately, too,
+it is most get-at-able. There are thirty-six hundred miles of river and
+lake in the North on which steamers are plying to-day and which are open
+for navigation for six months in every year. The first railway that
+comes in will tap a system of transporation equalled only on this
+continent by the Mississippi and St. Lawrence with the Great Lakes. The
+American Government has spent two hundred million dollars on the
+improvement of Mississippi navigation, and to-day it is not as valuable
+a national asset as the great Athabasca-Mackenzie-Peace system is as it
+came from the hand of Nature. Thirty thousand bushels of wheat that
+would grade 'No. 1 Northern' was produced in the Peace River Country
+this year, besides thousands of bushels of oats and barley. In this
+Northland there are 100,000,000 acres of land fit for the growing of
+grain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Charles Dickens used to carry a note-book in his vest-pocket in which he
+jotted down names that tickled his fancy. Were Dickens to travel this
+route with us, his name-note-books would bulge. Where Lesser Slave River
+issues out of Lesser Slave Lake, we found Tom Lilac in earnest
+conversation with Jilly Loo-bird. Jilly has navigated the North all the
+way from Athabasca Landing to Hudson's Hope on the Peace, seeking a
+wife, and still lacks his connubial rib. Being told that ladies are on
+board, he breathlessly asks, &quot;What colour?&quot; When he learns that we are
+white, Jilly makes a dash for some cache in the woods which takes the
+place of clothes-closet, but the steamer has passed on before he
+emerges. Another lost chance, both for Jilly and the writer! For two or
+three miles here, where the river runs out of the lake, it never
+freezes, and ducks and wild-fowl remain here all the winter in open
+water. Last month, in this immediate vicinity, no fewer than one hundred
+moose were killed. Lilac tells us that last winter there was no snow
+here until March, and two winters ago absolutely no snow fell whatever,
+so that the sleighs were not gotten out and all the freighting had to be
+done with waggons. &quot;No need to starve here,&quot; says Lilac, &quot;the trout run
+up to forty pounds each. There are whitefish and grayling, and I gather
+berries all the year round. In summer, I get the red and white currants,
+raspberries, saskatoons, blueberries, gooseberries, and strawberries,
+and all winter long there are both high-bush and low-bush cranberries.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0383"></a>
+<img src="images/img0383.jpg" width="307" height="488" alt="Three Generations" title="">
+<BR><B>Three Generations</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Travelling with us are Judge Noel and Judge Beck, making the first
+circuit of justice through this country. Although they had come all the
+way from Edmonton looking for trouble, so splendid has been the
+surveillance of the Mounted Police here that no one could scrape up one
+case for the judges to try. The Peace River people seemed somehow to
+think that in greeting the judges with an empty house the settlement had
+failed to make good. Some one comforts them with setting forth as the
+ethics of the case the fact that the judges should be presented with
+white gloves, as the traditional sign of an empty docket. Again is Peace
+River chagrined, neither The Company nor the French Company has white
+kids in stock. Each judge is made the recipient of a handsome pair of
+moose-skin gloves, as a substitute, ornamented with beads and quills of
+the porcupine.</p>
+
+<p>At Norris's, we leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift
+Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout. The Dominion Government, with a
+series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to
+make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel. Where the Lesser Slave
+River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, and from
+there to Athabasca Landing float down the last stretch of our northern
+waterways of delight. There is frost each night now and the deciduous
+trees on the banks are a rich riot of colour. We resurrect from the
+depths all the warm clothing available and have opportunity of testing
+in their own latitudes the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and
+other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>Every passenger who floats with us enlarges our knowledge and enriches
+our vocabulary. Judge Noel's bodyguard is a young stripling of the
+Mounted Police, born in dear old Lunnon. It is always interesting to
+note the different things of which people are proud. Old men boast of
+their age and young ones of their youth. The fat woman in the side-show
+is arrogant over her avoirdupois; the debutante glories in her slender
+waist; and the globe-trotter triumphs in the miles he has travelled.
+Wyllie claimed distinction in never having left Chipewyan. This Mounted
+Policeman, who stretches out on the scow, plumes himself on two things:
+&quot;I 'old the dahnsin' championship of Edmonton. I got a gold watch lahst
+winter for waltzin'.&quot; We smile approval, and the constable continues, &quot;I
+waltzed,&mdash;reversin',&mdash;an 'our-an'-a-'alf! And&mdash;,&quot; straightening himself
+up, &quot;I am the best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0385"></a>
+<img src="images/img0385.jpg" width="370" height="241" alt="A Family on the Lesser Slave" title="">
+<BR><B>A Family on the Lesser Slave</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Rich is the descriptive language of the North, and we lie awake on the
+scows, rolled in our blankets, loath to lose any of it. &quot;Jim&quot; is at the
+sweep. Many of the men are going out from the North for the first time
+in four or five years. They also seem too interested to slumber, and all
+night long the conversation goes on. A priest is describing some man who
+seems to be hard to identify. &quot;You know him,&mdash;the son of the ole man
+with the patch on his nose wot died. I christen him last winter.&quot; No one
+is more apt at naming than these men. Two days ago, at the treaty at
+Lesser Slave, when a smiling couple drew five dollars for a baby one day
+old, a Cree bystander dubbed the baby &quot;dat little meal-ticket.&quot; A young
+girl who came up to claim her money was nicknamed &quot;Pee-shoo,&quot; or &quot;The
+Lynx,&quot; because of her bad temper. So we see where all the old cats of
+the south come from.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0386"></a>
+<img src="images/img0386.jpg" width="370" height="163" alt="A One Night Stand" title="">
+<BR><B>A One Night Stand</B>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<p>The scow glides on, and we doze, but do not sleep. In the dark she hits
+something and bumps us wide awake to hear the reassuring, &quot;This is where
+Pat Cunningham's horses were drownded last week.&quot; Under Jim's command,
+everybody works, even learned judges from Edmonton. He says, &quot;Take
+another shot at the oars, and then you can hit the feathers.&quot; In the
+morning, one half-breed fails to turn up for <i>meat-su</i> and the comment
+is, &quot;He feels the feathers pullin'.&quot; &quot;Don't blime 'im,&quot; remarks the
+constable, passing the tea, &quot;only fools and 'orses work.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He reached out his hand for a drink,&quot; rendered into trans-Athabascan
+would be, &quot;He got his thievin' irons on the joy-juice,&quot; or &quot;He stretched
+his mud-hooks for the fight-water.&quot; &quot;He set him a-foot for his horse&quot;
+means &quot;He stole his horse,&quot; and from this we derive all such phrases as,
+&quot;He set him a-foot for his blankets,&quot; &quot;He set him a-foot for his furs,&quot;
+&quot;He set him a-foot for his wife.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The springy tussocks of grass growing in swampy places are <i>t&ecirc;tes des
+femmes</i>, a name that pleased our fancy and made us think each time we
+negotiated them of walking over the swaying heads of women in a crowd.
+To call the tribes together, Indians are wont to send out significant
+little pieces of wood. The announcement in the society columns, if the
+Indians had any, would be, &quot;The Crees sent out chips for a crush.&quot; An
+Indian far down the Mackenzie had a name that kings might envy. He was
+known among his tribe as <i>The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps</i>. When a
+beardless and ardent missionary approached this splendid chief, wanting
+to &quot;convert&quot; him to the Christian religion, the old man replied with
+indulgent dignity, &quot;My son, for eighty years have I served the Great
+Spirit in my own way. I fear I am now too old to change.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<h3>HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as<br>
+the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.&quot;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">&mdash;<i>Leviticus, XIX</i>, 34.</span><br>
+<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0388"></a>
+<img src="images/img0388.jpg" width="365" height="284" alt="A Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba" title="">
+<BR><B>A Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Edmonton once more. Two Spanish sailors shipwrecked and navigating the
+Pacific on a log, search the shore for a sign. Into what land are they
+drifting? The one at the bow (does a log have a bow?) sees something
+through the haze&mdash;&quot;<i>Gracias a Dios</i>! Praise be to God, it is a
+Christian country! I see the gallows!&quot; We too get our sign. We reach
+Edmonton on Convocation Day.</p>
+
+<p>Most young countries for the first ten years of their lives confine
+their energies to roads, bridges, transportation&mdash;things of the
+market-place. Alberta has been a full-fledged Province of Canada for
+barely three years, and, coming out of the wilds, we sit on the back
+benches and see her open the doors of her first Provincial University.
+The record is unique and significant. On the banks of the Saskatchewan
+rise the walls of the new Parliament Buildings, a replica in small of
+Minnesota's State Capitol at St. Paul. This new Province, carved out of
+the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within
+it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil
+in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a
+hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young
+people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of
+happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would
+you?</p>
+
+<p>The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan.
+On his promised visit to the Orkneys the old man had gotten as far as
+Winnipeg, where the crowds of the modern city affrighted him. &quot;Miss
+Cameron, the men on the streets were as trees walking, and no man
+stopped to ask how the other was doing. If that is the world, I wanted
+to go no farther. I'm going back to Chipewyan, and I will take my family
+with me. We go home with dogs on the first ice!&quot; Poor Wyllie! Before the
+bells rang out the Old Year, his soul heard the summons none may
+disregard, and alone he went out on the Long Journey.</p>
+
+<p>What of Inspector Pelletier, Walker, Joyce, and Conway, essaying the
+traverse from Resolution to Hudson Bay? For weeks after coming out we
+waited for news of the party. Month succeeded month and no word came out
+of the white silence. Hudson Bay has no daily mail service. &quot;There ain't
+no busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay.&quot; It is not until March that
+the welcome word comes that the original party safely made salt water.
+The relieved tension at Regina headquarters and the joy of personal
+friends is dimmed by the news of the death of Corporal Donaldson, who
+joined the others at Chesterfield Inlet. Donaldson, in company with
+Corporal Reeves, started down Hudson Bay in an open boat and encountered
+a herd of walruses. Enraged and maddened at the shots of the men, one
+huge animal made a charge, the boat was upset, and Donaldson, trying to
+make shore, was drowned. Reeves survived.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to be a chapter of accidents. Just as this book goes to press
+we learn of a double fatality which attended the transport of the 1909
+outfit of Count von Hammerstein. This plucky developer of McMurray
+oilfields, while running Grand Rapids on the Athabasca (the rapids which
+we had descended in an empty while the other sturgeon-heads were
+discharging freight at Grand Rapids Island), struck a boulder. The boat
+turned turtle and the three men were tossed into the torrent,&mdash;von
+Hamerstein, V. Volksooky, a young Russian, and a French half-breed, La
+France. The Count was washed ashore and escaped, but the others were
+drowned. Deaths such as these are the price of Empire. When the
+railroad reaches the Athabasca, the running of these dangerous rapids
+will no longer be necessary.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0391"></a>
+<img src="images/img0391.jpg" width="269" height="361" alt="Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>In the footprints of Back and Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and Sir
+John Franklin, for six months we have been treading the silent places.
+We have thought much of these faith-possessed men who found the roads
+that others follow. In faith they wrought. Canada does well to honour
+these great of old, and that she appreciates the work of her early
+explorers is shown in the fact that British Columbia recently granted a
+pension to the granddaughter of Simon Fraser, the man who in 1808 first
+sailed down the great river that bears his name. But the day of our
+great men is not over; Canada still in her great North and West has
+Pathfinders of Empire. The early voyageurs made their quest in the
+dugout and the birchbark; and the tools of these are rails of steel and
+iron horses.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0392"></a>
+<img src="images/img0392.jpg" width="262" height="329" alt="William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We are accustomed to look upon a railroad as a cold thing of dirt and
+sand and rock, ties and steel,&mdash;a mechanical something associated with
+gradients and curves. But the history of railroading in Canada is one
+long romance; back of each line is its creative wizard. We are too near
+these men to get their proper measure; the historian of the future will
+place their names on Canada's bead-roll:&mdash;Charles M. Hays, the forceful
+President of the Grand Trunk Pacific; Mackenzie and Mann; William Whyte
+of the Canadian Pacific. Canada owes much to Caledonia. Nine-tenths of
+those pioneers of pioneers, the trading adventurers of the H.B. Company,
+came from Scotland, that grey land where a judicious mixture of
+Scripture and Shorter Catechism, oatmeal and austerity, breeds boys of
+dour determination and pawky wit, boys who, whatever their shortcomings,
+are not wont to carry their wishbone where their backbone ought to be. A
+conspicuous example of the dynamic Scottish Canadian, hale at sixty-six,
+is William Whyte, Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At an
+age when most men are content to &quot;drowse them close by a dying fire,&quot;
+William Whyte finds himself in complete charge of all the affairs of the
+Canadian Pacific Railway Company between the Great Lakes and the
+Pacific. Through the positions of brakemen, freight clerk, yard master,
+conductor, night station-agent, passenger agent, this man worked on his
+own passage along Fame's ladder. Twenty years of adolescence and
+preparation, twenty years with the Grand Trunk, a quarter of a century
+with the Canadian Pacific, this is William Whyte's record of splendid
+service. He has always played the game and he is still in the harness.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0393"></a>
+<img src="images/img0393.jpg" width="219" height="315" alt="Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern
+Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern
+Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0394"></a>
+<img src="images/img0394.jpg" width="254" height="298" alt="William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>When people enquired of the early Christians, &quot;What do you call your new
+religion?&quot; they answered, &quot;We call it <i>The Road</i>.&quot; If religion is the
+best work of a man made visible, as I think it is, then the Canadian
+Northern Road may well stand for the religious expression of the men
+who made it. It takes more than money, more than dreams, more than
+ambition, for two men in twelve years to build, own, and personally
+control five thousand miles of railway. As Riley says, it takes sweat. A
+mile a day for twelve years,&mdash;this is the construction-record of the
+Canadian Northern. It sounds like the story of Jonah's gourd. In 1896,
+nothing. In 1909, a railroad line with earnings of ten million dollars a
+year west of Port Arthur alone, and twelve thousand people on the
+regular pay-roll. Beginning in Manitoba and operating in the three
+prairie Provinces, the Canadian Northern is primarily a western railway,
+its remarkable growth being coincident with and closely related to the
+tide of immigration.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0395"></a>
+<img src="images/img0395.jpg" width="362" height="200" alt="In the Wheat Fields" title="">
+<BR><B>In the Wheat Fields</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>As a case in point, on our way south from Edmonton we pass through the
+divisional point of Vermilion on the Canadian Northern, which is not to
+be confounded with our Far North Vermilion-on-the-Peace. Vermilion
+exemplifies wonderfully the Go-Fever and the Grow-Fever of the
+Prairies. Before it was three months old its citizens had organised a
+Board of Trade, had given it a Methodist Church, a newspaper, a bank, a
+public school, three lumber-yards, three hotels, three restaurants, four
+implement warehouses, two hardware stores, two butcher shops, four real
+estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a
+steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a
+bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two
+doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There
+were two pool-rooms and a bowling-alley.</p>
+
+<p>Farther south we reach the town of Vonda. The Canadian Northern reached
+this neighbourhood, and the town-site was surveyed in June, 1905. That
+year Vonda shipped over the line one hundred thousand bushels of wheat,
+and in 1906 her exports were five hundred thousand bushels. The Canadian
+farmer looks upon the railroad as his friend; you cannot expect <i>him</i> to
+use the inclusive condemnation, &quot;Corporations have no souls.&quot; The main
+line of the Canadian Northern runs from Port Arthur on Lake
+Superior&mdash;where, by the way, stands the world's largest grain
+elevator&mdash;to beyond Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan, operating in the
+heart of one gigantic wheat-farm. The method of construction has been
+unique. The owners commenced to build branch railways almost before they
+had a main line. Little spurs to small elevators grew into long branches
+flanked with bigger elevators, and the elevators evolved into villages,
+towns, and cities, until to-day the result of twelve years' growth shows
+a main line of thirteen hundred miles, with over three thousand miles
+of branch railways. An orchard tree is a good fruit-bearer when the
+thick clustering branches are more in evidence than the long thin trunk,
+and the same applies to railroads. But this main line will grow, too.
+Working out from its wheaten heart, its natural line of growth is east
+to Hudson Bay, north beyond Edmonton, and west to the Pacific. Surely
+the tentacles are pushing out. Already the Alberta Legislature has
+granted the Canadian Northern a charter to Athabasca Landing, and one
+hundred miles of steel will here tap all the lush land watered by the
+Peace and the Athabasca.</p>
+
+<p>More interesting than the line which gridirons the wheat-lands we are
+passing through, are the men who made it. To try to write the history of
+Western Canada's development and not speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann
+would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without
+mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil
+Rhodes of Canada&mdash;gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and
+with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher,
+he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of
+action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a
+saw-mill. Three things come to him as priceless treasure out of the
+self-discipline of these experiences: a rare aptitude to see and to
+focus the central idea of any proposition, quick and unerring decision,
+and the power of ready calculation. &quot;I am seldom wrong in a figure,&quot; is
+one of his few admissions about himself. The President of the Canadian
+Northern travels without a secretary, dictates letters sparingly, and
+works in an office as bare of adornment as a monk's cell.</p>
+
+<p>And his working partner? Donald D. Mann is a man of deeds rather than
+words. James J. Hill has declared Mr. Mann to be the greatest railway
+builder in the world. Mr. Mann was born in Ontario not far from the
+sleepy town of Acton and just six miles east of Rockwood, the birthplace
+of James J. Hill. These two boys learned to swim in the same
+swimming-hole. One wonders from what roadside spring they quaffed the
+draught which sent them railroad-building. Mr. Mann thinks it a great
+advantage to be born a country boy, for he says it makes a lad frugal,
+strong, and resourceful. It worked out this way in his own case at
+least, for there is not a thing in railroad building that Mr. Mann
+cannot do with his own hands, from shoeing a mule to finding the best
+pass in the Rockies through which to slide his iron horse down to the
+sea. Direct, strong, simple, he knows how to control himself and manage
+others. D.D. Mann is a conspicuous example of what a Canadian boy has
+managed to accomplish by his own efforts. The beauty of this Western
+Canada is that it holds out opportunities to every plucky lad who has
+initiative and who is willing to work; nothing is stratified, the whole
+thing is formative.</p>
+
+<p>While the steel kings are letting the light of day into this great
+granary, they are being helped by a government representative, as
+democratic and direct as any of the pathmakers whose visible work we
+have been noticing. The Hon. Frank Oliver, Canada's Minister of the
+Interior, is essentially a self-made man. Before the railroad men
+realised their vision splendid, young Mr. Oliver and his bride rode into
+Edmonton on an ox-cart, with a modest little printing-press tucked away
+among the wedding-gifts and household goods. Oliver was a practical
+printer and soon issued a hand-dodger called by courtesy a newspaper.
+The editing habit sticks. The Minister of the Interior owns and
+publishes the Edmonton <i>Bulletin</i>. Mr. Mann says, &quot;I like building
+railroads&quot;; Mr. Oliver might parody him and say, &quot;I like building
+newspapers.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0399"></a>
+<img src="images/img0399.jpg" width="238" height="346" alt="Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior" title="">
+<BR><B>Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Arrived at Winnipeg, we look back across this great prairie we have
+twice traversed. The land stands ready to produce bread for the nations;
+Nature has done her part, now man must do his. The two greatest needs of
+Western Canada to-day are transportation and immigration. Of the one we
+have spoken; the other claims our interest even more compelling, for man
+is more vital than machinery. Canada is a country with a meagre past, a
+solid present, and an illimitable future.</p>
+
+<p>She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man's
+sky,&mdash;where wilderness and man are meeting. The flood of immigration
+hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the
+immigration policy of a government. It is the natural sequence of the
+economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least
+resistance to a more favourable situation. The people who are coming in
+are not dreamers but workers. &quot;The world's greatest wheat-farm,&quot; says
+the economist. It is more than this: it is a human crucible, and we are
+witnessing here the birth-throes of an entirely new nation.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0400"></a>
+<img src="images/img0400.jpg" width="366" height="289" alt="Threshing Grain" title="">
+<BR><B>Threshing Grain</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>While seventy-five per cent of Canada's wheat-farmers are either
+Canadian, American, or British-born, and of the class that preserves the
+homogeneity of the race, every country on the map pays tribute to the
+plains. Austrians are here and Galicians, Hungarians and Belgians,
+Dutch and French and Germans, Italians and Polish, the Russian
+Doukhobortsi, Finns and Danes and Icelanders, Swedes in thousands and
+stalwart Norwegians. South Africans and West Indians are coming in with
+Bermudians and Jamaicans and the bearded Spaniard. Far off on the
+Pacific Coast, strangers are knocking at the western gate,&mdash;Chinese,
+Japanese, and Hindoos.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0401"></a>
+<img src="images/img0401.jpg" width="367" height="249" alt="Doukhobors Threshing Flax" title="">
+<BR><B>Doukhobors Threshing Flax</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>There is no Established Church in Canada; it is the freest land in the
+world. On his one hundred and sixty government-given acres, the new
+arrival may worship his God in his own way. The Greek Church in Winnipeg
+has a Bishop who one day each year makes holy water of the Red River
+when the Czar is performing the same blessing on the Neva. Down in
+Southern Alberta refugee Mormons from Salt Lake grow sugar-beets,
+revere the memory of Brigham Young, and multiply after their kind. Until
+within two years ago the expatriated Russian Doukhobors maintained a
+commonwealth of ten thousand souls, eschewing liquors and flesh-meats,
+making the prairie blossom into bumper harvests, and holding all things
+in common.</p>
+
+<p>Winnipeg has three thousand Icelanders who, every August, take a day off
+to celebrate the fact that the Danish King, in 1874, granted a
+constitution to Iceland. When you ask them why they came to America,
+they say, &quot;Did not our Lief Ericcson discover this continent, why
+shouldn't we come?&quot; The Icelanders boast two members in the Manitoba
+legislature. A Mennonite is a member of the Parliament of Alberta. The
+first graduate of Wesley College in Winnipeg to find a place on the
+staff of his Alma Mater is also a Mennonite. Winnipeg has several, Roman
+Catholic Polish lawyers. Statistics prove that the young Jewish people
+of Western Canada patronise the public libraries more than any other
+class or race. All the citizens-in-the-making are closely interested in
+politics. Recently there was chronicled the formation in Winnipeg of a
+Syrian Liberal Club and a Syrian Conservative Club. Up in Edmonton the
+Galicians (Ruthenians?) have just organised a corps of volunteer militia
+to serve the Canadian country of their adoption.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0403"></a>
+<img src="images/img0403.jpg" width="315" height="405" alt="Sir William Van Horne, First President
+of the Canadian Pacific Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>Sir William Van Horne, First President of the Canadian Pacific Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Americanisation of Canada? During the past seven years over three
+hundred and fifty thousand people have come to us from the United
+States. Is this American invasion to be feared politically? Western
+Canada has no more desirable citizens than those who come to us from
+the south. They are not failures, but are people who have made good,
+intent on making better. One generation at the most,&mdash;sometimes but a
+few years,&mdash;converts these into Canadian voters. The troubled English
+brother should remember that when &quot;American&quot; farmers in Canada pronounce
+on Canadian matters they do so constitutionally at the polls and as
+Canadian citizens. As Canadians we believe that our national
+institutions, though far from perfect, are in some respects superior to
+those of the United States. We believe they are at once more elastic,
+more responsive to the popular will, and more stable because more
+elastic. The west is gaining in political power as it gains in
+population and prosperity, and fortunately our government machinery has
+been well tested before it is called upon to feel the strain of our
+rapidly-increasing population. Canada may construct where older nations
+must reconstruct, and if we borrow an American institution or two,
+provided it be a good one, let no man hold up hands in holy horror.
+Japan has borrowed nationally whenever she saw, lying around loose,
+something she could use, and Japan is as Japanese at heart as she was in
+the days of the Tycoon and the two-sworded Samurai. Belgium to-day,
+after centuries of contiguity and intercourse, is not exactly France;
+and little Switzerland, surrounded by the Powers, will be Switzerland
+till the last curtain-fall.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Is Canada loyal to England?&quot; is a question that sometimes meets us. No,
+Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let
+England see to it that she, too, is loyal.</p>
+
+<p>Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the
+Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace,
+are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated
+as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and
+the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land.
+God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the
+diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people in
+time will intermarry,&mdash;Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with
+these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations.
+Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type
+will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into
+the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who will step out?</p>
+
+<p>In the point of population, Canada begins the twentieth century where
+the United States began the nineteenth. The race is ours to run. Wise
+the nation, as is the individual, who can learn his lesson from a page
+torn out of his neighbour's book, learn what to follow and what to
+avoid. Our fore-elders who laid the foundations for us laid them
+four-square. As Canadians, we owe a debt to the Fathers of Confederation
+and their successors. In the West, our particular thanks are due to the
+Hudson's Bay Company, the R.N.W.M.P., and all those factors which
+established British law &quot;in the beginning.&quot; Canada has never seen a
+lynching; we have had no Indian war; with but one weak-kneed exception
+there has been no attempt to hold up a train within our Western borders.
+This is the inheritance of the people of this generation, and on this
+foundation we must build. Our hope is in the children.</p>
+
+<p>On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had
+been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New
+Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary. They were
+all singing &quot;<i>The Maple Leaf Forever</i>.&quot; It is the lessons these children
+are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the
+future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel
+wheat. In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed. Many
+signs are full of hope. Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with
+dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children
+in school. Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post. At
+all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed
+out with them!</p>
+
+<p>May I close with a purely personal note? At the end of a summer which
+had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman
+priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my
+life. We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls,
+the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the
+Lake of the Woods country. I was anxious to get the story of the
+recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs. But
+the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve. We
+turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary. Looking in
+at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a
+blackboard problem. &quot;If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a
+trench 82 yards long&mdash;&mdash;.&quot; And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse
+stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You are interested?&quot; queried the Father.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; I acknowledged, &quot;I once taught school.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I taught school for twenty-five years,&quot; I admitted.</p>
+
+<p>We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he
+turned to me with, &quot;And you taught school&mdash;for twen-ty five years?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I nodded my head, and we went on. At the next landing the remark was
+repeated. At the foot of the stairs he excused himself and came back
+with the photographs which he presented to me with an Old World courtesy
+and dignity. Grasping my hand in farewell, once more the man of God
+wondered, &quot;And for twen-ty five years you taught school. And you remain
+so&mdash;&quot; He hesitated for the word, and I wondered what it would be. At
+last it came,&mdash;the tribute of one who expected to teach school all his
+life to one who had put in a quarter of a century at the work and still
+survived,&mdash;&quot;You have taught school for twen-ty five years, <i>and you
+remain so glad!</i>&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And this is the keynote of what the summer has left with us. As
+Canadians, looking at this Western Canada which has arrived and thinking
+of the lands of Canada's fertile Northland far beyond, for the future we
+are full of optimism, and of the present we are <i>glad</i>.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="ROUTES"></a><h2>ROUTES OF TRAVEL</h2>
+<br>
+
+<h3>ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO THE ARCTIC VIA THE ATHABASCA AND MACKENZIE RIVER
+SYSTEMS.</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr>
+<td align=center><b>MILES</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PLACE</b></td>  <td align=center colspan=2><b>PASSENGER TARIFF</b></td>
+   <td align=center colspan=2><b>FREIGHT TARIFF<br>per cwt</b></td>  <td align=center><b>MODE OF TRAVEL</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>TIMES</b></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Edmonton</td><td colspan=2></td><td colspan=2></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>100</td><td>Athabasca Landing </td><td colspan=2>$8.00</td><td colspan=2>$1.00</td>
+   <td>Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy</td> <td>Twice a week all year round</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan=2></td><td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td colspan=2></td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Athabasca Landing</td> <td colspan=4></td>
+   <td rowspan=3>Northern Transportation Co.'s SS. <i>Midnight Sun</i> (when business offers) or scows. From
+                 Athabasca Landing to Grand Rapids.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>120</td><td>Pelican Rapids</td><td>$ 7.50</td><td>$ 7.50</td><td> .75</td><td> .75</td></tr>
+<tr><td>165</td><td>Grand Rapids</td><td>$10.00</td><td>$15.00</td><td>1.50</td><td>1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td>252</td><td>Fort McMurray</td><td>$20.00</td><td>$27.50</td><td>3.25</td><td>3.25</td>
+  <td>Scows from Grand Rapids to Fort McMurray</tr>
+<tr><td>437</td><td>Fort Chipewyan</td><td>$35.00</td><td>$45.00</td><td>4.50</td><td>4.50</td>
+  <td rowspan=2>H.B. Co's SS. <i>Grahame</i> (sternwheel river steamer, 130 ft. x 28 ft.; accommodates 30
+    passengers; blankets supplied; bathroom; meals served 50 cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).
+    From Fort McMurray to Smith's Landing.</td>
+  <td>From June to August inclusive<a name="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>539</td><td>Smith's Landing </td><td>$45.00</td><td>$55.00</td><td>5.50</td><td>5.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td>555</td><td>Fort Smith</td><td>$48.00</td><td>$58.00</td><td>6.25</td><td>6.25</td>
+  <td>H.B. Co. Transport, portage by teams from Smith's Landing to Fort Smith.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>749</td><td>Fort Resolution</td><td>$56.00</td><td>$68.00</td><td>7.25</td><td>8.25</td>
+  <td rowspan=10>H.B. Co's SS. <i>Mackenzie River</i> (strong new sternwheel, lake and river steamer; accommodates 50
+    passengers, same conditions as <i>Grahame</i> above). From Fort Smith to Fort Macpherson.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>819</td><td>Hay River</td><td>$59.00</td><td>$73.00</td><td>7.75</td><td>9.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>869</td><td>Fort Rae</td><td>$62.00</td><td>$78.00 </td><td>8.25</td><td>10.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>917</td><td>Fort Providence</td><td>$65.00</td><td>$82.00</td><td>8.25</td><td>10.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1078</td><td>Fort Simpson</td><td>$73.00</td><td>$92.00</td><td>9.25</td><td>12.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1214</td><td>Fort Wrigley</td><td>$80.00</td><td>$102.00</td><td>10.25</td><td>14.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1398</td><td>Fort Norman</td><td>$87.00 </td><td>$112.00</td><td>11.25</td><td>16.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1572</td><td>Fort Good Hope</td><td>$93.00</td><td>$122.00</td><td>12.25</td><td>18.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1780</td><td>Arctic Red River</td><td>$100.00</td><td>$130.00</td><td>13.00</td><td>19.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1854</td><td>Fort Macpherson<br>(Peel's River)</td><td>$103.00</td><td>$133.00</td><td>13.75</td><td>21.25</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<a name="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1">[1]</a><div class="note"><p> For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Edmonton Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.</p></div>
+
+<h3>ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO PEACE RIVER, VIA THE ATHABASCA RIVER (UP
+STREAM), LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LESSER SLAVE LAKE.</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr>
+<td align=center><b>MILES</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PLACE</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PASSENGER TARIFF</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>FREIGHT TARIFF<br>per cwt</b></td>  <td align=center><b>MODE OF TRAVEL</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>TIMES</b></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Edmonton</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>100</td><td>Athabasca Landing </td><td>$8.00</td><td>$1.00</td>
+   <td>Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy</td> <td>Twice a week all year round</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Athabasca Landing</td> <td colspan=2></td>
+   <td rowspan=2>Northern Transportation Co.'s SS. <i>Midnight Sun</i> (sternwheel river steamer, 120 ft. long x 24 ft.
+       beam; accomodates 35 in staterooms; passengers supply their own blankets; meals served 50 cents each;
+       freight-carrying capacity 50 tons). From Athabasca Landing to Mouth of Lesser Slave River.</td>
+<tr><td>75</td><td>Mouth of Lesser Slave River</td><td>$6.00</td><td> .80</td></tr>
+<tr><td>91</td><td>Norris's (head of rapids)</td><td>$8.00</td><td>1.40</td>
+   <td>Portage 16 miles in N.T. Co's passenger and freight waggons from Mouth of Lesser Slave River to
+       Norris's (head of rapids).</td>
+   <td>From May 15 to Oct. 15<a name="FNanchor_1_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_2"><sup>[2]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>194</td><td>Shaw's Point on LesserSlave Lake</td><td>$16.00</td><td>2.50</td>
+   <td>N.T. Co.'s SS. <i>Northern Light</i> (sidewheel river and lake steamer, 100 ft. long x 26 ft. beam;
+       accommodates 35 in staterooms; passengers supply their own blankets; meals served 50 cents each;
+       freight capacity 30 tons). From Norris's to Shaw's Point.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>201</td><td>Lesser Slave Lake Settlement</td><td></td><td></td><td>Portage 7 miles to the settlement.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Lesser Slave Lake Settlement</td><td></td><td></td>
+  <td rowspan=3>From Lesser Slave Lake Settlement to Peace River Crossing, teams and drivers may be hired; fare depends
+                on number of passengers; takes 3 days. Stopping places at intermediate points, with stabling and hay;
+                bunkhouses for travellers who supply their own bedding and provisions.</td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td></td><td>$10.00 to $25.00 according to number</td><td></td><td>All the year round</td></tr>
+<tr><td>90</td><td>Peace River Crossing (Peace River Landing)</td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<a name="Footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_2">[2]</a><div class="note"><p>
+For&nbsp;further&nbsp;particulars&nbsp;regarding&nbsp;dates&nbsp;and&nbsp;rates,&nbsp;application&nbsp;should&nbsp;be&nbsp;made&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;Hudson's&nbsp;Bay&nbsp;Company,&nbsp;Winnipeg;&nbsp;J.K.
+Cornwall,&nbsp;M.P.P.,&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;Northern&nbsp;Transportation&nbsp;Co.&nbsp;at&nbsp;Edmonton;&nbsp;or&nbsp;to&nbsp;A.&nbsp;G.&nbsp;Harrison,&nbsp;Secretary&nbsp;Board&nbsp;of&nbsp;Trade,&nbsp;Edmonton,
+Alberta.</p></div>
+
+<h3>PEACE RIVER ROUTES:&mdash;(1) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING UP TO HUDSON'S HOPE.
+(2) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING DOWN TO FORT CHIPEWYAN.</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr>
+<td align=center><b>MILES</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PLACE</b></td>  <td align=center colspan=2><b>PASSENGER TARIFF</b></td>
+   <td align=center colspan=2><b>FREIGHT TARIFF<br>per cwt</b></td>  <td align=center><b>MODE OF TRAVEL</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>TIMES</b></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan=2></td><td align=center><b>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td colspan=2></td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Peace River Crossing</td><td></td><td></td><td> </td><td> </td>
+   <td rowspan=4>Having arrived at Peace River Crossing, the traveller may go up the Peace by H.B. SS.
+                <i>Peace River</i> (sternwheel river steamer, electric light, bathroom; accomodates 40 passengers;
+                blankets supplied; meals served 50 cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).</td>
+   <td rowspan=4>From June to August inclusive<a name="FNanchor_1_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>70</td><td>Fort Dunvegan</td><td>$10.00</td><td>$ 5.00</td><td>1.00</td><td> .75</td></tr>
+<tr><td>200</td><td>Fort St. John's</td><td>$25.00</td><td>$15.00</td><td>3.00</td><td>2.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>240</td><td>Hudson's Hope</td><td>$35.00</td><td>$20.00</td><td>5.00</td><td>4.25</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan=2></td><td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td colspan=2></td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Peace River Crossing</td><td></td><td></td><td> </td><td> </td>
+   <td rowspan=3>Or, having arrived at Peace River Crossing, the traveller may go down the Peace.&mdash;<br>
+                 By the H.B. SS. <i>Peace River</i>, from Peace River Crossing to the Chutes of the Peace.</td>
+   <td rowspan=4>From June to August inclusive<a href="#Footnote_1_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>280</td><td>Fort Vermilion</td><td>$15.00</td><td>$25.00</td><td>1.00</td><td>3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td>330</td><td>Chutes of the Peace</td><td>$17.00</td><td>$30.00</td><td>1.75</td><td>4.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td>570</td><td>Fort Chipewyan</td><td>$37.00</td><td>$60.00</td><td>3.25</td><td>7.00</td>
+  <td> By H.B. SS. <i>Grahame</i> or Tug <i>Primrose</i>, from Chutes of the Peace to Fort Chipewyan.</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<a name="Footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_3">[3]</a><div class="note"><p> For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.</p></div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12874 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
+
+
+
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12874 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12874)
diff --git a/old/12874-8.txt b/old/12874-8.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New North, by Agnes Deans Cameron
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New North
+
+Author: Agnes Deans Cameron
+
+Release Date: July 10, 2004 [EBook #12874]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW NORTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brendan Lane and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW NORTH
+
+_Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic_
+
+BY AGNES DEANS CAMERON
+
+_WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR_
+
+
+_Published November, 1909_
+
+[Illustration: A Magnificent Trophy]
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
+
+JESSIE ANDERSON CAMERON
+
+AND
+
+TO ALL THOSE WHO TRY TO LIVE OUT HER SIMPLE RULE "WE MUST JUST TRY TO DO
+THE VERY BEST WE CAN"
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+It is customary to write a preface. Mine shall be short. Out of a full
+heart, I wish to thank all the splendid people of the North who, by
+giving me so freely information and photographs, and chapters out of
+their own lives, have facilitated the writing of this story. For their
+spontaneous kindness to me and mine no acknowledgment that I can here
+make is adequate. What we feel most strongly we cannot put into words.
+
+AGNES DEANS CAMERON.
+
+August, 1909.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
+
+The Mendicants leave Chicago--The invisible parallel of 49 where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver--Union Jack floats on
+an ox-cart--A holy baggage-room--Winnipeg, the Buckle of the
+Wheat-Belt--The trapper and the doctor--Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks--Boy
+Makers of Empire--The vespers of St. Boniface
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+The 1,000-mile wheat-field--Calgary-in-the-Foothills--Edmonton, the end
+of steel--The Brains of a Trans-Continental--Browning on the
+Saskatchewan--East Londoners in tents--Our outfit--A Waldorf-Astoria in
+the wilderness--The lonely cross of the Galician--Height of
+Land--Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., the sleuth of Lesser Slave
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+Athabasca Landing, the Gateway of the North--English gives place to
+Cree--Limit of the Dry Martini--Will the rabbits run?--The woman
+printer--Hymn-books by hand in the Cree syllabic--Baseball even
+here--Rain and reminiscences--The World's Oldest Trust
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
+
+"Farewell, Nistow!"--The rainy deck of a "sturgeon head" under a
+tarpaulin--Drifting by starlight--The wild geese overhead--Forty-foot
+gas-spout at the Pelican--The mosquito makes us blood-brothers--Four
+days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling
+Athabasca--Nomenclature of the North--Sentinels of the Silence
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
+
+The _Go-Quick-Her_ takes the bit in her mouth--Mallards on the
+half-shell--We set the Athabascan Thames afire--Sturgeon-head breaks her
+back on the Big Cascade--Fort McMurray--A stranded argosy, wreckage on
+the beach--Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader--A land flowing with
+coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
+
+Old Fort Chipewyan--In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John
+Franklin--Sir John turns parson--Grey Nuns and brown babies--Where grew
+the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial--Militant missionaries
+fight each other for souls--The strong man Loutit--Wyllie at the
+forge--An electric watch-maker--Where the Gambel sparrow builds--"Out of
+old books"
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
+
+Farewell to the Mounted Police--Our blankets on the deck--Fern odours by
+untravelled ways--Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of
+daylight--Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man--A 23-inch
+trout--First white women at Fond du Lac--Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a
+Fond du Lac library--The hermit padre and the hermit thrush--Worn north
+trails of the trapper--Caribou by the hundred thousands--The phalarope
+and the suffragette
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
+
+World's records beaten on the Athabasca--Down the Slave to Smith's
+Landing--Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned--The Mosquito
+Portage--Fort Smith, the new headquarters--Lady-slippers and
+night-hawks--Steamer built in the wilderness--Last stand of the wood
+bison--The grey wolf persists--Fur-trade and the silver-fox--Breeding
+pelicans.
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
+
+"Red lemol-lade" kiddies--Tons of crystal salt--Great Slave Lake and its
+fertile shores--Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh
+Edward--Hay River and its annual mail--Ploughing with dogs--Bill
+balked--The Alexandra Falls--Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputations
+while you wait.
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
+
+Drowning of De-deed--Fort Simpson, the old headquarters--A mouldy
+museum--The shrew-mice that were not preserved in rum--The farthest
+north library--Gold-seekers and grub-staked brides--Bishop Bompas, the
+Apostle of the North--Owindia, the Weeping One--Fort Simpson in the
+first year of Victoria the Good.
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
+
+Tenny Gouley tells us things--Mackenzie River, past and present--The
+fringed gentian at Fort Wrigley--The fires Mackenzie saw--The weathered
+knob of Bear Rock--Great Bear Lake--Orangeman's Day at Norman--The
+Ramparts of the Mackenzie--Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle--Mignonette and Old World courtesy--We meet Hagar once
+more--Potatoes on the Circle--The Little Church of the Open Door
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
+
+Arctic Red River--Wilfrid Laurier, the merger--Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko, the
+danseuse--Marriage as the Oo-vai-oo-aks see it--Orange-blossoms at
+Su-pi-di-do's--Trading tryst at Barter Island--Floating fathers--By-o
+Baby Bunting--Wild roses and tame Eskimo--Midnight football with walrus
+bladder and enthusiasm--Education that makes for manliness
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
+
+Sir John Franklin's lobsticks at Point Separation--We reach Fort
+Macpherson on the Peel--Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., eulogizes the
+Eskimo--An Eskimo wife must make boots that are waterproof--She ariseth
+also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her
+household--Cribbage-boards the link between Dick Swiveller and the
+Eskimo--Linked sweetness long drawn out--Chauncey Depew of the
+Kogmollycs
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
+
+The Midnight Sun--Our friend the heathen--"We want to go to
+hell"--Catching fish by prayer--The Eskimo and the Flood--Pink tea at
+the Pole--Always a balance in the Eskimo Bank--Marriage for better and
+not for worse--Christmas carols even here
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
+
+Jurisprudence on ice--The generous Innuit--Emmie-ray, the Delineator
+pattern--Weak races are pressed south--Roxi, a re-incarnation of Sir
+Philip Sidney--Blubbery bon vivants--Eskimo knew the Elephant--We write
+the last chapter of the story of McClure, the navigator--Cannibalism at
+the Circle
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TALE OF A WHALE
+
+Circumpolar Bowhead makes his last stand--Whales here and elsewhere--The
+Yankee peddler at Canada's back-door--Thirteen and a half million in
+whale values--Wind-swept Herschel, the Isle of Whales--One wife for a
+thousand years--Baleen, Spermaceti, and Ambergris--Save the Whale
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
+
+Lives lost for the sake of a white bead--The stars come back--The Keele
+party from the Dollarless Divide--"Here and there a grayling"--Across
+Great Slave Lake--The first white women at Fort Rae--Land of the
+musk-ox--Tales of 76 below--Two Thursdays in one week--Rabbits on ice
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TO MC MURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
+
+The nuptials of 'Norine--Ladies round gents and gents don't go--The
+fossil-gatherers--I give my name to a Cree kiddie--A solid mile of red
+raspberries--The typewriter an uncanny medicine--The Beetle Fleet leaves
+for Outside--Shipwrecked on a batture
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
+
+Ho! for the Peace--One break in 900 miles of navigation--A grey
+wolf--Bear-meat and the Se-weep-i-gons--Ninety-foot spruces--Tom Kerr
+and his bairns--The fish-seine that never fails--Our lobsticks by Red
+River--The Chutes of the Peace
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
+
+The farthest north flour-mill--The man who made Vermilion--Wheat at
+$1.25 a bushel--An Experimental Farm in latitude 58° 30'--An unoccupied
+kingdom as large as Belgium--Where the steamer _Peace River_ was
+built--The hospitable home of the Wilsons--Vermilion a Land of Promise
+Fulfilled--Culture and the Cloister--Thomas of Canterbury on the Stump
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
+
+Se-li-nah of the happy heart--My premier moose--The rare and resourceful
+boatmen of the North--Alexander Mackenzie's last camp
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
+
+Pleasant prairies of the Peace--We tramp a hundred miles--The Angelus at
+Lesser Slave--Poole coats and Norfolk shooting-jackets--Roast duck
+galore--Alec Kennedy of the Nile--Louise the Wetigo, she ate nineteen
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
+
+Jim wins: Allie Brick can't run--100,000,000 acres of
+wheat-land--Jilly-Loo bird still lacks a rib--100 moose in one
+month--Peripatetic judges but no prisoners--The best-tattooed man in the
+Province of Alberta--The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
+
+Edmonton again--Wyllie goes out on the Long Journey--Donaldson killed by
+a walrus--Two drowned in the Athabasca--Steel kings and iron
+horses--Wheat-plains the melting-pot of a New Nation
+
+ROUTES OF TRAVEL
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+A magnificent trophy
+Map showing the Author's Route
+Sir Wilfred Laurier
+Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada
+Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt
+The Canadian Women's Press Club
+A section of Edmonton
+The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan
+Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta
+A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge
+Athabasca Landing
+Necessity knows no law at Athabasca
+The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians
+C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.
+A "sturgeon-head" on the Athabasca
+"Farewell, Nistow!"
+Grand Rapids, on the Athabasca River
+Portage at Grand Rapids Island
+Our transport at Grand Rapids Island
+Cheese-shaped nodules, Grand Rapids Island
+Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police
+Towing the wrecked barge ashore
+The scow breaks her back and fills
+Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray trader
+The steamer _Grahame_
+An oil derrick on the Athabasca
+Tar banks on the Athabasca
+Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca
+Three of a kind
+Woman's work of the Far North
+Lake Athabasca in winter
+Bishop Grouard
+The modern note-book
+Tepee of a Caribou-eater Indian
+A bit of Fond du Lac
+Birch-barks at Fond du Lac
+Fond du Lac
+Father Beibler carrying water to a dying Indian
+Smith's Landing
+A transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing
+Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company
+The world's last buffalo
+Tracking a scow across mountain portage
+The "red lemol-lade" boys
+Salt beds
+Unloading at Fort Resolution
+Coming to "take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake
+On the Slave
+Dogs cultivating potatoes
+David Villeneuve
+Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson
+A Slavi family at Fort Simpson
+A Slavi type from Fort Simpson
+Interior of St. David's Cathedral
+Fort Simpson by the light of the Aurora
+Indians at Fort Norman
+Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman
+The ramparts of the Mackenzie
+Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie mouth
+A Kogmollye family
+Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak family
+Farthest North football
+Two spectators at the game
+An Eskimo exhibit
+Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo togs
+Two wise ones
+A Nunatalmute Eskimo family
+Cribbage-boards of walrus tusks
+Useful articles made by the Eskimo
+Home of Mrs. Macdonald
+Eskimo kayaks at the Arctic edge
+A wise man of the Dog-Ribs
+A study in expression
+We tell the tale of a whale
+Two little ones at Herschel Island
+Breeding grounds of the seal
+The Keele party on the Gravel River
+The first typewriter on Great Slave Lake
+The bell at Fort Rae mission
+The musk-ox
+A meadow at McMurray
+Starting up the Athabasca
+On the Clearwater
+Evening on the Peace
+Our lobsticks on the Peace
+The chutes of the Peace
+Pulling out the _Mee-wah-sin_
+The flour mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace
+Articles made by Indians
+The Hudson's Bay Store
+Papillon, a Beaver brave
+Going to school in winter
+My premier moose
+Beaver camp, on Paddle River
+The site of old Fort McLeod
+Jean Baptiste, pilot on the Peace
+Fort Dunvegan on the Peace
+Fort St. John on the Peace
+Where King was arrested
+Alec Kennedy with his two sons
+Cannibal Louise, her little girl and Miss Cameron
+A Peace River Pioneer
+Three generations
+A family at the Lesser Slave
+A one-night stand
+A rye field in Brandon, Manitoba
+Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway
+William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway
+Donald D. Maun, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern Railway
+William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway
+In the wheat fields
+Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior
+Threshing grain
+Doukhobors threshing flax
+Sir William Van Horne, first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Map of the Author's Route]
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW NORTH
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
+
+
+"We are as mendicants who wait
+  Along the roadside in the sun.
+Tatters of yesterday and shreds
+  Of morrow clothe us every one.
+
+"And some are dotards, who believe
+  And glory in the days of old;
+While some are dreamers, harping still
+  Upon an unknown age of gold.
+
+"O foolish ones, put by your care!
+  Where wants are many, joys are few;
+And at the wilding springs of peace,
+  God keeps an open house for you.
+
+"But there be others, happier few,
+  The vagabondish sons of God,
+Who know the by-ways and the flowers,
+  And care not how the world may plod."
+
+Isn't it Riley who says, "Ef you want something, an' jest dead set
+a-longin' fer it with both eyes wet, and tears won't bring it, why, you
+try sweat"? Well, we had tried sweat and longing for two years, with
+planning and hoping and the saving of nickels, and now we are off!
+
+Shakespeare makes his man say, "I will run as far as God has any
+ground," and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on
+going till we strike the Arctic,--straight up through Canada. Most
+writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and
+travel west by the C.P.R., following the line of least resistance till
+they reach the Pacific. Then they go back to dear old England and tell
+the world all about Canada, their idea of the half-continent being
+Euclid's conception of a straight line, "length without breadth."
+
+[Illustration: Sir Wilfred Laurier]
+
+But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt
+of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary
+and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves
+after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to
+follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from
+Dan to Beersheba to say "All is barren," but to come near to the people,
+our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than
+Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of
+Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting
+that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.
+
+We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of
+all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend
+of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward,--till
+you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our
+ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St.
+Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of
+the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong
+hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on
+the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.
+
+There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage
+was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered
+Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool.
+But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last
+unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out,
+pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a
+dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.
+
+Kipling speaks of "a route unspoiled of Cook's," and we have found it.
+Going to the office of Thos. Cook & Son, in Chicago, with a friend who
+had planned a Mediterranean tour, I gently said, "I wonder if you can
+give me information about a trip I am anxious to take this summer." The
+young man smiled and his tone was that which we accord to an indulged
+child, "I guess we can. Cook & Son give information on _most_ places."
+"Very well," I said, "I want to go from Chicago to the Arctic by the
+Mackenzie River, returning home by the Peace and the Lesser Slave. Can
+you tell me how long it will take, what it will cost, and how I make my
+connections?" He was game; he didn't move an eyebrow, but went off to
+the secret recesses in the back office to consult "the main guy," "the
+chief squeeze," "the head push," "the big noise." Back they came
+together with a frank laugh, "Well, Miss Cameron, I guess you've got us.
+Cook's have no schedule to the Arctic that way." They were able,
+however, to give accurate information as to how one should reach Hudson
+Bay, with modes of travel, dates, and approximate cost. But this journey
+for another day.
+
+Leaving Chicago one sizzling Sunday in mid-May, we (my niece and I) stop
+for a day to revel in bird and blossoms at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota,
+then silently in the night cross the invisible parallel of 49° where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver.
+
+With the Polar Ocean as ultimate goal, we cannot help thinking how
+during the last generation the Arctic Circle has been pushed steadily
+farther north. Forty years ago Minneapolis and St. Paul were struggling
+trading-posts, and all America north of them was the range of the
+buffalo and the Indian. Then Fort Garry (Winnipeg) became Farthest
+North. Before starting, I had dug out from the Public Library the record
+of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago,
+deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their
+minutes) that "Our Northern tier of States is too far north to
+successfully grow wheat." For years Winnipeg was considered the northern
+limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of
+limitation was pushed farther back until it is
+Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared "Farthest North." To-day
+we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due
+north of Edmonton!
+
+In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh
+beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all
+interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach
+Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These
+were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. "But," the old chap
+says, "the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the
+Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it
+stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal
+to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin'
+red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set
+on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and
+what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart,
+poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the
+old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at
+sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all
+wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife." This incident was
+not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known
+to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his
+way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the
+war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured
+clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing
+this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by
+the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.
+
+[Illustration: Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada]
+
+What Cook & Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg
+furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for
+two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when
+the Second Charles ruled in England,--an age when men said not "How
+cheap?" but "How good?", not "How easy?" but "How well?" The Hudson's
+Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the
+Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can
+travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except
+under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for
+you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and
+sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot.
+Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be
+transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats,
+guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort
+Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between
+Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull
+whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.
+
+For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the
+Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the
+benefit of employés, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here
+they are as we copied them down:
+
+Let all things be done decently and in order.
+    1 Cor. xiv, 40.
+
+Be punctual, be regular, be clean.
+Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
+Be obliging and kind one to another.
+Let no angry word be heard among you
+Be not fond of change. (Sic.)
+Be clothed with humility, not finery.
+Take all things by the smooth handle.
+Be civil to all, but familiar with few.
+
+As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American,--
+
+"Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let
+go your overcoat. Thieves are around,"
+
+the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our
+shoulders, "Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!"
+
+A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a
+transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, "What makes
+Winnipeg?" Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it
+out. "This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our
+nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches
+going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty
+stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the
+remittance man from England, sorr," with a quizzical look at the checked
+suit of his interlocutor, "shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies
+up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!" As Mulcahey winks
+the other eye, we drift out into this "Buckle of the Wheat-Belt."
+
+What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her
+a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of
+her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an
+increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one
+hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the
+world's history.
+
+Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and
+bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has
+had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now
+counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the
+British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway
+tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million
+dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings
+in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801;
+and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without
+Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade
+filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a
+day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed
+a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western
+Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures--the lure of the
+land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is
+estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one
+thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth
+of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring
+the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in
+figures--the "power of the man."
+
+[Illustration: Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt]
+
+Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City
+of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation
+of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg
+sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages--Armenian, Arabic,
+Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu,
+Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that
+some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast
+the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would
+Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the _London
+Times_, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out
+from among the flotsam in the kelp.
+
+Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we
+cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred
+steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate
+that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the
+six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This
+will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold
+by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for
+breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the
+list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics
+of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that
+these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do.
+"But they are all good pay," the implement-man says. Looking at the red
+ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history.
+The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out
+into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these
+ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of
+faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and
+formative!
+
+We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we
+reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A.
+Stewart says to us, "Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has
+fallen by the way." We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a
+cot. "Tell him that you are going into the land of fur," whispers the
+doctor, "he has been a trapper all his life."
+
+Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and
+his snow-shoes pinned him fast. When dragged out he had suffered so with
+the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to
+the hospital. Hard luck? Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with
+mercy. Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice
+of life,--a doctor with a man's brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the
+heart of a little child. The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has
+one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of
+motion remaining in the other leg. His vocal cords are so affected that
+the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the
+mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man. Between patient and
+doctor, a third man entered the drama,--Mr. Grey, a convalescent.
+Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother
+studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel,
+to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.
+
+Who is this patient? A man without friends or influence, not attractive
+in appearance, more than distressing to listen to,--just one more worker
+thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life. The
+consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not
+even arrest the creeping death. Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner
+of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked.
+Dr. Stewart had two men's work to do. He worked all day and was busy
+well into the night. A doctor's natural tendency is to see in each man
+that he ministers to merely "a case," a manifestation of some disease to
+be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages. But in the
+Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young
+men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.
+
+The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper
+was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke
+by twilight. We are happiest when we create. So he said to Carlton, "Did
+you ever write a story?" The head shook answer. "Well, why don't you
+try? You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody
+else knows. Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here."
+
+The outcome was disappointing. The uncouth sounds, translated by Grey,
+were bald, bare, and stiff. Soon the stiffness worked off. With
+half-shut eyes Carlton lived again in the woods. He lifted the dewy
+branch of a tree and surprised the mother deer making the toilet of her
+fawn, saw the beaver busied with his home of mud and wattles, heard the
+coyote scream across the prairie edge. Easily the thought flowed, and
+the stuff that Grey handed in was a live story that breathed. In that
+brave heart the joy of the creator stirred, and with it that feeling
+which makes all endeavour worth while--the thought that somebody cares.
+A close observer at this stage of the game may read, too, on the face of
+Grey the kindly look that comes when we forget ourselves long enough to
+take the trouble to reach out for another man's viewpoint.
+
+Carlton's short stories, submitted to a publisher, were pronounced
+good, were accepted, and brought a cash return. They struck a new note
+among the squabblings of the nature-fakers. Favourable comment came from
+those who read them, who, reading, knew naught of their three authors.
+Before this Carlton had never written a line for publication; but he had
+been a true observer. He had felt, and was able to project himself into
+the minds of those living things he had seen and hunted.
+
+I leave the hospital cot with a strange lump forming in my throat,
+although every one around me, and the patient most of all, is gay and
+blithe. I say to Carlton, "I wish I could take your knowledge and your
+eyes with me into the North, there is so much I will miss because of my
+lack of knowledge." With Grey's kindly interpretation I get my answer,
+"You must take your own mind, your own eyes; you must see for yourself."
+
+During the last day in Winnipeg, while the Kid (like faithful
+Ariovistus) is looking after the impedimenta, I snatch half an hour to
+look in at the Royal Alexandra upon the reception which the Women's
+Canadian Club is tendering to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Rain-bespattered,
+short-skirted, and anchored with disreputable rubbers gluey with
+Winnipeg mud, I sit on the fringe of things, fairly intoxicated with the
+idea that we are off and this North trip no dream. Mrs. Sanford Evans
+presides with her usual _savoir faire_ and ushers in the guest of the
+day, beautifully-gowned and gracious.
+
+Like a bolt from the blue came the summons from the president, and I,
+all muddy, am called to the seats of the mighty. I have never seen a
+more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg
+Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face
+them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of
+mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my
+unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success
+of my journey. Mrs. Humphry Ward calls attention to the lack of
+playgrounds in England. She wants to bring more fresh air and space to
+the crowded people of the Old World. I submit that my wish is the
+mathematical converse to hers. My great desire is to call attention to
+the great unoccupied lands of Canada, to induce people from the crowded
+centres of the Old World to use the fresh air of the New.
+
+[Illustration: The Canadian Women's Press Club]
+
+To those who bid us good-bye at the train, the Kid and I yell
+exultantly, "All aboard for the Arctic Ocean and way ports!"
+
+A group of Galicians sitting by the curb, two mothers and seven small
+children, one a baby at the breast, make the last picture we see as the
+train pulls out. It was the end of their first day in Winnipeg. The
+fathers of the flock evidently were seeking work and had left their
+families gazing through the portals of the strange new land. In the
+half-sad, altogether-brave lines on the young mothers' faces and their
+tender looks bent on the little ones we read the motive responsible for
+all migrations--"Better conditions for the babies." In the little
+fellows of seven or eight with their ill-fitting clothes and their
+dogged looks of determination one sees the makers of empire. Before a
+decade is past they will be active wheat-growers in their own right,
+making two grains grow where one grew before and so "deserving better of
+mankind than the whole race of politicians put together." I think it was
+President Garfield who said, "I always feel more respect for a boy than
+for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that
+ragged jacket?" It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A
+young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg
+students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic
+world--the Rhodes scholarship.
+
+We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers
+from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral,
+has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of
+forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures
+its every thought in bushels and bullion.
+
+The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg
+just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of
+David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here
+and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted
+some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony
+performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding.
+One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, "I wudna
+have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a
+properly-ordained meenister." And he was coming. Even now he was
+floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having
+reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks
+before.
+
+When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton
+phrase, "they do not teem with conversational grace." Straight from
+Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the
+Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago.
+In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and
+in his simplicity thought himself "the first that ever burst into that
+silent sea." When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled
+sound, he was in doubt how to place it.
+
+"Is it the clang of wild-geese?
+  Is it the Indian's yell,
+That lends to the voice of the North-wind
+  The tones of a far-off bell?"
+
+The Indian boatmen _said_ nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's
+parrot.
+
+"The voyageur smiles as he listens
+  To the sound that grows apace;
+Well he knows the vesper ringing
+  Of the bells of St. Boniface."
+
+Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in
+the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness
+
+"The bells of the Roman Mission,
+  That call from their turrets twain
+To the boatmen on the river,
+  To the hunter on the plain."
+
+That friend was a fellow-townsman of the "Quaker Poet." The story was
+told to Whittier and inspired the lines of _The Red River Voyageur_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+
+"To the far-flung fenceless prairie
+  Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,
+To our neighbor's barn in the offing
+  And the line of the new-cut rail;
+To the plough in her league-long furrow."
+
+--_Rudyard Kipling_.
+
+Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at
+Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it
+will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.
+
+From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and
+two railway lines are open to us,--the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
+Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the
+latter.
+
+Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand
+miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are
+pouring. "The sleeping nation beyond," is what General Sherman in a
+moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We
+are on the heels of the greatest economic trek this world has ever seen.
+The historian of to-morrow will rank it with the world migrations.
+
+The flourishing centres of Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its
+Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police,
+Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw
+towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand
+of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as
+these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp
+conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement
+warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it
+takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat
+elevator, red against the setting sun.
+
+The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo
+bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a
+sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude
+coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is
+the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the
+crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and
+fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to
+the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the
+transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.
+
+Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy,
+buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a
+busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many
+railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R.
+irrigation works, the largest on this continent. The area included in
+the irrigation block is twice as big as the Island of Porto Rico and
+one-eighth the size of England and Wales; and the ultimate expenditure
+on the undertaking will reach the five million mark.
+
+Calgary is the centre of a country literally flowing with milk and honey
+and fat things. The oil-fields of Pincher Creek, with their rich promise
+of becoming a second Pennsylvania, are contiguous to the city. The
+winter wheat grown in Southern Alberta was awarded first prize and gold
+medal at the World's Fair in Oregon in 1905. The hackney carriage horses
+which took first prize at the last Montreal and New York horse-fairs
+were foaled and raised near Calgary. If we were to continue going due
+west from this point, all the scenic glories of the Rocky Mountains
+would be ours--seventy Switzerlands in one. But that journey must stand
+over for another day, with the journey to Prince Rupert, the ocean
+terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific.
+
+Turning sharply to the north, we travel two hundred miles, and draw into
+where Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, sits smiling on the banks of her
+silver Saskatchewan. As he sees us digging out our tents and dunnage,
+the porter asks, "Then yer not comin' back?" "No." "You _are_ goin' to
+the North Pole, then, the place you wuz hollerin' fer!"
+
+With the exception of Victoria, Edmonton has the most charming location
+of all cities of Western Canada. High Hope stalks her streets. There is
+a spirit of initiative and assuredness in this virile town, a culture
+and thoughtfulness in her people, expectancy in the very air. It is the
+city of contrasts; the ox-cart dodges the automobile; in the track of
+French heel treads the moccasin; the silk hat salutes the Stetson.
+
+Edmonton is the end of steel. Three lines converge here: the Canadian
+Northern, the Canadian Pacific, and the Grand Trunk Pacific. The
+Canadian Northern arrived first, coming in four years ago. Now that
+Edmonton has arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that
+there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis,
+anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in
+commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before
+Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian
+Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals
+and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that
+sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into
+Edmonton, as little was known of the valley of the Saskatchewan as is
+known now of the valley of the Peace. Without exception, Canadian men of
+letters go to other countries for recognition, but not so all our men of
+deeds. Mackenzie and Mann, "the Brains of a Trans-Continental," stayed
+in Canada and put their genius to work here. The Canadian Northern is
+the product of Canadian minds and Canadian money.
+
+[Illustration: A Section of Edmonton]
+
+We walk Edmonton streets for ten days and see neither an old man nor an
+old woman. The government and the business interests are in the hands of
+young people who have adopted modern methods of doing things; single tax
+is the basis of taxation; the city owns its public utilities, including
+an interurban street railroad, electric lighting plant, water-works, and
+the automatic telephone. Mr. C.W. Cross, the Attorney-General of
+Alberta, is the youngest man in Canada to hold that high office. During
+the first session of the first legislature of this baby province less
+than three years ago, an enabling act was passed for a university.
+Nowhere else have I been sensible of such a feeling of united
+public-spiritedness as obtains here.
+
+Down in the river valley are hundreds of people living under canvas, not
+because they are poor but because building contractors cannot keep pace
+with the demand for homes. As we pass these tents, we are rude enough to
+look in. Most of them are furnished with telephones and the city water;
+here a bride bends over a chafing dish; another glance discloses an
+oil-painting that was once shown in the Royal Academy. From the next
+tent float the strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and, as we stop
+to listen, a gentleman and his wife step out. An auto picks them up and
+off they whirl to Jasper Avenue. The Lord o' the Tents of Shem
+disappears into his bank and Milady drives on to the Government house to
+read before the Literary Club a paper on Browning's _Saul_. To the
+tenderfoot from the South it is all delightfully disconcerting--oxen and
+autos and Browning on the Saskatchewan!
+
+The Sunday before we leave Edmonton I find another set of tents, put up
+by the Immigration Department, where East-End Londoners are housed
+pending their going out upon the land. In the first call I make I
+unearth a baby who rejoices in the name of Hester Beatrice Cran.
+"H.B.C.," I remark, "aren't you rather infringing on a right, taking
+that trade-mark?" Quick came the retort, "Ho! If she gets as good a 'old
+on the land as the 'Udson's Bay Company 'as, she'll do!"
+
+Another lady in the next tent proudly marshalled her olive branches.
+"D'isy and the baiby were born in the Heast Hend. They're Henglish;
+please God they'll make good Canaidians. They're tellin' me, miss,
+there'll be five 'undred more of us on the 'igh seas comin' out to
+Hedmonton from the Heast Hend, all poor people like ourselves. I often
+wonder w'y they don't bring out a few dukes to give the country a touch
+of 'igh life--it's very plain 'ere."
+
+By the first day of June we have our kit complete and are ready to
+leave. We have tried to cut everything down to the last ounce, but still
+the stuff makes a rather formidable array. What have we? Tent,
+tent-poles, typewriter, two cameras, two small steamer-trunks, bedding
+(a thin mattress with waterproof bottom and waterproof extension-flaps
+and within this our two blankets), a flour-bag or "Hudson's Bay
+suit-case" (containing tent-pegs, hatchet, and tin wash-basin), two
+raincoats, a tiny bag with brush and comb and soap--and last, but yet
+first, the kodak films wrapped in oilcloth and packed in biscuit-tins.
+The bits of impedimenta look unfamiliar as we take our first inventory,
+but we are to come to know them soon by their feel in the dark, to
+estimate to an ounce the weight of each on many a lonely portage.
+
+[Illustration: The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan]
+
+At seven in the morning the stage pulls up for us, and it rains--no
+gentle sizzle-sozzle, but a sod-soaker, yea a gully-washer! The
+accusing newness of those raincoats is to come off at once. Expansive
+Kennedy looks askance at the tenderfoots who climb over his wheel. His
+Majesty's Royal Mail Stage sifts through the town picking up the other
+victims. We are two big stage-loads, our baggage marked for every point
+between Edmonton and the Arctic Ocean. Every passenger but ourselves
+looks forward to indefinite periods of expatriation in the silent
+places. We alone are going for fun. Our one care is to keep those
+precious cameras dry. This is the beginning of a camera nightmare which
+lasts six months until we again reach Chicago.
+
+And the fellow-passengers? Law is represented, and medicine, and the
+all-powerful H.B. Co. With us is Mr. Angus Brabant going in on his
+initial official trip in charge of H.B. interests in the whole Mackenzie
+River District, and with him two cadets of The Company. On the seat
+behind us sit a Frenchman reading a French novel, a man from Dakota, and
+a third passenger complaining of a camera "which cost fifty pounds
+sterling" that somehow has fallen by the way. Sergeant Anderson,
+R.N.W.M.P., with his wife and two babies are in the other stage.
+
+Kennedy, the driver, is a character. Driving in and out and covering on
+this one trail twelve thousand miles every year, he is fairly soaked
+with stories of the North and Northmen. The other stage is driven by
+Kennedy's son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was
+just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man. Dwarfed in mind
+and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp.
+
+The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his
+camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and
+run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find
+the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat
+with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic
+Circle.
+
+[Illustration: Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta]
+
+The girlish figure of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in
+gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the
+little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward
+look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of "seven
+times nine," "the mountains of Asia," "the Tudor sovereigns with dates
+of accession," and other things appertaining to "that imperial palace
+whence I came." All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty
+and food scarce, a backward thought to this teacher making muddy tracks
+toward the well of English undefiled, brings pleased content.
+
+[Illustration: A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge]
+
+At noon it clears, and as we "make tea" at Sturgeon Creek (the Namao
+Sepee of the Indians), the first of the "stopping-places" or
+Waldorf-Astorias of the wilderness, the Doctor has his will and gathers
+violets, moccasin flowers, and the purple _dodecatheon_. As we pass Lily
+Lake he remarks, "This reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk's place at
+Arundel; it is just like this." South Dakoty returns, "I don't know
+him."
+
+Here and there we pass clusters of Galician huts. Instead of following
+the line of least resistance in the fertile plains to the south, these
+people, the Mark Tapleys of the prairies, choose cheap land up here for
+the pleasure of conquering it and "coming out strong." They are a frugal
+people, with a fondness for work, a wholesome horror of debt, and the
+religious instinct strongly insistent. Off on a hillside near each
+little settlement a naked cross extends its arms. These are their
+open-air churches, and in all weathers, men, women, and children gather
+at the foot of the cross to worship the God of their fathers. By and by,
+when the soil has yielded to their labours, with their own hands will
+they build a church and without debt it will be dedicated. The idea of
+raising an imposing church and presenting God with the mortgage does not
+appeal to the Galician.
+
+The clean sheets at "Eggie's," the second stopping-place, are
+attractive, and we sleep the sleep of the just. We acknowledge with
+inward shame that two years of city life have given us the soft muscles
+of the chee-chaco; we'll have to harden up a bit if we are to reach that
+far-away ocean.
+
+Next day, midway between Edmonton and Athabasca Landing, we water our
+horses at the Tautinau. We are standing at the Height of Land, the
+watershed between the Saskatchewan and the Athabasca. This little ridge
+where the harebells grow divides the drops of rain of the noon-day
+shower. Some of these drops, by way of the Saskatchewan, Lake Winnipeg,
+and Hudson Bay, will reach the Atlantic. Others, falling into the
+Athabasca, will form part of that yellow-tinged flood which, by way of
+Great Slave Lake and the mighty Mackenzie, carries its tribute to the
+Frozen Ocean. These last are the drops we follow.
+
+To save the horses we walk the hills, and I try to match giant steps
+with Sergeant Anderson. Kennedy, Junior, joins us and has a knotty point
+to settle regarding "the gentleman wot murdered the man." It is hard to
+induce a Mounted Policeman to talk. However, to be striding Athabasca
+Trail with the hero of the Hayward-King murder-trial is too good an
+opportunity to lose, and, reluctantly rendered, bit by bit the story
+comes out.
+
+Most people looking at a map of Northwest Canada would think it a safe
+wilderness for a live man or a dead man to disappear in with no
+questions asked. In reality, it is about the worst place in America in
+which to commit a crime and hope to go unpunished.
+
+In September, 1904, the Indians reported to the Mounted Police that they
+had seen two white men in the early summer, and that afterwards one man
+walked alone, and was now at Lesser Slave. An observant Cree boy added,
+"The dog won't follow that other white fellow any more." Sergeant
+Anderson, going to their last camp, turned over the ashes and found
+three hard lumps of flesh and a small piece of skull bone. Convinced
+that murder had been done, he arrested the suspected man and sent him to
+Fort Saskatchewan for trial. No one knew the identity of either the dead
+man or the living. In front of the old camp-fire was a little slough or
+lake, and this seemed a promising place to look for evidence. Sergeant
+Anderson hired Indian women to wade in the ooze, feeling with their toes
+for any hard substance. In this way were secured a sovereign-case and a
+stick-pin of unusual make. The lake was systematically drained and
+yielded a shoe with a broken-eyed needle sticking in it. Sifting the
+ashes of the camp-fire and examining them with a microscope, Anderson
+discovered the eye of the broken needle and thus established a
+connection between the camp with its burnt flesh and the exhibits from
+the lake. The maker of the stick-pin in London, England, was cabled to
+by the Canadian Government, and a Mr. Hayward summoned to come from
+there to identify the trinkets of his murdered brother. A cheque drawn
+by the dead Hayward in favour of King came to the surface in a British
+Columbia bank. Link by link the chain of evidence grew.
+
+It took eleven months for Sergeant Anderson to get his case in shape.
+Then he convoyed forty Indian witnesses two hundred and fifty miles from
+Lesser Slave to Edmonton to tell what they knew about the crime
+committed in the silent places. The evidence was placed before the jury,
+and the Indians returned to their homes. A legal technicality cropped up
+and the trial had to be repeated. Once more the forty Indians travelled
+from Lesser Slave to repeat their story. The result was that Charles
+King of Utah was found guilty of the murder of Edward Hayward and paid
+the death penalty.
+
+This trial cost the Canadian Government over $30,000,--all to avenge the
+death of one of the wandering units to be found in every corner of the
+frontier, one unknown prospector. Was it worth while? Did it pay? Yes,
+it paid. It is by such object-lessons that to Indian and white alike is
+forced home the truth that God's law, "Thou shalt not kill," is also the
+law of Britain and of Canada.
+
+We are still on foot, when a cry from the Kid hurries us to the
+hilltop. Reaching the crest, we catch our breaths. Down below lies the
+little village of "The Landing." That sparkling flood beyond proves the
+Athabasca to be a live, northward-trending river, a river capable of
+carrying us with it, and no mere wiggly line on a map.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+
+"I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;
+Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods;
+I wait for the men who will win me--and I will not be won in a day;
+And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,
+But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child."
+
+--_Robert Service_
+
+[Illustration: Athabasca Landing]
+
+Athabasca Landing, a funnel through which percolates the whole trade
+between the wheat-belt and the Arctic, is the true gateway of the North.
+Seeing our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union
+Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its
+edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an
+incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading
+itself with prodigality over the swift river.
+
+The Athabasca, after dipping to the south, here takes a sudden northward
+bend. Its source is in the crest of the continent far back in the
+Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river
+being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great
+tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to
+embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five
+miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps
+an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.
+
+We are in latitude 55° North, and between us and the Arctic lies an
+unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and
+the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging
+like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south
+of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has
+stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a
+country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown
+and dubbed "barren" because unknown, will support its teeming millions.
+Chimerical? Why so?
+
+Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of
+55° westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the
+Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map
+of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to
+follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year
+1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain,
+grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a
+half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one
+and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining
+in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are
+about to enter does not enjoy.
+
+Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by
+all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of
+moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing
+in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the
+little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large
+establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman
+Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted
+Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a
+blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of
+Cree-Scots half-breeds.
+
+Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a
+discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all
+sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the
+place,--tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike
+dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may
+be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the
+silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the
+language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, "What means a
+camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a
+needle's eye." The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and
+coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its
+coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that
+stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed
+by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only "for medicinal
+purposes." By an easy transferring of epithets, the term "permit" has
+come to signify the revivifying juice itself.
+
+[Illustration: Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca]
+
+One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the
+North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a
+rule they are not. There is no discussion of American banks and equally
+no mention of the wheat crop. The one conjecture round the bar and in
+the home is, "When will the rabbits run this year?" The rabbits in the
+North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark
+aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him.
+Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year
+means a scarcity of all kinds of fur. As surely as wheat stands for
+bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of
+the North.
+
+It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company
+making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in
+supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in
+barter during the previous winter. The big open scows, or
+"sturgeon-heads," which are to form our convoy have been built, the
+freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen
+drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the
+word which is the keynote of the Cree character,--"Kee-am," freely
+translated, "Never mind," "Don't get excited," "There's plenty of time,"
+"It's all right," "It will all come out in the wash."
+
+When the present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office
+he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a
+time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was
+shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing,
+old Duncan Tremblé, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked
+admiringly at the printed slip and said, "Aye, aye; the Commissioner he
+makes laws, but the river he boss." It is only when ice is out and
+current serves that the brigade moves forward. Old Duncan knows seven
+languages,--English, French, Cree, Chipewyan, Beaver, Chinook,
+Montagnais,--he speaks seven languages, thinks in Cree, and
+prevaricates in them all.
+
+[Illustration: The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians]
+
+At the foot of the hill we visit the English parsonage, with its
+old-time sun-dial at the garden-gate. Within, we find what must surely
+be the farthest north printing-press. Here two devoted women have spent
+years of their lives printing in Cree on a hand-press syllabic hymns and
+portions of the Gospel for the enlightenment of the Indians. We wander
+into the school where a young teacher is explaining to his uneasy
+disciples the intricacies of Present Worth and Compound Interest. Idly
+we wonder to what use these bare-footed half-Cree urchins will put their
+exact banking knowledge.
+
+Everywhere around us the wild flowers are a great joy; we hail with the
+gladness of released children the posies that sweetened childhood
+meadows--the dwarf cornel (Cornel Canadensis), dandelions, strawberry
+blossoms, wild roses, the pale wood-violet on its long stem, and amid
+these familiars the saskatoon or service-berry bushes, with blueberry
+vines, and viburnums of many kinds. On the street the natty uniforms of
+the Mounted Police are in evidence, and baseball has penetrated as far
+north as this. In the post office we read,
+
+"It is decided to hold sports on the first day of July. The Committee
+promises a splendid programme,--horse-races, foot-races, football match,
+baseball game. There will also be prizes for the best piece of Indian
+fancy-work. Dancing will be in full swing in the evening. All welcome."
+
+Opposite the hotel is a reading-room built by a Methodist parson who
+also made the furniture with his own hands; magazines, books,
+writing-material, games are available to all. This practical work of one
+man who accepted the responsibility of being his brother's keeper
+appealed to us. In a store near the hotel we see a Cree boatman
+purchasing a farewell present for his sweetheart. As he turns over the
+fancy articles, we have bad form enough to observe his choice. He
+selects a fine-tooth comb, for which he pays fifty cents, or as he calls
+it, "two skins," and asks, as he tucks it into his jerkin, if he can
+change it "if she doesn't like it."
+
+In the evening it rains, and the room assigned us becomes a living
+illustration of the new word we have just learned,--"muskeg," a swamp.
+Putting the precious cameras on top of the bureau, we let the rest of
+the things swim at their pleasure. Starting with the rest of the
+unattached community of Athabasca Landing to go down to the pool-room,
+we catch sight of Dr. Sussex and the Cree priest, who have found a
+little oasis of their own around a big stove in the upper hall and, with
+chairs tilted back, are enjoying some portable hospitality from below.
+The doctor arises to escort us through the flood, and when I rally him
+about his liquid refreshment, he says, "Oh, I had lemonade."
+
+"I see. And the priest?"
+
+"He had--what he liked."
+
+If local colour and local smell is what we have come north for, we find
+it here. Mr. Brabant comes up with "I wonder if that bunch of nuns is
+going to get here in time to take scows with us," and we pass into the
+billiard-room and watch the game. The players gliding round in moccasins
+are all half-breeds. The exclamations are for the most part in Cree or
+bad French, and as I crowd in looking for some local terms all that I
+hear intelligible is, "That is damn close, I think me."
+
+For thirty-six hours on end it rains. That roof was full of surprises;
+you never knew where it would spring a fresh leak. One room is a little
+better than the rest, and we all gather there and make the best of
+it,--smoking, writing, telling yarns. A bumping noise from across the
+hall and the cry of a child startles us. It proves to be Sergeant
+Anderson's baby whose cradle has started afloat, and there is a general
+rush to rescue Moses from his bulrushes. Everybody is in good humour.
+
+As we calm the baby, South Dakota says "It reminds me of the Englishman
+and his musical bath." We demand the story. "Well, a rich American took
+a great liking to an Englishman he had been travelling with, and sent
+him for a birthday present a Yankee invention to set up in his
+country-house--a musical bath. As you turned on the spigot, the thing
+played a tune while you were washing, and sort of relieved the tee-deum.
+The two gents met next Christmas in New York, and the Yankee he sez,
+'And how did you like the bath?' 'Oh, thank you very much, it was kind
+of you indeed, but I found it a little irksome standing all the time,
+you know.' 'Standing, what the blazes do you mean?' asked the Yankee.
+'Well,' says the Britisher, 'the tune you furnished, you know, with the
+bawth, was _God Save the King_, and as soon as it began, you know, I had
+to stand, and it's rather tiresome taking your bawth standing, you
+know."
+
+Sergeant Joyce tells how at a Mounted Police dinner at Fort Saskatchewan
+a parson, who was a guest, in proposing a toast, facetiously advised his
+entertainers to have nothing to do with either a doctor or a lawyer. It
+was interesting to watch the parson's face when there arose to reply a
+lawyer and a doctor, each a constable in the rank and file.
+
+Mrs. Leslie Wood of Athabasca Landing adds her quota to the Tales of a
+Wayside Inn. We could have listened to her for a week and regretted
+neither the rain nor the waiting scows. As a girl she remembers being
+shocked at seeing men hold tin cups to the throats of newly-slaughtered
+buffalo, drinking with gusto the warm blood.
+
+"What are the two greatest things on earth?" Mrs. Wood, as a young girl,
+asked the dusky disciples of her Sunday School class. "The Queen and The
+Company," was the ready response. "And of these, which is the greater?"
+Little Marten-Tail rubbed one moccasin over the other, and the answer
+came thoughtfully in Cree, "The Company. The Queen sometimes dies, but
+The Company never dies."
+
+"The Company," of which the little girl spoke, "The Governor and Company
+of Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay," deriving its charter in 1670
+from the Second Charles of England, is the oldest chartered concern in
+the world, with a present-day sphere of influence as large as Great
+Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined. From lone Labrador to the
+Pacific littoral and from Winnipeg to the Frozen Ocean are scattered the
+two hundred and fifty fur-trading forts of this concern in charge of its
+two thousand strong silent servants. Last year it paid to its
+stockholders a profit of forty-five per cent on the invested capital,
+and for two hundred and thirty-nine consecutive years it has been
+declaring dividends. The motto of the Company, _Pro Pelle Cutein_, is
+prominently displayed at Athabasca Landing. Literally translated, the
+phrase means "Skin for skin"; but why the promoters should have chosen
+as war-cry the words which Satan used when fighting with the Lord for
+the soul of Job, is not so apparent.
+
+As we watch the trading goods being carried in the rain from warehouse
+to scows, we think how, weaving its cross-Atlantic way through the
+centuries and joining the periwigged days of the Stuarts to this day,
+the one man-made thing that has persisted is this commerce-shuttle of
+the H.B. Co.
+
+In the days when The Company had its birth, the blind Milton was
+dictating his message and the liberated Bunyan preached the spoken word,
+the iniquitous Cabal Ministry was forming in England, and Panama was
+sacked by Morgan the buccaneer. New York merchants of Manhattan met
+every Friday at noon on the bridge over the Broad Street Canal for
+barter, South Carolina was settled on the Ashley River, Virginia enacted
+that "all servants not being Christians, imported into this country by
+shipping shall be slaves," and her Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was
+inspired to exclaim piously, "I hope we shall have neither free schools
+nor printing these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience
+and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. God
+keep us from both!" It was not until two years later that Addison was
+born, and that Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi, even as
+we now are essaying the Athabasca.
+
+Unique in commercial annals is the Royal Charter which gave, with power
+of life and death, to the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, less than
+twenty in number, "forever hereafter" possession and jurisdiction over a
+country as large as Europe. Liberty here for utter despotism, the widest
+of excesses. We marvel that from the first Prince Rupert of the Rhine to
+the latest Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Governors of the
+Ancient Company have, with Duncan-like demeanour, borne themselves so
+meek in their great office.
+
+It has been fashionable to paint the H.B. Co. as an agrarian oligarchy.
+Organized for the purpose of "making fur" before the time of the Habeas
+Corpus, two decades ahead of the Bank of England, sixty-two years before
+Benjamin Franklin began publishing "Poor Richard's Almanac," and a
+century in advance of Watt's steam-engine, it is true that The Company,
+throughout the years, devoted itself to peltries and not to platting
+town sites. This was its business. From the beginning it has
+consistently kept faith with the Indians; the word of The Company has,
+for reward or for punishment, ever been worth its full face value. It
+was not an H.B. Scot who exclaimed feelingly, "Honesty _is_ the best
+policy, I've tried baith."
+
+The feeling of devotion to The Company is as strong today as it ever
+was. When the present Commissioner took office he penetrated the North
+on a tour of inspection. At Athabasca Landing, since it was not known
+just when the Head would arrive, the local official charged all his
+clerks and minions to be ready at the sound of a whistle to salute and
+fall into line for inspection. The call to arms came on Sunday morning
+during divine service. Every attaché of The Company with one exception
+obeyed the signal. Young Tom Helly, the paid organist, stuck to his
+post; and next day he was called on the carpet. "It was a special
+service; I was in the middle of the anthem, sir, and didn't like to
+leave the House of God." "Couldn't you show some respect?" roared the
+local officer. Man was near in Athabasca Landing and God far away. Down
+in the big office at Winnipeg is a Doomsday Book where the life-record
+of every servant of The Company is kept, for no man who has ever served
+The Company is lost sight of. When there is a good fur-winter, every
+employé of The Company is handed an envelope which contains a
+bonus-cheque,--ten per cent of his yearly salary.
+
+[Illustration: C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.]
+
+The Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company and the head of one of
+Canada's big department stores were dining together at a Toronto Club.
+"After six o'clock I don't want to see or hear of an employé--he doesn't
+exist for me until eight o'clock next morning," said the head of the
+department store. "Well, I'm more curious than you," smiled the
+Commissioner of the H.B. Co., "I want to be reasonably assured of what
+every man-Jack of my people is doing all the time. I want to know what
+he reads, and if he treats his wife well, and how his last baby is
+getting along--you see, he's a working-partner of mine."
+
+There came out of Northern British Columbia last year the Indian wife
+and half-breed daughters of an H.B. Co. Factor. They were bound for
+Montreal and it was their first trip "outside." The Commissioner at
+Winnipeg contradicts the old saw, and surely has "a soul above a
+beaver-skin"; like Mulvaney, too, he "has bowels." Quickly went forward
+a letter to a tactful woman in the border-town through which the
+visiting ladies must pass--"Meet them, and see that they get the proper
+things to wear in society circles in Montreal. I don't want them to feel
+ill at ease when they get there." Stories like these give us glimpses of
+the kind of paternalism exercised by the Ancient Company, the one trust
+that has never ground the faces of the poor, and in whose people to-day
+appears the "constant service of the Old World."
+
+The big books of The Company a year or two ago in unmistakable
+round-hand declared that one Running Rabbit, lawful widow of Blueskin,
+was entitled to draw from the coffers clear-side bacon and a modicum of
+flour. But one quarterly paysheet, returned to Winnipeg from Fort
+Churchill, showed that Running Rabbit in addition to her food allowance
+had been handed out forty cents' worth of cotton. Stern enquiry, backed
+by red-tape and The Company's seal as big as a saucer, was sent up to
+the Churchill Factor. Why had the allowance of Mrs. Blueskin (née
+Running Rabbit) been exceeded? By "return mail" nine months later the
+Factor reported,
+
+"The widow's gone,
+  Her tent's forsaken,
+No more she comes
+  For flour and bacon.
+N.B. The cotton was used for her shroud."
+
+The Ancient Company was penny-wise, but in spite of the copybook line,
+not pound-foolish, as its dividend paysheets conclusively prove.
+
+There is no desire to show forth these silent ones of the North as
+infallible men and immaculate. They make many mistakes; they were and
+are delightfully human, and we couldn't picture one of them with a
+saintly aureole. But in the past, as in the present, they were large
+men; they honoured their word, and you couldn't buy them. Men of action,
+whether inside fort walls, bartering in the tepee of the Indian, or off
+on silent trails alone,--it has been given to each of them to live life
+at firsthand. In every undertaking the determining factor of success is
+men, and not money or monopoly. And because the North still breeds men
+of the H.B. type, the eye of The Great Company is not dimmed, its force
+not abated.
+
+We spoke with no fewer than three men at The Landing who came into the
+North in the year of the Klondike rush, that is, just ten years ago.
+Into the human warp and woof of the Great Lone Land of Northern Canada
+the Klondike gold-rush intruded a new strand. The news of the strike on
+Yukon fields flashed round the world on wires invisible and visible,
+passed by word of mouth from chum to chum, and by moccasin telegraph was
+carried to remotest corners of the continent. Gold-fever is a disease
+without diagnosis or doctor--infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if
+its germ once stirs in a man's blood, till the day of his death he is
+not immune from an attack. The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent
+swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous
+horde,--gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet
+firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two
+continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.
+
+Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from 'Frisco, Seattle, and
+Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have
+some records. But of that vast army who from the east and from the south
+travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has
+ever been made. Singly they went, in groups, and by partnerships of two
+and three. There was no route marked out by which they were to reach the
+glittering streams of which they dreamed; the general direction of north
+and west was all that guided them. Athabasca Landing was the portal
+through which they passed, and by every northward stream they
+travelled,--down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca
+to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore. By
+raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways
+who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to
+you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police
+Station where Sergeant Anderson rescued a dozen tenderfoots from
+drowning.
+
+To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the
+whites was a revelation. Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had
+been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed
+Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the
+outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that
+only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern
+Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first
+lessons from the Klondike miners.
+
+And what of the men who followed the gleam? Some reached Dawson. These
+were few. Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still. In the old books
+of the H.B. Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is "a band of Indians
+_cast up_ from the east," "the Express from the North _cast up_ at a
+late hour last night." On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from
+that point, hundreds of gold-miners are "cast up" on every interior
+shore. Acting as attachés to Hudson's Bay posts, engaging as free
+traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic
+seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at
+least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us. Round
+the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still
+prays for her absent son. A silence like this once entered upon is hard
+to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about him the
+garment of the recluse. Outcropping from the strata in striking
+individuality, they belong to a different race to the plodding people of
+the Hudson's Bay posts, and are interesting men wherever you meet them.
+Keen of vision, slow of speech, and with that dreamy look which only
+those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet
+places,--they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and
+dropped here and there over the white map of the North.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
+
+
+"Set me in the urge and tide-drift
+Of the streaming hosts a-wing!
+Breast of scarlet, throat of yellow,
+Raucous challenge, wooings mellow--
+Every migrant is my fellow,
+Making northward with the Spring."
+
+--_Bliss Carman_.
+
+If you have to do with Indian or half-breed boatmen in the North you
+plan to begin your journey in the evening, even though you hope to run
+only a few miles before nightfall. This ensures a good start next
+morning, whereas it would be humanly impossible to tear men away from
+the flesh-pots (beer pots) of Athabasca Landing early in any day. It
+took these chaps all the afternoon to say good-bye, for each one in the
+village had to be shaken hands with, every dog apostrophized by name.
+
+The Athabasca Transport of which we form joyous part makes a formidable
+flotilla: seven specially-built scows or "sturgeon-heads." Each runs
+forty to fifty feet with a twelve-foot beam and carries ten tons. The
+oars are twenty feet long. It takes a strong man to handle the
+forty-foot steering-sweep which is mounted with an iron pivot on the
+stern.
+
+Our particular shallop is no different from the others, except that
+there is a slightly raised platform in the stern-sheets, evidently a
+dedication to the new Northern Manager of the H.B. Co. We share the
+pleasant company of a fourth passenger, Mrs. Harding, on her way home to
+Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. The second sturgeon-head carries
+seven members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, jolly laughing
+chaps, for are not they, too, like us, off duty? Inspector Pelletier and
+three men are to go with our Fur Transport as far as Resolution and then
+diverge to the east, essaying a cross-continent cut from there to salt
+water on Hudson Bay. For this purpose they ship two splendidly made
+Peterborough canoes. The other three members of the force are young
+chaps assigned to Smith's Landing on the Slave River, sent there to
+protect the wood bison of that region, the world's last wild buffalo.
+The third craft we observe with due respect as "the cook boat." The
+remaining four scows carry cargo only,--the trade term being "pieces,"
+each piece from eighty to a hundred pounds, a convenient weight for
+carrying on the portages.
+
+[Illustration: A "Sturgeon-head" at Athabasca]
+
+[Illustration: "Farewell, Nistow!"]
+
+June 6th at a quarter of seven saw the whole populace of Athabasca
+Landing on the river bank--dogs, babies, the officials of the Hudson's
+Bay, parson, priest, police, and even the barkeep,--and with the yelping
+of dogs and "Farewell, Nistow!" we are off. We are embarked on a
+2500-mile journey, the longest water route on the continent, down which
+floats each year the food, clothing, and frugal supplies of a country as
+big as Europe.
+
+The river is running five miles an hour and there is no need of the
+oars. The steersman is our admiration, as with that clumsy stern-sweep
+he dodges rocks, runs riffles, and makes bends. The scow is made of
+green wood, and its resilience stands it in good stead as, like a snake,
+it writhes through tight channels or over ugly bits of water. Everybody
+is in good humour; we are dreamers dreaming greatly. Why should we not
+be happy? Mrs. Harding is homeward-bound, Mr. Brabant on a new rung of
+the fur ladder of preferment, Inspector Pelletier and his associates
+starting on a quest of their own seeking. Sitting low among the "pieces"
+of the police boat, with only his head visible in the sunset glow, Dr.
+Sussex builds air-castles of that eleemosynary hospital of his on the
+Arctic Circle. The cook is whistling from the cook-boat. Five years ago
+he graduated from a business college, but the preparation of bannock and
+sow-belly appeals to the blood more insistently than trial balances and
+the petty cash book. As for ourselves, the Kid's smile is almost audible
+as she runs a loving hand over the oilskin cover of the camera. A
+favourite expression of mine in the latitudes below when the world
+smiled was, "Oh, I'm glad I'm alive and white!" On this exclamation I
+start now, but stop at the word "white." North of Athabasca Landing
+white gives place to a tint more tawny.
+
+A hundred yards out, the Policemen are boyish enough to launch those
+shiny Peterboroughs just to try them, and in and out among the big
+sturgeon-heads, debonair dolphins, they dart. Then comes the rain, and
+one by one the clumsy boats turn toward shore. There are some things
+that even the enquiring mind cannot run to ground, things that just
+happen out of the blue. For fifteen successive springs I have tried to
+discover the first boy who brought marbles to school when marble-season
+came in, and I have never yet been able to put my finger on that elusive
+history-maker. So on this voyage, the fleet is started and stopped,
+landings are made, camping-places decided upon, and no ear can detect
+the sound of command.
+
+The scows tie up, and without undressing we sleep on board, pulling a
+tarpaulin over us and letting the rain rain. At 5:30 next morning we
+hear the familiar "Nistow! Nistow!" of the awakened camp. This word
+literally means "brother-in-law," but it is the vocative used by the
+Cree in speaking to anybody he feels kindly toward. The cook makes a
+double entry with bacon and bannock, and there is exulting joy in our
+soul. Who would napkins bear, or finger-bowls? We had put them far
+behind, with the fardels.
+
+It is the season of lengthening days and fading nights. At seven o'clock
+we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first
+one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being
+shouted from boat to boat. Then, in one voice from three boats,
+"Mooswa!" and far beyond white man's vision the boatmen sight a moose.
+There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious
+Peterboroughs which were to make history on the map, and in the delay
+the moose wandered into pleasant pastures. The boatmen were very much
+disgruntled, as the moose is treasure-trove, the chief fresh meat that
+his world offers the Indian. From here to the Arctic are no domestic
+animals, the taste of beef or mutton or pork or chicken is unknown,
+bread gives place to bannock (with its consequent indigestion
+"bannockburn"), and coffee is a beverage discredited. Tobacco to smoke,
+strong, black, sweetened tea to drink from a copper kettle,--this is
+luxury's lap.
+
+The bowsman points to a rude cross on the right bank where a small
+runway makes in, "Gon-sta-wa-bit" (man who was drowned), he volunteers.
+Yesterday a Mounted Policeman buried there the body of an Indian man,
+his wife and his baby, who fell through the ice in a dog-sled this
+spring,--three in one grave, Lamartine's trinity, the Father, the
+Mother, and the Child.
+
+It is Sunday, and we have music from a li'l fiddle made by a squaw at
+Lac Ste. Anne. Lac la Biche River we pass, and Calling River, and at
+five in the evening are at Swift Current, Peachy Pruden's place, and
+then Red Mud. Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all
+night. Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the
+missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I
+draw up a canvas sheet. But it is too wonderful a night to sleep. Lying
+flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full
+of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up
+and pluck them. Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is
+the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the
+shadow of the cut-banks. At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in
+his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these
+human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or
+two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from
+high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant
+blood--the "unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go." It is
+the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. In
+imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that
+long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back raucous encouragement to
+his long, sky-clinging V.
+
+Floating as we float, it is no longer a marvel to us that this North
+holds so many scientific men and finished scholars--colonial Esaus
+serving as cooks, dog-drivers, packers, trackers, oil-borers. The not
+knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new
+places and untrod ways,--who would exchange all this for the easy ways
+of fatted civilization!
+
+At five in the morning there is a drawing-in of the fleet to Pelican
+Portage. Before two hours have passed the grasshopper has become a
+burden, and it is 102° in the shade, and no shade to be had. We are now
+a hundred miles from Athabasca Landing. On the left bank we come across
+a magnificent gas-well with a gush of flame twenty or thirty feet in
+height.
+
+It seems that eleven years ago, seeking for petroleum, the Dominion
+Government had a shaft sunk here; their boring apparatus was heavy, the
+plunger with its attachment weighing nearly a ton. At eight hundred feet
+the operator broke into an ocean of gas, and the pressure blew him with
+plunger and appliances into the air as a ball comes from a cannon-bore.
+The flow of gas was so heavy that it clogged his drills with maltha and
+sand, and from then to now the gas has been escaping. To-day the sound
+of the escape ricochets up and down the palisaded channel so that we
+cannot hear each other speak. There is gas enough here, if we could pipe
+it and bring it under control, to supply with free illumination every
+city of prairie Canada. It has destroyed all vegetation for a radius of
+twenty yards; but, oddly enough, outside this range of demarcation the
+growth is more luxuriant and comes earlier and stays later than that of
+the surrounding country. One redheaded Klondiker, ignorant of gas and
+its ways, ten years ago struck a match to this escaping stream, was
+blown into the bushes beyond, and came out minus hair, eye-brows and red
+beard--the quickest and closest shave he ever had. The shells of birds'
+eggs, tea-leaves from many a cheering copper-kettle, tufts of
+rabbit-hair, and cracked shin-bones of the moose, with here a greasy
+nine of diamonds, show, this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the
+gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or
+broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no
+thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a
+patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has
+consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills
+and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have
+eased the mind of poor Lo, around whose dying bunk we hear the relatives
+scrapping over his residuary estate of rusty rifle, much-mended
+fishing-net, and three gaunt dogs.
+
+We pass House River, and the devout cross themselves and murmur a
+prayer. The point is marked by a group of graves covered with canvas.
+Here years ago a family of four, travelling alone, contracted
+diphtheria, and died before help could reach them. There is another
+legend of which the boatmen unwillingly speak, the story of the
+_Wetigo_, or Indian turned cannibal, who murdered a priest on this
+lonely point, and ate the body of his victim. The taste for human flesh,
+Philip Atkinson assures us, grows with the using, and this lunatic of
+long ago went back to the camps, secured an Indian girl as bride,
+carried her to this point, took her life, and ate of her flesh. It is a
+gruesome story.
+
+[Illustration: Grand Rapids on the Athabasca River]
+
+Now begin the rapids, ninety miles of which we are to run. This rough
+water on the Athabasca is one of the only two impediments to navigation
+on the long course between Athabasca Landing and the Polar Ocean. These
+first rapids, frankly, are a disappointment. The water is high, higher
+than it has been for ten years, so the boiling over the boulders is not
+very noticeable. The Pelican Rapid and the Stony we shoot without
+turning a hair; the Joli Fou is a bit more insistent, but, as the cook
+says, "nothing to write home about."
+
+We drift in a drowsy dream of delight, and in the evening arrive at the
+head of Grand Rapids. If we had looked slightingly on the rough water
+passed, what we now see would satisfy the greediest. We tie up and get a
+good view of what lies ahead, and get also our first real introduction
+to the mosquito. In mid-stream he had not bothered us much, but after
+supper it rained a little, the day had been warm, and with cymbals,
+banners, and brass-bands, he comes in cohorts to greet us. The scows
+have their noses poked into the bank, the men have built smudge fires in
+front, but we decide that the best way to escape the mosquito is to go
+to bed. We lie down in the stern-sheets with our clothes on, make
+night-caps of our Stetson hats, pull the veils down over our necks, and
+try to sleep, but it is no avail. Each one of these mosquitoes is a
+Presbyterian mosquito and it has been ordained that this night he is to
+taste of white blood. It rains incessantly, and that hot hole in which
+we lie is one brown cloud of mosquitoes. The men on the bank have
+finally given it up as a bad job, and they set round the fires smoking
+and slapping different parts of their persons, swearing volubly in
+English. For the Cree language is devoid of invective. In the morning we
+are a sorry crowd, conversation is monosyllabic and very much to the
+point. It is the first serious trial to individual good-humour. When
+each one of your four million pores is an irritation-channel of
+mosquito-virus it would be a relief to growl at somebody about
+something. But the sun and smiles come out at the same time, and, having
+bled together, we cement bonds of friendship. What did Henry the Fifth
+say on the eve of Agincourt,--"For he to-day who sheds his blood with me
+shall be my brother"?
+
+Who would worry about mosquitoes with that splendid spectacular of the
+Grand Rapids at our feet? The great flood (Kitchee Abowstik) is divided
+into two channels by an island probably half a mile in length, with its
+long axis parallel to the flow of the river, and this island solves the
+question of progress. The main channel to the left is impassable; it is
+certain death that way. Between the island and the right shore is a
+passage which on its island side, with nice manipulation, is practicable
+for empty boats. Then the problem before us is to run the rough water at
+the near end of the island, tie up there, unload, transfer the pieces by
+hand-car over the island to its other end, let the empty scows down
+carefully through the channel by ropes, and reload at the other end.
+
+Between the bank where we are and the island ahead is a stretch of
+roaring water dangerous enough looking. We have learned ere this,
+however, to sit tight and watch for events. The careless Indians have
+straightened into keen-eyed, responsible voyageurs, each muscle taut,
+every sense alert. Our boat goes first, one half-breed with huge pole
+braces himself as bowsman, the most able man takes the stern sweep, the
+others stand at the oars. Fifteen minutes of good head-work brings us to
+the island and we step out with relief. The other boats follow and
+anchor, and we have opportunity at close range to inspect these worst
+rapids of the Athabascan chain. The current on the west side of the
+dividing island looks innocent, and we understand how the greenhorn
+would choose this passage-way, to his destruction.
+
+[Illustration: Portage at Grand Rapids Island]
+
+The transportation of pieces occupied four days, every moment of which
+we enjoyed. Grand Rapids Island is prodigal in wild flowers,--vetches,
+woodbine, purple and pink columbines, wild roses, several varieties of
+false Solomon's seal, our persisting friend dwarf cornel, and,
+treasure-trove, our first anemone,--that beautiful buttercup springing
+from its silvered sheath--
+
+"And where a tear has dropt a wind-flower blows."
+
+I measured a grass-stem and found it two feet three inches high, rising
+amid last year's prostrate growth.
+
+[Illustration: Our transport at Grand Rapids Island]
+
+At Grand Rapids Island we overtook two scows which had preceded us from
+The Landing and whose crews had waited here to assist in the transport.
+It gave us opportunity to observe these sixty representative half-breeds
+from Lac la Biche. Tall, strong, happy-go-lucky, with no sordid strain
+in their make-up, they are fellows that one cannot help feeling sympathy
+for. A natural link between the East and the West, the South of Canada
+and the North, they have bridged over the animosity and awkwardness
+with which the Red race elsewhere has approached the White.
+
+[Illustration: Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island]
+
+In a glade our camp is made, inside our tents we arrange the
+mosquito-bar (a tent within a tent looking something like a good-sized
+dog-kennel), and here we lie in our blankets. The hum of the foiled
+mosquito is unction to our souls. It is a relief, too, to remove the
+day's clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.
+
+The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,--soft,
+yellowish, homogeneous. In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of
+ninety feet. The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four
+or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped
+nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones. The
+river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift
+current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as
+spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite
+the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet
+thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil
+trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great
+wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this
+strange page of history in stone.
+
+Timber along the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we
+see is largely second growth,--Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and
+aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender,
+delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery
+branches seem to float in air.
+
+Across the roaring water swallows are nesting in the clayey cliffs:--
+
+"This guest of summer,
+The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
+By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
+Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
+Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
+Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:
+Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
+The air is delicate."
+
+We learn that half-breeds share the Scottish superstition that it is
+unlucky to disturb bank-swallows.
+
+Others of the migrant host travel in upper air more quickly than we on
+water, and have left us far behind,--swans, the Canada goose, great
+flocks of brant, waveys by the millions, followed by their cousins of
+the duck tribe,--spoon-bill, canvas-back, mallard, pin-tail, ring-neck,
+wood duck, and merganser. The geese will not stop until they have passed
+the Arctic Circle. Why people use the word "goose" as synonym for
+stupidity is beyond the ken of the ordinary observer. The text-books
+tell us tritely that the goose lives to be a hundred years. If she does,
+she may exclaim with the Churchmen, "Yet are my years but labour and
+sorrow." The little chaps who have their birthday parties among
+sub-Arctic reeds are surrounded with enemies from the first day they
+crack their baby shells. Lynx and raccoon prey upon them by land, eagles
+and owls swoop upon them as they swim; and as with one eye they scan the
+sky above them, a greedy pike is apt to snap their web-feet from under
+them and draw them to a watery grave.
+
+The cadets of the Hudson's Bay Company exchange courtesies with the
+Mounted Police, each considering himself a distinct cut above the other.
+One Mounted Policeman, whose duty it had been to escort the crazed
+Russian Doukhobortsi on one of their "altogether" pilgrimages, is hailed
+across the circle, "Here, lend us your knife, you nursemaid to the
+Douks." "Who spoke?" yawned the Policeman. "Was it that fur-pup of the
+Hudson's Bay?" "Yes," retorted the first, "and I'm glad I'm it; you
+couldn't pay me to wear a red coat and say 'Sir' to a damned little
+Frenchman, even if you are going to blaze a trail to Hudson Bay."
+
+Some one asks Sergeant Joyce to tell his Bible story. He says, "Oh,
+about Coal-Oil Johnnie! It was the cub's first year in the service, and
+he got off with some civilians and was drunk for a week. When he was in
+the Guard Room awaiting court-martial he had lots of time 'to sit in
+clink, admirin' 'ow the world was made.' Likewise he was very dry. There
+was nothing for him to amuse himself with but a paper of pins. He took
+the pillow of his cot and used the whole bunch of pins in working on it
+the one word 'Hagar,' in letters six inches high. The inspecting officer
+came in and the pin sign caught his eye. He spelled it out letter by
+letter, 'H-a-g-a-r,--what was the matter with him?' Johnnie retorted,
+'The him was a her, and she died of thirst in the wilderness.' The
+inspecting officer says to Johnnie, 'Well, that would never happen to
+you.'"
+
+A peculiar drumming wafts from the shore-line. "Pa-pas-ku," says one of
+the Cree lads, pulling his pipe from his mouth and listening. Young
+Hudson's Bay to my enquiring look returns, "The Canadian ruffed grouse,"
+which Sussex elucidated, "_Bonasa umbellus logata_," at which we all
+feel very much relieved.
+
+The Kid was pressing specimens, and, holding up a branch, the Mounted
+Policeman next her said, "Young jackpine, I think." "It belongs to the
+Conifer family," corrects the Doctor. "Oh!" says the Mounted Policeman,
+with a sniff, "then we'll give it back to 'em the next time one of the
+Conifer boys comes round." The man of the river and the woods hates a
+Latin name, and any stray classic knowledge you have is best hidden
+under a napkin. The descriptive terms men use here are crisp and to the
+point. The vicious habit of giving birds bad names is one that grows,
+and you never know when the scientific have come to a finality. For
+instance, little Robin Red-Breast _("the pious bird with scarlet
+breast_" whose nest with four eggs the Kid discovered to-day), has
+successively lived through three tags, "_Turdus migratorius_,"
+"_Planesticus migratorius_," and "_Turdus canadensis_." If he had not
+been an especially plucky little beggar he would have died under the
+libels long ago. For my own part I cannot conceive how a man with good
+red blood in his veins could look a chirky little robin in the eye and
+call him to his face a "_Planesticus migratorius_," when as chubby
+youngster he had known the bird and loved him as Robin Red-Breast. One
+is inclined to ask with suspicion, "Is naming a lost art?" Any new
+flower discovered these days, every clever invention in the realm of
+machinery, is forthwith saddled with an impossible name. If it had not
+been easy to clip the term "automobile" down to the working stub "auto,"
+the machine would never have run our streets. Again, the decimal system
+is conceded to be far ahead of the asinine "five and one-half yards make
+one rod, pole or perch"; the only reason why the commonsense thing does
+not supersede the foolish one is that the sensible measurement has the
+fool tag on it. Who could imagine ever going into a store and asking for
+seven decimetres and nine centimetres of picture-moulding, or dropping
+into the corner grocery to buy a hectolitre of green onions? When man
+dug gold and iron and tin out of the earth he made things with them. Now
+when we discover a new mineral we dub it "molybdenum" and let it rust in
+innocuous ease. When man loses the art of nervous speech, his power of
+action goes with it. And as we ruminate, the _Bonasa umbellus togata_
+drums on.
+
+When we pass the parallel of 55°N. we come into a very wealth of new
+words, a vocabulary that has found its way into no dictionary but which
+is accepted of all men. The steep bank opposite us is a "cut bank," an
+island or sandbar in a river is a "batture." A narrow channel is called
+a "she-ny," evidently a corruption of the French _chenal_. When it leads
+nowhere and you have to back down to get out, you have encountered a
+"blind she-ny." The land we have come from is known as "Outside" or "_Le
+Grand Pays_." Anywhere other than where we sit is "that side," evidently
+originating from the viewpoint of a man to whom all the world lay either
+on this side or that side of the river that stretched before him. When
+you obtain credit from a Hudson's Bay store, you "get debt." A Factor's
+unwillingness to advance you goods on credit would be expressed thus,
+"The Company will give me no debt this winter." From here northward the
+terms "dollars" and "cents" are unheard. An article is valued at "three
+skins" or "eight skins" or "five skins," harking back to the time when a
+beaver-skin was the unit of money. The rate of exchange to-day is from
+four skins to two skins for a dollar. Trapping animals is "making fur."
+"I made no fur last winter and The Company would give me no debt," is a
+painful picture of hard times. Whenever an Indian has a scanty larder,
+he is "starving," and you may be "starving" many moons without dying or
+thinking of dying. "Babiche" in the North is the tie that binds, and
+"sinew" is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or
+caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of
+the spinal column of the same animals.
+
+[Illustration: Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police]
+
+There is but one thing on this planet longer than the equator, and that
+is the arm of British justice, and the Mounted Police, these chaps
+sprawling at our feet, are the men who enforce it. The history of other
+lands shows a determined fight for the frontier, inch by inch
+advancement where an older civilization pushes back the native,--there
+are wars and feuds and bloody raids. Not so here. When the homesteader
+comes down the river we are threading and, in a flood, colonization
+follows him, he will find British law established and his home ready.
+The most compelling factor making for dignity and decency in this
+border-country is the little band of red-coated riders, scarcely a
+thousand in number. Spurring singly across the plains that we have
+traversed since leaving Winnipeg, they turn up on lone riverway or
+lakeside in the North just when most wanted.
+
+Varied indeed is this man's duty,--"nursemaid to the Doukhobor" was a
+thrust literally true. His, too, was the task on the plains of seeing
+that the Mormon doesn't marry overmuch. He brands stray cattle,
+interrogates each new arrival in a prairie-waggon, dips every doubtful
+head of stock, prevents forest-fires, keeps weather records, escorts a
+lunatic to an asylum eight hundred miles away, herds wood bison on the
+Slave, makes a cross-continent dash from Great Slave Lake to Hudson Bay,
+preserves the balance of power between American whaler and Eskimo on the
+Arctic edge!
+
+At one time the roll-call of one troup of Mounted Police included in its
+rank and file three men who had held commissions in the British service,
+an ex-midshipman, a son of a Colonial Governor, a grandson of a
+Major-General, a medical student from Dublin, two troopers of the Life
+Guards, an Oxford M.A., and half a dozen ubiquitous Scots. Recently an
+ex-despatch-bearer from De Wet joined the force at Regina, and although
+the cold shoulder was turned on him for a day or two, he soon made good.
+One of the young fellows stretched before us, now going to Fort Smith to
+round up wood bison, was born in Tasmania, ran away from school at
+fourteen, sheared sheep and hunted the wallaby, stoked a steamer from
+Australia to England and from England to Africa, and in the early days
+of bicycles was a professional racer.
+
+Constable Walker, lying lazily on his back blowing blue spirals into
+the air, has in the long winter night made more than once, with dogs,
+that perilous journey from the Yukon to the Mackenzie mouth (one
+thousand miles over an unknown trail), carrying to the shut-in whalers
+their winter mail. On one of these overland journeys he cut off the tips
+of his four toes. His guide fainted, but Walker took babiche and,
+without a needle, sewed up the wound. On this trip he was fifty-seven
+days on the trail, during five days of which the thermometer hovered
+between sixty-two and sixty-eight degrees below.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
+
+
+"On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,
+  De win' she blow, blow, blow,
+An' de crew of de wood scow '_Julie Plante_'
+  Got scar't an' run below--
+For de win' she blow lak hurricane
+  Bimeby she blow some more,
+An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre
+  Wan arpent from de shore."
+
+--_Dr. Drummond_.
+
+This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The
+daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten
+underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to
+thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes
+behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive laundry. At
+dusk we had seen an empty scow floating down river, adrift from
+Athabasca Landing. In the middle of Grand Rapids she broke amidships,
+but held together until in the darkness she floated beyond our ken.
+
+Trouble of our own awaits us. With no one noting, an adventurous scow,
+with all her precious cargo, has pulled loose from her moorings. By the
+time the Cree watchman discovers that the "_Go-Quick-Her_" has taken the
+bit in her teeth, the runaway with tail-sweep set has turned the next
+corner of the Athabasca. Great excitement! Billy Loutit and Emile
+Fosseneuve borrow the Police canoe and go in chase. It is such a rough
+bit of water that we hold our breaths, for a false stroke means death to
+both; but that false stroke does not come. Billy Loutit knows this river
+as we know the borders and shrubs in our garden-bed.
+
+[Illustration: Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore]
+
+This accident causes everyone to look grave. The Edmonton value of the
+cargo is over two thousand dollars, but it is a loss that cannot be
+measured in dollars and cents. These wrecked goods, gaily sailing down
+the Athabasca, cannot be duplicated at some convenient grocery around
+the corner.
+
+We have learned that any untoward happening means a half day's delay.
+Philip Atkinson calls me to one side to suggest that it would be a
+"clear waste" to leave behind the eggs of "that duck's nest I showed you
+the day we came." Atkinson is a half-breed with a Hercules-build who
+looks forty-five and owns up to sixty. He and I chatted over the mallard
+eggs and my collection of wild flowers, he respecting the preservative
+art and I in full awe of that art gastronomic of his which gulps the
+Mallards-in-embryo, sans fourchette, sans salt, sans ceremony.
+
+They are an interesting study, these half-breeds; it means much to each
+on which side of the English Channel his father had birth. When a
+Frenchman marries an Indian woman he reverts to her scale of
+civilization; when a Scot takes a native to wife he draws her up to his.
+Our crew live at Lac la Biche and were engaged last winter for their
+season's work at from twenty to forty dollars a month, with board and
+moccasins. They walked a hundred miles to Athabasca Landing to connect
+with their summer's job, and the absolute certainty of regular meals
+just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and
+four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual
+happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic
+term "the law of heredity" works out with these people, cut off from the
+lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the
+pre-civilization Indian.
+
+Philip, duck-stuffed but untroubled by "that full feeling after eating,"
+lights his pipe and looks back through the years. "My father belonged to
+The Company, my mother was an Ojibway from the Lake of the Woods
+country. My father went back to the Old Country when I was seven,
+leaving me to an uncle to be educated, and I don't know 'B' from a
+bull's foot. He put me to work on the woodpile from morning till night.
+When my father came back after twelve years and found me ignorant, he
+cried like a baby. I have no education, but," with a contemplative
+puff, "I have friends wherever I go." Philip is good to look at and he
+is a linguist, speaking Cree, French, and excellent English with a
+delightful Scotch accent. He is an ardent admirer of the H.B. Company.
+"They always kept their word with a man, and when they had done with
+him, returned him without cost to his old home." Philip and his two sons
+were the first to shoot the Grand Rapids, and he tells us that this
+stretch of the Athabasca River has been used only twenty years. Before
+that time people from the North reached Winnipeg by the Clearwater.
+Philip is a Loyalist. During the half-breed rebellion of 1885 he carried
+dispatches to Middleton and Otter, going seventy-five miles one day on
+foot. He had his horse, "a draught-horse as black as a crow," taken from
+him twice, got through the lines and stole another, and tells proudly
+how for his deed of valor he was presented with an Assomption belt.
+
+At last we are off, keeping sharp look-out for the lost scow. Buffalo
+River, where we pull up for the night, is a recognized camping-place.
+The men know where to put their hands on old-time tent-poles, the boys
+dig out shin-bones of the moose,--the relics of some former
+feast,--which they gnaw as a puppy mumbles an old bone.
+
+Another manifestation of gas is here. It bubbles up on the shore and
+through the water at the boat's bow, and as we strike a match the whole
+surface flames like the brandy on a Christmas plum-pudding. On the
+opposite side of the river are "lobsticks," a new word to us and a new
+thing. To stand as a living totem-pole, the Indians select on a striking
+promontory a tall spruce and from a section of the trunk lop all the
+branches except two, which are left as wings. If the lobstick is to
+stand a monument to a certain man or party, the names of those to be
+honored are written in Cree on an attached slab. We were to notice
+lobsticks from point to point along the rest of our journey, some of
+them indicating good hunting-grounds or fishing-places back from the
+shore, but most of them memorials of happenings on the river.
+
+The Little Buffalo carries to the Athabasca its noisy current between
+two high escarpments, and on the shelf leading back from the banks of
+the main stream is a far-reaching plateau of splendidly-fertile land. In
+the scow next us the two young Crees who are preparing the food for our
+evening "meat-su" carry on a religious controversy as they slice the
+sow-belly. We gather that one has been taken into the Protestant fold
+and that the other follows the priests. Duncan Tremblé comes down and
+cuffs them both soundly, putting an end to the argument with, "It's all
+the same as the other, just like the Hudson's Bay Company and the free
+trader. Each one tells you his goods is the best and the other is
+_nee-moy-yuh mee-wah-sin_ (no good). It's that way with the God-goods of
+the white men. Each church tells you that his is the best, but they all
+come down to us in the same scow, both the priest and the missionary."
+
+Next morning we are all keyed-up for the rapids, and about six miles
+down we encounter the Brulé, the first one, and take it square in
+mid-channel. We ship a little water, but pass through it all too soon,
+for the compelling grandeur of the Brulé grips one. The river here is
+held between vertical walls of the reddest of red sandstone against
+which the lush greenery makes a striking contrast. Twenty miles below is
+the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but
+because the boiler of the steamer _Wrigley_ was lost here and still
+remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as
+clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The
+tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes
+the Long Rapid _(Kawkinwalk Abowstick_), which we run close to its right
+bank.
+
+From the distance sounds the ominous roar of the Big Cascade. At quarter
+past four we reach the head of the swirling fall. The underlying cause
+of the Big Cascade is a limestone ledge which cuts the channel
+diagonally and makes ugly-looking water. We plan to run the rapid one
+boat at a time. The crews are doubled. Our steersman is alert,
+expectant, and as agile as a cat, his black hair switching in the wind.
+Sitting in the centre of the scow, as we do, the sensation is very
+different to that which one experiences in running rapids in a canoe.
+Then it is all swiftness and dexterity, for your craft is light, and, in
+expert hands, easily dirigible with one clever turn of the wrist. With a
+ten-ton scow the conditions change and you feel correspondingly more
+helpless.
+
+The great rapid stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer.
+With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to
+him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up
+for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a
+water-fence. For all we own in the world we wouldn't be anywhere but
+just where we sit. If it is going to be our last minute, well, Kismet!
+let it come. At least it will not be a tame way of going out. For the
+life of me I cannot forbear a cry of exultation. Then there is the
+feeling below one's feet which you experienced when you were a kiddie
+lying flat on your stomach coasting down a side-hill and your little red
+sled struck a stone. We, too, have struck something, but do not stop to
+ask what the obstruction is.
+
+[Illustration: The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills]
+
+At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to
+photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good
+vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just
+time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr.
+Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as
+we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it
+was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.
+
+The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Tremblé, the pilot, dances in the
+sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the
+top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the
+men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way
+through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The
+Inspector says, "Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste." The
+native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis,
+"After you, Inspector." Then Pelletier says, sharply, "Jump, I tell you,
+jump; there's no time for--Gaston-and-Alphonse business here."
+
+As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly
+things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows
+discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged
+goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has
+been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on
+the bank,--five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three
+minutes!
+
+A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward
+McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an
+hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden
+alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening
+swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along
+the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before
+we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the
+enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.
+
+The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks
+into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded
+island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in;
+so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back
+forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and
+Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful
+site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of
+Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.
+
+Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would
+expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their
+world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of
+the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition
+of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr.
+Brabant says, "Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for
+you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?" "Never mind,"
+says Bob, "I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?"
+
+It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the
+water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation.
+Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her "special
+orders" are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North
+not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of
+the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for
+hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes.
+Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of
+the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting,
+and, turning it over, says bravely, "I think it will dry." Mathematical
+and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic
+edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are
+miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and
+Hudson's Bay blankets!
+
+In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the
+Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding
+to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put
+up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little
+pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of
+effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted
+together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly
+Sand-boys "all in one delicious gravy." The Doctor is dazed, and offers
+to white and brown alike a tin box with "Have a pastile, do." He wanders
+among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they
+accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially
+appreciates,--something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the
+Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on
+each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. "Here are some
+authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and
+I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian
+Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I
+shall never be able to tell which it is." One by one the Doctor digs out
+from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,--a presentation "Life of the
+Countess of Munster," also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved
+holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be "as old as the
+Conqueror." There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which
+carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows
+the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under
+a side of bacon, is a print of "my great-grandfather who discovered a
+cure for scurvy." A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in
+Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead
+along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.
+
+[Illustration: Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader]
+
+Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad
+one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort
+McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and
+a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition
+to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a
+five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years
+with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their
+migrations and tribal feasts. We question, "Are you not lonely,
+especially in the winter?" But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as
+heroic. "Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians
+are always coming and going, and they are full of interest."
+
+We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees
+when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness
+consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is
+divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the
+black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox
+would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but
+varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral
+alpacas, all of us,--something between a sheep and a goat. But no less
+are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of
+his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the
+self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.
+
+As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home.
+The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind
+Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow
+from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that
+she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and
+depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an
+assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due
+to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss
+Gordon translates. "I am delighted that ladies have come such a long
+distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all
+white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to
+old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water,
+the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children," and
+the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. "Be
+glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it." It is the
+advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the
+Winnipeg Hospital.
+
+We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair
+of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle--merely for effect,
+for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In
+one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church
+to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the
+hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured
+hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that
+twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store
+to go across and dress this wound.
+
+When a schoolboy takes to his bosom a _fidus Achates_, the first thing
+he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces
+us to her find,--nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of
+a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.
+
+During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as
+they had "made little fur," entertaining them as courteously as you
+would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink
+thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden,
+bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman
+passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a
+Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just
+about three days.
+
+A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,--the reading of the
+rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a
+peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the
+latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern
+contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full
+fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the
+future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort
+McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the
+mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said,
+"Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn
+medicine so that I could help these poor creatures." Her tone of
+unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the
+scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden,
+radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.
+
+Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of
+pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for--a
+Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any
+one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of
+the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another
+guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a
+stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the
+potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally
+an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the
+wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of
+growing things.
+
+[Illustration: The Steamer _Grahame_]
+
+Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay
+Company's steamer _Grahame_ meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going
+passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort
+McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the
+easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers
+are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats,
+weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen
+scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden
+craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written
+word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out
+to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The _Grahame_
+has its advantages,--clean beds, white men's meals served in real
+dishes, and best of all, a bath!
+
+On the _Grahame_ we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus
+far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it.
+Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of
+Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have
+ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to
+rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole
+chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a
+resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as
+faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr.
+Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to
+shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see
+only the surface and have to guess the depths.
+
+As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56°
+40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, "where we
+are at." In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far
+north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and
+the lone Pribilof, "where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and
+the seals they breed for themselves." Crossing the junction of the
+Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of
+Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789
+traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its
+confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters
+of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat
+contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in
+latitude 58° 36' North.
+
+[Illustration: An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca]
+
+In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that
+upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of
+fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank,
+out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein,
+building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much
+time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those
+ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and
+determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant
+derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may
+reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of
+striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while "punching" one of
+his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of
+limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine,
+poplar, and spruce.
+
+[Illustration: Tar Banks on the Athabasca]
+
+At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is
+exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for
+blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these
+banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while
+extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the
+river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are
+medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.
+
+Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at
+every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a
+twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically
+may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is
+a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of
+over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a
+section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and
+twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed
+through the sands.
+
+Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two
+miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles
+up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable
+odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said,
+"Smells are surer than sounds or sights."
+
+We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down
+this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the
+coming of the railroad can bring to light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
+Their humble joys and destiny obscure."
+
+--_Gray's Elegy_.
+
+At seven in the morning of Sunday, June 21st, we enter Lake Athabasca,
+and catch our first glimpse of Fort Chipewyan. An acceptance of the
+invitation, "Come, shake your leg," has kept the men busy half the night
+over a hot sequence of Red River jigs among "pieces" on the lower deck,
+and we have this superb sweep almost to ourselves.
+
+The great lake-scape is blue and green and grey and opaline as the sun
+strikes it and the surface breaks to a south wind. Ours is the one craft
+on this inland sea, but overhead a whole navy of clouds manœuvres, the
+ships of the ghostly argosy doubling themselves in the lake. As we draw
+in, the village takes shape. What haunts us as we look at the white
+houses, that crescent beach of pinkest sand? We have it! It is a print,
+an old woodcut of "Russian America" that we used to pore over in the
+days when one wore "pinnies" of flour-sacking, and "hankies" were made
+from meal-bags.
+
+At one end of the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay
+Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the
+other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples
+and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of
+Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little Church of England, and higher
+up and farther back the Barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
+The white-washed homes of the employés of The Company, little
+match-boxes dazzling in the sun, stretch from one end of the beach to
+the other. In among the half-breed populace stalk policeman and priest,
+red jacket keeping the dark-skinned people straight in this world and
+black robe laying out conditions for the world to come. So is Chipewyan
+fate chequered with the _rouge et noir_ of compulsion and expediency.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca]
+
+Fort Chipewyan is the oldest post in the North, and every boulder of red
+gneissic rock, if we could interrogate it, has a story to tell. Peter
+Pond, of the North-West Company, in 1778 built a post on the Athabasca
+River thirty miles to the south of the lake. The far-seeing Alexander
+Mackenzie, in the interests of the same company, sent his cousin
+Roderick ten years later to build Fort Chipewyan on the lake, and for
+over a century this was the entrepôt and emporium of the whole North.
+The Hudson's Bay Company meanwhile were maintaining a post, Fort
+Wedderburne, not far away on Potato Island, and upon the amalgamation of
+the Companies in 1821 they took possession of the present Fort
+Chipewyan.
+
+This metropolis is one hundred and twenty years old. Chipewyan was doing
+business at the same old stand before Toronto was the capital of Upper
+Canada, while Ottawa was still unheard of, and when of Chicago not even
+the Fort Dearborn nucleus had been built. 1788! We wonder if the old ox
+that conveys our "cassette" and "pieces" up to the big gateway of The
+Company's quadrangle was a drawer of wood and drinker of water at that
+date. He looks as if he might have been. George III was reigning in
+England when Fort Chipewyan was built, Arkwright was making his spinning
+jenny, and Watts experimenting with the steam-engine. Sir Joshua
+Reynolds painted his pictures, Burns, a young man of twenty-nine, was
+busy with his ballads. In London a little baby saw the light of day,
+whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron. Three British boys might
+have been seen with arms thrown over each other's shoulders, "dreaming
+greatly"--Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and
+Wordsworth just eighteen. Across the Channel the French Revolution was
+at its height. Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Down on the
+Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had
+gone through the birth-throes of nationhood. It is a far call.
+
+Scraping the yellow lichens off the old sun-dial, we adjust our
+bearings. We are 111° West of Greenwich and in latitude 58° 45' North.
+Our parallel carried eastward would strike the Orkneyan skerries and
+pass through Stromness. All untouched by the development of that busy
+continent to the south which has grown up within its lifetime, Chipewyan
+is a little pearl of the periwigged days of the early Georges. From its
+red sands, tamarack swamps, and mossy muskeg one almost expects to see
+arise the forms of those great of old who outfitted here, making
+Chipewyan the base of their northward explorations. The ghostly company
+is a goodly one--Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Simpson, and Sir
+John Franklin (their honorary prefixes coming to them in the after days
+as reward of their labors), Back and Richardson and Rae, and in later
+days that young stripling curate who was afterwards to be known
+throughout the world of letters as Bishop Bompas, the "Apostle of the
+North." Then there is the great unnamed horde who rested tired limbs at
+Chipewyan on their northward journeys, each on his own
+mission--fur-traders and hunters of big game, devoted nuns and silent
+priests, the infrequent scientist, and the hundreds of Klondikers, their
+hearts hot with the greed for gold. These all through the century have
+enjoyed as we now enjoy the spontaneous hospitality of this little bit
+of Britain which floats the Union Jack from its fort walls, and whose
+people, brown and white, when the belated news of the passing of
+Victoria the Great reached this her northern outpost, gathered on the
+beach and bewailed aloud their personal loss. We seem to hear again the
+far-flung cry "The Queen is dead! The Queen is dead!" from the
+half-breed runners coming in that Christmas Day across the winter ice.
+
+Mackenzie made Chipewyan his headquarters for eight years. It was from
+here he started on his voyage to the Arctic Sea in 1789, and three years
+later on that other history-making journey to the far Pacific. Sir John
+Franklin outfitted here for his two land-journeys--in July, 1820, with
+Dr. Richardson, and again in 1825. Chipewyan is a mine of interest. We
+almost begrudge time given to the dainty meals of our hostess, Mrs.
+William Johnson, and the hours spent between her lavender-scented
+sheets.
+
+In the loft above the office of the H.B. Company, in among old
+flintlock rifles and discarded ox-yokes, we browse through the daily
+records of The Company, old journals written by the Factors at the close
+of their day's work through the years and here preserved for our
+inquisitive eyes. Sitting on the floor, making extracts from these
+tomes, one has the half-guilty feeling of being caught poking into a
+tomb.
+
+On this page the ink is thin and one can see the old writer thawing out
+his frozen ink-pot of stone at the end of a tired day and sitting down
+to write his simple tale. Here are finger-marks where the blood of a
+buffalo gives a marginal note. The journalist had been called away from
+his writing to weigh and pay for some fresh meat. Drops from a tallow
+candle show the light of other days. A pressed mosquito of the vintage
+of 1790 is very suggestive. We picture the trivial round and common task
+of the man who writes, see him exchanging fathoms of tobacco for
+beaver-pelts in those long, cold winters, and eagerly hunger with him
+for the signs presaging the going-out of the ice and the coming-in of
+Spring. We follow out the short Summer with him and revel in its
+perpetual daylight. With him we make the fall fishery and shoot our
+winter's supply of waveys and southward-flying cranes. We wonder, as he
+wondered, what news the next packet will bring from the old folks in the
+Orkneys or the Hebrides. We study, as he studied, the problem of
+governing his servants, placating the Indians, and making enough fur to
+satisfy that inexorable Board of Directors back in London whose motto is
+"Skin for skin."
+
+It has been a grim enough life as the author of this journal records it.
+He is far from those who direct his fate, and recognition and reward are
+slow in coming. Companionship and the gentle arts of "outside" are
+denied him. He must make his own world and rear within it his dusky
+brood, that they in honourable service may follow his round of "work
+done squarely and unwasted days." What made the charm of this life to
+these men? It is hard to see. The master of the post was also master of
+the situation, and an autocrat in his community, a little Fur King, a
+Captain of Industry. A thing was law because he said it. And isn't it
+Caesar himself who declares, "Better be first in a little Iberian
+village than second in Rome?"
+
+We get a delightful picture in an entry under the date of Wednesday,
+23rd May, 1827, when Sir John Franklin was on his way back to England at
+the end of his second journey.
+
+"To-day William McGillivary and Katherine Stewart, daughter
+of Alexander Stewart, Chief Factor, were joined in holy wedlock
+by Captain John Franklin, R.N., Commander of the Land Arctic
+Expedition."
+
+Great is the force of example, for five days later appears the entry
+
+"This evening the ceremonial of marriage took place between
+Robert McVicar, Esq., and Christy McBeath. Captain Franklin
+acted on the occasion as clergyman. The ceremony o'er, the
+evening was agreeably spent in a family assembly."
+
+Looking at these records, we are reminded of a not-very-well-known story
+of international courtesy which connects itself with the third and
+ill-fated journey of Franklin. Old Sir John, then in his sixtieth year,
+had sailed from England in an attempt at the Northwest Passage. Years
+passed and no word came from the explorer, and in 1852 the ice-desert
+was still mute.
+
+In this year, Sir Edward Belcher in the _Resolute_ headed one of the
+many Arctic Relief Expeditions, subsequently abandoning his boat in the
+ice off Melville Island. Next year the American whaler _Henry George_
+met the deserted _Resolute_ in sound condition about forty miles from
+Cape Mercy; she must have drifted through Barrow Strait, Lancaster
+Sound, and Baffin Bay. She was recovered, the Government of the United
+States bought her and with international compliments presented her in
+perfect condition to Queen Victoria in 1856. The old ship was broken up
+about thirty years ago, and from the soundest of her timbers a solid
+desk was made by direction of Queen Victoria, who presented it to the
+then President of the United States. This is the desk which stands in
+President Taft's reception room to-day, and on it the papers of eight
+administrations have been written.
+
+There is living as well as buried history in Chipewyan. A stroll from
+one end of its lacustrine street to the other is lush with interest. We
+call upon Colin Fraser, whose father was piper to Sir George Simpson.
+Colin treats us to a skirl of the very pipes which announced the
+approach of Simpson whenever that little Northern autocrat, during his
+triumphal progress through a bailiwick as big as Europe, made his way
+into a new fort.
+
+With the echo of the "_Gay Gordons_" in our ears we pass into the
+largest convent in the North country, managed by the Grey Nuns of
+Montreal. Sister Brunelle came into the North in 1866. Forty-two years
+in a convent-school of the Northland! It makes one gasp.
+
+These Indian schools, assisted by the Canadian Government, catch the
+little Indians in the camps and hold their prey on school-benches from
+the age of four to fourteen. One boy is dumb, another a hunchback. In a
+corner we came upon a poor old derelict of the camps, a Cree woman,
+paralysed and mentally deranged, who within these quiet walls has found
+harbour. The kiddies are taught one clay in French and the next day in
+English; but when they hide behind their spellers to talk about the
+white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan. What do they learn?
+Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes,
+grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in
+Southern schools. When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their
+skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep
+(young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish
+meals for a twelve-month to come. If fish be brain food, then should
+this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards,
+capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarships _ad lib_.
+
+[Illustration: Three of a Kind]
+
+Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was
+from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their protégés, that the
+sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
+in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This
+wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.
+
+We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and
+immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot,
+with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty
+bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a
+recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these
+good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six
+o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light
+is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. "What in the world do you
+do after six?" I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not
+content to rest in idle laps. "Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to
+give us light." Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through
+the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft
+a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their
+candles like Alfred of old.
+
+Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a
+stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations. At the Church
+of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from
+the leg of an injured Indian. Afterward we learn that the peripatetic
+patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in
+the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome.
+Poor chap, he died in the process! But while he lived he stimulated
+trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale. If
+there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have
+comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably
+fore-ordained.
+
+An interesting family lives next to the English Mission--the Loutits.
+The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company,
+and "for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a
+rabbit-track." There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old
+journals reach. The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree
+and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day's generation is a family of
+striking young people--the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work
+and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding
+the strong men's records of the North.
+
+George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from
+Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids. His
+brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran
+with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in
+three days--a distance of two hundred miles at least. Once, when the
+river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow
+to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling
+upward in the night. The rivermen tell of George Loutit's quarreling
+with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his
+adversary out of the window. When he heard him slump, George immediately
+thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for
+Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away. He arrived there in time for
+noon luncheon next day.
+
+At the H.B. Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge. A
+French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is
+peltries and not souls that Pierre is after. His forebears were Irish
+McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of
+French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs
+it.
+
+Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such
+entries as these:--"Wyllie at the forge," "Wyllie making nails," "Wyllie
+straightening the fowling-pieces," "Wyllie making sled-runners," "This
+day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian." We step into the old man's
+smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a "Good
+mornin'," in richest Doric. The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation
+of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan. He was born
+in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World. Coming out
+to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he
+threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without
+seeing a city in America. Torontonians think the hub of the universe is
+their capital on Lake Ontario. A smart young man from Toronto filtered
+in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, "Came from the
+Old Country, didn't you? What did you think of Toronto?" "Naething, I
+didna see the place."
+
+Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a
+two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone. In the
+forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of
+his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north,
+Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west. To him
+these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into
+luxuriousness with all its weakening influence. "It was much better in
+the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil. Nowadays, when we
+have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are
+coming out!"
+
+No one feels like smiling a smile of superiority in talking with old Mr.
+Wyllie. He has taught himself the gentle arts of gunsmithing and
+blacksmithing. The tools that we see all around us are marvels of
+mechanical skill and would be the joy of a modern Arts and Crafts
+Exhibition. His sledges and augurs, planes and chisels have been made by
+the old man out of pig iron which came as ballast in the holds of those
+old sailing ships which beat their way into Fort Churchill through
+Hudson Strait. The hand-made tools are set into convenient handles of
+moose-horn and bone. Clever indeed is the workmanship that Wyllie has
+done with them. The last triumph from this unique forge was the welding
+of the broken shaft of the little tug _Primrose_. The steamer _Grahame_
+was built at Chipewyan of whipsawn lumber, and much of her steel and
+ironwork was wrought on Wyllie's forge.
+
+Wyllie left the Scottish Isles when a mere lad, but they are still
+"Home" to him and he tells us that this autumn he is going back on a
+visit. It was a prototype of Wyllie's
+
+"From the lone sheiling and the misty island,
+  Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
+But still the heart, the heart is Highland,
+  And we in _dreams_ behold the Hebrides,"
+
+who prayed "O, Lord, we beseech Thee, send down Thy covenanted blessin'
+on the Muckle Hebrides, the Lesser Hebrides, and the adjacent islands
+of Great Britain and Ireland." Talking with the old gentleman, you are
+conscious of the innate moral strength rather than the mechanical skill
+of the craftsman. Instinctively you feel the splendid power of his
+presence and come out from his forge murmuring, "Thank God I have seen a
+_man_ this day." Wyllie belongs to the age of the old journals, to the
+days that bred Joe Gargerys and old Adams in whom appeared "the constant
+service of the antique world."
+
+[Illustration: Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North.
+
+EXPLANATION OF PLATE
+
+A and C--_Muski-moots_, or bags used by the duck-hunter for his game.
+Made by Dog-Rib women, of _babiche_, or rawhide of the moose or caribou.
+
+B--Velvet leggings richly embroidered in violet-coloured bead-work, made
+by Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald, a full-blooded Loucheaux woman.
+
+D--Wall-pocket of white deerskin embroidered in silk. Made by a
+Rabbit-Skin woman at Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.
+
+E--Wall-pocket ornamented with porcupine-quill work, made by a
+Yellow-Knife Indian woman at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.
+
+F--_Fire-bag_, or tobacco-pouch, made of two claws of the black bear.
+The work of a Beaver Indian woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+G--_Fire-bag_ of velvet ornamented with silk-work, made by Chipewyan
+woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.
+
+H--Velvet watch-bag embroidered in silk, made by Slavi Indian woman at
+Fort Providence, at the head of Mackenzie River.
+
+I--Watch-pocket of smoked moose-skin, embroidered in silk-work, made by
+a Cree girl at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca.
+
+J--Armlets ornamented in porcupine quills, made by a half-breed woman on
+the Liard River (a feeder of the Mackenzie).
+
+K--Three hat bands--the first two ornamented with porcupine quills, and
+the last in silk embroidery--made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac,
+Lake Athabasca.
+
+L--Beautiful belt of porcupine work, made by a half-breed woman at Fort
+Nelson on the Liard (a feeder of the Mackenzie).
+
+M--Armlets of porcupine-quill work, made by half-breed girl at Fort
+Chipewyan.]
+
+Mr. and Mrs. William Johnson, with generous courtesy, have made us
+their guests while we stay, and their refined home is a clear delight.
+Mr. Johnson is as clever a man as Mr. Wyllie, but in other lines.
+Without ever having seen an electric light, he learned by study and
+research more about electricity than nine men out of ten know who go
+through Electrical Training Schools. With the knowledge thus gained he
+constructed and put into working use an electric-light plant at Fort
+Simpson on the Mackenzie. Far up here on the map, too, the "Judge," as
+he is lovingly called, taught himself all about watches, and he is now
+Father Time for the whole Mackenzie District, regulating and mending
+every timepiece in the country. The corrected watches are carried to
+their owners by the next obliging person who passes the post, where the
+owner is notching off the days on a piece of stick while he waits. A
+watch, the works of which were extracted from three old ones and
+assembled within one case by this Burbank of Watchdom, found its way
+down to Chicago. The jeweller into whose hands it fell declared that
+among all his workmen there was not one who could have duplicated the
+job.
+
+Chipewyan is a bird paradise; the whole woods are vocal to-day. In the
+autumn, wonderful hunts are made of the southward-flying cranes, geese,
+and waveys, thousands of these great birds being killed and salted and
+put in ice chambers for winter use. If the mosquitoes were not so bad we
+would spend hours in the woods here with "God's jocund little fowls."
+These sweet songsters seem to have left far behind them to the south all
+suspicion of bigger bipeds. We hear the note of the ruby-crowned kinglet
+(_regulus calendula_) which some one says sounds like "Chappie, chappie,
+jackfish." The American red-start comes to our very feet, the yellow
+warbler, the Tennessee warbler, the red-eyed vireo, and the magnolia
+warbler, which last, a young Cree tells us, is
+"High-Chief-of-all-the-small-birds." Rusty blackbirds are here with
+slate-coloured junco, and we see a pair of purple finches. We are
+fortunate in getting a picture of the nest of the Gambel sparrow and two
+of the nesting white-throated, sparrow. They are ferreted out for us by
+the sharp eyes of a girl who says her Cree name is
+"A-wandering-bolt-of-night-lightning!" At our feet blossom cinquefoil,
+immortelles, the dainty flowers of the bed-straw.
+
+It has been a full day, and by the way the "permits" are opening up in
+the settlement when we come back, promises to be a full night. These men
+have waited a whole year for a drink, and now the lids can't come off
+quick enough. "Come, hurry up, Flynn, we're all as dry as wooden gods,
+we're so dry that we're brittle--we'd break if you hit us." "Well, I'm
+hurrying; I'm as much in a rush as any of you; I'm so warped the hoops
+are falling off."
+
+It doesn't take long to polish off the permits proper (or improper). By
+morning all this liquor, imported for "medicinal purposes," is gone.
+Whoever in Chipewyan is thoughtless enough to get ill during the next
+twelve months must fall back on the medicine-chest of the English
+Mission or of the Grey Nuns. Anything strong will do for the creation of
+joyousness during the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days of the
+year--Jamaica ginger, lavender-water, flavouring extracts.
+
+Next morning the bon vivants of Chipewyan are down to essences of lemon,
+vanilla, and ginger, which have been specially imported as stimulating
+beverages. We ask if they are any good. "Good? I should say so, and one
+bottle just makes a drink. Can I offer" (politely) "to exhilarate you
+ladies with vanilla?" The most jovial of the celebrants tells of his
+early imbibition of red ink. "I used to get a gallon of red ink with my
+outfit every year, and it gives you the good feel, but when this new
+Commissioner comes in he writes, 'I don't see how you can use a gallon
+of red ink at your post in one year,' and I writes back, 'What we don't
+use we abuse,' and next year he writes to me, 'It's the abuse we
+complain of,' and, with regretful reminiscence, "I got no more red ink."
+The substitution of red tape for the carmine fluid that inebriates is an
+innovation not appreciated.
+
+The old records fascinate us. We spend every spare moment before the
+coming of the treaty party in transcribing choice bits from them. There
+were drinks and drinkers in these old days.
+
+"_1830, Friday 1st. January_. All hands came as is customary to wish us
+the compliments of the season, and they were treated with cakes each, a
+pipe, and two feet tobacco. In the evening they have the use of the hall
+to dance, and are regaled with a beverage."
+
+"_1830, April 30. Poitras_, a Chipewyan half-breed, arrived, and
+delivered 81 made beavers in prime furs, though he says he has been
+sickly all winter. I therefore presented him with a complete clothing
+and a Feather."
+
+"_1830, May 16th_. One of our Indians having been in company with
+Indians from Isle a la Crosse got married to one of their young women,
+consequently has followed the father-in-law and taken his hunt away from
+us."
+
+"_1830, August 13th_. One Indian, _The Rat_, passed us on the Portage,
+he was treated with a dram for 'Old Acquaintance' sake."
+
+On New Year's Eve the old chronicler drops into verse. In tall thin
+letters in faded ink we read,
+
+"If New Year's Eve the wind blow south,
+It betokeneth warmth and growth;
+If west, much milk, and fish in the sea;
+If north, much storms and cold will be;
+If east, the trees will bear much fruit;
+If northeast, flee it man and beast."
+
+"_1831, January 1_. The thermometer this morning was 29 below cypher."
+
+_1831, May 22_. They bring intelligence that _Mousi-toosese-capo_ is at
+their tent, having lately joined them, without his family of two women
+and two children, who perished during the winter. From his frequent
+prevarication when questioned by the other Crees, they suspect he has
+murdered and eaten them."
+
+"_1831, May 30th._ The fellow has got too large a family for a Fort
+Hunter, he cannot feed them with unlimited Indulgence and supply us at
+the same time." [Would Mr. Roosevelt second this?]
+
+"_1831, June 19th_. Two Chipewyans came from the Long Point informing us
+that _Big Head's_ son is dead, that _Big Head_ has thrown away his
+property in consequence of the loss of his boy, and that he told them to
+beg a shirt and tobacco. The shirt, of course, I did not send, the
+scoundrel is not worthy of it. I merely sent him six inches of tobacco
+with reluctance. That cursed family is a perfect pest to the place, and
+it is my humble opinion that the hand of Providence sends them the
+present calamity for their ill deeds."[!]
+
+"_1834, November 27th._ A party of the Isle à la Crosse Indians with old
+_Nulooh_ and _Gauche_ cast up. They have not come in this direction for
+the sake of running about, some of their relations is dead, and in their
+own words they are travelling on strange lands to kill grief, not an
+unusual custom among the Northern Indians."
+
+"_1865, October 23rd_. We were surprised yesterday at the arrival of a
+Protestant missionary, a Mr. Bompas from England; he came in a canoe
+from the Portage with Sylvestre and _Vadnoit_."
+
+"_1866, January 1st_. The whole Establishment breakfasted in the Hall
+and in the evening a Ball came off with great eclat. Two marriages also
+to-day, Francis Villebrun to Marie Cyre, and Baptiste St. Cyre, Jr., to
+Justine McKay--so that all things considered the New Year was ushered
+in with a tremendous row! Verily, times are improving in the North."
+
+"_1866, January 2nd_. The men are rather seedy to-day after their
+tremendous kick-up of yesterday."
+
+"_1840, January 25th._ The object of sending _Lafleur_ to the Little
+Island is that he may procure a kind of willow that the Canadians call
+'Courmier,' the bark of which scraped and boiled in water has healing
+qualities which they think will be of great service for Hassel's
+complaint. Confidence in anything is half the cure."[!]
+
+"_1840, February 1st_. Hassel is still without much appearance for the
+better, and at his earnest request was bled."
+
+"_1841, December 31st_. The men from the Fishery made their appearance
+as usual at this time, and as usual, too, the best we had (which
+by-the-by is not great as will be seen by this journal) was served out
+to them. The other men had the time to themselves to prepare for the
+holiday of to-morrow, for the _Jour de Tan_ is the greatest day of the
+Canadians in these distant Northern posts. To finish things properly
+there is still wanting the famous aqua vitae, which we are sorry to
+state is not in our means to furnish. Adieu the year one thousand eight
+hundred and forty-one!"
+
+"_1842, February 13th_. The Rev. Mr. Evans proposing to take his
+departure to-morrow for Isle a la Crosse edified us with a farewell
+service, several of the women and children were baptized, and Flett and
+Hassel were married to their wives."
+
+From the records we compile this Chipewyan calendar:--
+
+March 17th, House-flies. April 8th, Grey goose seen. April 11th,
+Catkins. April 12th, Barking crows. April 19th, Blackbirds and
+mosquitoes. April 21st, Plover, two hawks, and a butterfly. April 22nd,
+Gulls, white waveys, robins. April 28th, White cranes. April 30th,
+Frogs, most of snow gone. May 2nd, Dark butterfly, four purple crocuses.
+May 4th, Frogs noisy, bumble bees. May 5th, Nearly clear of ice. May
+8th, Water from Peace River flowing into lake. An Eagle. May 10th, Sand
+martins. Ice drifting in channel in front of fort. May 20th, Swans
+passing north. May 21st, Trees bursting into leaf. July 11th,
+Strawberries and raspberries. August 18th, Cranes passing south. October
+11th, Small birds passing south. October 12th, First ptarmigan seen
+about the fort. October 24th, Lake in front closed up this morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
+
+
+"Afar from stir of streets,
+  The city's dust and din,
+What healing silence meets
+  And greets us gliding in!
+
+"The noisy strife
+  And bitter carpings cease.
+Here is the lap of life,
+  Here are the lips of peace."
+
+--_C.G.D. Roberts_.
+
+For fresh woods and pastures new this Friday, June 26th! Our little
+"bunch" breaks up. Mr. Brabant and Mrs. Harding, of the Hudson's Bay
+Company contingent, go on in the _Grahame_ to Smith's Landing, and with
+them the two detachments of the R.N.W.M.P. As we shake hands with the
+police party, we wonder what Fate has in store for each of us. Breaking
+off at Fort Resolution, Great Slave Lake, and trending eastward by canoe
+over unchartered ways, will they reach salt water on Hudson Bay as they
+hope?
+
+For our two selves, great good fortune is ours. The Canadian Government
+Indian Treaty party, consisting of Mr. Conroy in command, Mr. Laird as
+secretary, Dr. Donald, and Mr. Mooney in charge of the commissariat,
+with Constable Gairdner, R.N.W.M.P., as Escort, has just come down the
+Peace. To-day they pay treaty in Chipewyan, and this afternoon start
+for far Fond du Lac, at the eastern extremity of Lake Athabasca. The
+little H.B. tug _Primrose_ will tow them and their outfit in a York-boat
+and a scow, and the captain has been persuaded to allow us, too, to take
+our blankets and come along, sleeping on the deck. The _Primrose_ from
+stem to stern is not big enough to swing a cat in, but who wants to
+swing a cat? It is blue Lake Athabasca that we long to see; no white
+woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity and we would go if
+we had to work our passage at the sweeps of the scow.
+
+[Illustration: Lake Athabasca in Winter]
+
+Athabasca Lake (whose name means "In Muskeg Abounding"), is two hundred
+miles long, with thirty-five miles at its greatest width. It lies in a
+general easterly and westerly direction. No survey has been made of the
+lake; its height above ocean level is seven hundred feet, and it covers
+perhaps three thousand square miles. Its chief feeder is the Athabasca
+River, down which we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by
+the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake
+Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts
+of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse
+wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation
+being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for
+six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable
+blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace and Athabasca Rivers
+open their icy mouths about May-day, parts ot the lake are not free for
+travel until mid-May. The lake freezes fast at Fort Chipewyan some time
+in November. Lying on the deck of the tug, we look down and take
+inventory of our odd tow. Just behind comes the scow. It holds wood for
+the engine, a long sled, a canoe, a "skift," all this year's trading
+supplies for Fond du Lac, and half a dozen chained husky dogs. Trailing
+the scow is a York-boat carrying the treaty party and Mr. Harris.
+
+It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun
+is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock
+Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at
+the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well
+stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little
+deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the
+typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us
+from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for
+slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican
+Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them
+until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many,
+many hundreds of miles.
+
+[Illustration: Bishop Grouard]
+
+Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On
+board the _Primrose_ the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the
+wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch
+with him. "I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to
+have neither chart nor compass."
+
+"No," assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, "we just go by
+the power o' man," and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches
+us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in
+the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered
+adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.
+
+By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day.
+At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the
+scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five
+dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on
+the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In
+front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended
+midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of
+baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so
+far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of
+reindeer moss (_cladonia rangiferina_?), the _tripe de roche_ of the
+North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its
+gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the
+odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian
+lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and
+acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and
+tonic.
+
+No orders are given when we land, and we study countenances and actions
+to guess the time-limit of our tether. For twenty-four hours we have
+wondered if there were trout in Lake Athabasca and if they would rise to
+the fly. With a borrowed rod we take a canoe and off the shadow of a
+cottonwood point try a cast at random. The gut carries three flies--a
+brown hackle, a coachman, with a Jock Scott at the tail--a rainbow
+aggregation. To the coachman we get a rise and it takes three of us to
+land him. There are no scales; so his weight must forever be unrecorded,
+but as we lay him out he measures just a trifle over twenty-three
+inches, as beautiful a lake trout as ever sent thrill up and down a
+sympathetic spine. Bye-and-bye this road we travel is going to be
+listed on the sporting routes of the world, and tired souls from the
+Seven Seas with rod and gun will here find Nepenthe.
+
+[Illustration: The Modern Note-book]
+
+Clutching our catch, we step gingerly along an outstretched oar and
+climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and
+suggest turf rather than surf. "Kick her up, Mac!" "Give her a kick
+ahead!" "Who-o-oa!" On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac,
+clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All
+unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet us,--bent
+old crones, strong men, and black-eyed babies. For is not the coming of
+the treaty party the one event of the Fond du Lac year?
+
+Half way along the traverse of the lake we had crossed the
+inter-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern
+limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's
+Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak
+English,--Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler
+who would fain shepherd their souls.
+
+These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only
+at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the
+_moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers_ (July) they will press back
+east and north to the land of the caribou. September,
+_the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns_, will find them camping on
+the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the
+_hour-frost-moon,_ or the _ice-moon,_ they will be laying lines of
+traps.
+
+We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians
+by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in
+its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned
+the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of
+Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present
+has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction,
+by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection
+had been loud and eloquent.
+
+[Illustration: Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian]
+
+We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman
+whom he addresses as "Josette." Their three girls are being educated in
+the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the
+grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with
+thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the
+latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter
+nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of
+the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with
+the great world of thought outside. "Stone walls do not a prison make
+nor iron bars a cage." Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under
+birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of
+ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and
+Labrador tea _(Ledum latifolium_), we reach the H.B. garden where the
+potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little
+graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The
+inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father
+Beihler, who comes across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years
+the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in
+the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit
+hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was
+out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself
+wept. White women are a _rara avis_. Father Beihler wants to know how
+old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing
+wisely to the Kid, he assures me, "They are not an-gell (angel) at that
+age," and says, "I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a _woman
+chercher_." The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him,
+and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we
+have in common,--the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond
+du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so
+far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned
+warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.
+
+[Illustration: A Bit of Fond du Lac]
+
+These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the
+trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The
+father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money
+to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served
+The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in
+England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here
+Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the
+tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.
+
+To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more
+interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form
+silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the
+Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and
+makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a
+contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass,
+become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string
+tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who
+used to "make fur" in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the
+extinct product of a past race that never existed.
+
+The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce
+of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the animal's skull
+to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and
+musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on
+sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in
+the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the
+animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her
+side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp
+she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.
+
+The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and
+they are perhaps the least unspoiled of "civilisation," as their range
+is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie.
+To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled
+down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on
+the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have
+not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and
+sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the
+germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in
+the graves by the wayside.
+
+[Illustration: Birch-barks at Fond du Lac]
+
+Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two
+canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs
+following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary
+weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence
+the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind
+of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for
+moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are _cached_, and the trail strikes into
+the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and
+eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge
+wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his
+journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting
+incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps
+flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie
+Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.
+
+Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart
+of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral
+fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are
+lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his
+traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line
+of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an
+accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of
+the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small
+hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights
+come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far
+trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent streams, the
+Chipewyan trudges from trap to trap; if he finds fifty dollars worth of
+fur along the whole line he is content. It is not this lonely man who
+gets the high price, madame, for your marten stole or opera-cloak of
+ermine.
+
+On the trail the hunter may go hungry for two days and no word of
+complaint, just a tightening of the lips and L'Assumption belt, and a
+firm set to the jaw; but when a moose is killed life is one long supper.
+A jolly priest whispers of this confession from a son of the Church, a
+recent brand from the burning, "O Father, I know that Christianity is
+true, the great, the strong religion. When I was a heathen Chipewyan and
+trapped with my mother's tribe I ate ten rabbits a day. But now I am a
+Christian, a good Catholic, seven rabbits are enough for me--I will eat
+no more!"
+
+In the early days the H.B. Company allowed its men _en voyage_ five
+pounds of meat a day, and each kiddie three pounds. In British Columbia
+and the Yukon the ration was one salmon; up here on the Athabasca one
+wild goose or three big whitefish; on the Arctic foreshore two fish and
+three pounds of reindeer meat. This was the scheduled fare, but the
+grimness of the joke appears in the fact that each man had to run his
+breakfast to earth before he ate it.
+
+Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when
+the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt. The
+whole thing is a Louisiana lottery. The very next trap may hold a
+silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and
+a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr.
+Harris. As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the
+starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so
+long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond
+du Lac. In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating
+caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake. Caribou skins are in
+prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh
+or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk.
+About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance
+from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs
+with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother
+Church. Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear,
+and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty
+money and annual reunion in July.
+
+Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou
+(_rangifer articus_), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the
+bands of the dead and gone buffalo. Caribou go north in spring and south
+in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou
+form the advance line. They drop their young far out toward the seacoast
+in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow.
+The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make
+the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July. From this time they
+stay together till the rutting season is over late in October. Then the
+great herds of caribou,--"la foule,"--gather on the edge of the woods
+and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food
+afforded by the country of the larger pine trees. A month later the
+females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the
+uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the
+end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.
+
+This is the general rule. Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca
+Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the
+Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and
+westward branches of the caribou family. But the trend of this mighty
+migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and
+the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and
+divert them from their line of march. Individuals and scattered bands,
+indeed, have been known not to migrate at all. Fifteen years ago in the
+last days of July, in latitude 62° 15' North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a
+herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand
+individuals. In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near
+Fort Rae on the ice. It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in
+the words of an eye-witness, "daylight could not be seen through the
+column."
+
+A priest, on the winter trail between Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a
+few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail
+crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till
+they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass
+through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat
+bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.
+
+Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, "At
+Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't
+think they will ever die out." Rae was the old meat-station for the Far
+North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three
+thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a
+caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without
+any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the
+wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.
+
+When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink
+teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will
+cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would
+be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish
+(_coregonus clupeiformis_) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to
+spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern
+waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are
+always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying
+with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the
+Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good
+fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some
+of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their
+chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The
+whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it
+is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live
+for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual
+mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is
+the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes
+daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our
+sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of _de
+gustibus_, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon
+the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping
+the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one
+would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear
+dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after
+all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had
+overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they
+broached cargo. "Do you like these?" "Yes." "You're a liar!" On the
+Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his
+first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of
+Kennedy. He coveted one of the "plums" from our lunch-basket, and was
+much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. "What are them?"
+"Olives," we elucidated; "they come from Southern Europe by steamer."
+"Do they?" (slightingly). "The one I et must have come steerage."
+
+We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern
+delicacies,--beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys,
+caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of
+these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest
+here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery,
+whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and
+freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish
+hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh
+firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the
+fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly
+gamy. This is the "Fall Fishery." Winter fishing is done through holes
+in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The
+handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.
+
+As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the
+United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in
+Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an
+Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada
+from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was
+$1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its
+Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or
+ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game
+off his own bat.
+
+Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look,
+seeking in vain any trace of "the wild Red Man." The _raison d'être_ of
+these annual "treaty-payment parties" is merely the acknowledgment on
+one side and the recognition on the other that the Northern Indian is a
+British subject protected by and amenable to British law. In addition to
+the present of five dollars per head each year, the Canadian Government
+sends in by the Indian Agent presents of fishing twine and ammunition,
+with eleemosynary bacon for the indigent and old. The chiefs strut
+around in official coats enriched with yellow braid, wearing medals as
+big as dinner-plates.
+
+From Edmonton northward to Fort Chipewyan the Indians are all Crees. At
+Fort Chipewyan the northern limit of the Crees impinges on the southern
+limit of the Chipewyan, but here at Fond du Lac the Indians are all true
+Chipewyans. The Chipewyan wife is the New Red Woman. We see in her the
+essential head of the household. No fur is sold to the trader, no yard
+or pound of goods bought, without her expressed consent. Indeed, the
+traders refuse to make a bargain of any kind with a Chipewyan man
+without the active approbation of the wife. When a Chipewyan family
+moves camp, it is Mrs. Chipewyan who directs the line of march. How did
+she happen to break away from the bonds that limit and restrain most Red
+brides? This is the question that has troubled ethnologists since the
+North was first invaded by the, scientific. We think we have found the
+answer. Along the shores of Fond du Lac we descry a long-legged wader,
+the phalarope. This is the militant suffragette of all bird-dom. Madame
+Phalarope lays her own eggs (this depository act could scarcely be done
+by proxy), but in this culminates and terminates all her
+responsibilities connubial and maternal,--"this, no more." Father
+Phalarope builds the house, the one hen-pecked husband of all feathered
+families who does. He alone incubates the eggs, and when the little
+Phalaropes are ushered into the vale, it is Papa who tucks their bibs
+under their chins and teaches them to peep their morning grace and to
+eat nicely. Mamma, meanwhile, contrary to all laws of the game, wears
+the brilliant plumage. When evening shadows fall where rolls the
+Athabasca, she struts long-leggedly with other female phalaropes, and
+together they discuss the upward struggles toward freedom of their
+unfeathered prototypes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
+
+
+"On we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
+  And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as swinging heel and toe,
+We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to anywhere,
+  The tragic road to Anywhere but one dear year ago."
+
+--_Service_.
+
+Everybody is to say farewell to Fond du Lac to-day, June 29th, so there
+is a hurried finishing up of loose ends. A loud yowl as of a lost soul
+letting go of life starts the lake echoes! No hand is staining itself in
+brother's blood. The treaty doctor, who visits these people, to use
+their own word, "as a bird on the wing," has just succeeded in
+extracting a tooth for a Chipewyan bride, Misère Bonnet Rouge. Misère
+looks ashamed of her howl when the operation is over, and lisping,
+"Merci very," bears off in expansive triumph the detached molar.
+
+[Illustration: Fond du Lac]
+
+Down at the lake edge, belly prone, men and women lap the water as dogs
+do, while the festive small boy from the Government bags of poor-house
+bacon is slyly licking the oozing fat. Of the taste of red-cheeked
+apples and chewing-gum he is guiltless; popcorn, bananas, and the
+succulent peanut are alike alien. This _pee-mee_ or oil of bacon is
+delicious morsel enough for his red palate. We trade a brier pipe with
+young McDonald, a full-blood, for his beautiful hat-band of porcupine
+quills, and in the French of the North he confides to us, "I have two
+boys. The mother can have the younger one to help her in the house, and
+the priest can teach him to be a white man if he likes; but the other
+one goes with me, no school for him. I will make him a hunter like
+myself." Last year McDonald went into the woods on New Year's Day and
+didn't return until June, when he came back with three hundred caribou.
+
+Father Beibler is carrying a cup of water up to a tepee where an old
+Indian lies dying, to whom he is giving extreme unction. The slanting
+sun strikes the tin cup and the big crucifix of the good Father, and so
+we leave Fond du Lac.
+
+[Illustration: Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian]
+
+The man who tells the story crosses himself piously and immediately
+begins a bit of rag-time of the vintage of '08. We ask him where he
+heard the tune. "O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the
+Mission." Canned culture even here! It is light enough to read on the
+deck at quarter past eleven. We chunk along through a lake of amethyst
+and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep. On the
+scow astern, sprawled on the season's output of fur, the men smoke and
+argue. In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast
+about their dogs, and discuss food. Two kindred souls may hark back to
+boyhood days and quote a page of Virgil or demonstrate on a bit of
+birchbark the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, but you overheard no
+discussion of elections or ward-politics, no chatter of the marketplace.
+That is all "long ago and far away." To-night it is "You know there are
+fellows in here who can run like hell. The world's record is beaten
+every winter." "The world's record in lying, do you mean?" "No,
+running--a man can run one hundred miles a day in this country." "Well,
+what makes a day?" "Twelve hours,--that is what I learned at school."
+"No: there's twenty-four hours in a day." "Well, a day, _I_ take it, is
+as far as you can go without stoppin'--it never gets dark, so how is a
+man to know what's a day?"
+
+We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a
+whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada's national
+holiday. For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley,
+radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten
+inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter. Wild
+gooseberries are big enough to make delectable "gooseberry fool." Who
+hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?
+
+Early in the morning we start north in the _Primrose_, cross Athabasca
+Lake, and enter the Rocher River. Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the
+Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant
+stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer
+day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living. Poplars
+and willows alternate with white spruce (_Picea canadensis_) fully one
+hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter. It is an ideal
+run,--this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith's Landing, and
+we make it in twelve hours.
+
+[Illustration: Smith's Landing]
+
+"How did Smith's Landing get its name?" I ask the _Primrose_ Captain.
+"Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay," from the tightly-bitten black pipe
+leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At
+Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation
+in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort
+McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith
+the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total
+drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce
+of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this
+turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The "free
+trader" still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the
+H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.
+
+We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging
+swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had
+been in the North for years and was "going out," the other had come from
+Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the
+beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the
+"Rapid of the Drowned," and canoe and men went down. An old Indian
+woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, "One arm lifted out of the
+river, the paddle pointing to the sky--a cry came over the water, and
+that was all." Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France
+where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the
+unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that
+remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who
+wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny
+which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves
+dotards dozing in the sun.
+
+At Smith's Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones,
+among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North
+and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a
+winter's study. Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates,
+R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass
+tacks. With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and
+making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a
+barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as
+coadjutor. Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head
+of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck,
+an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since.
+Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a
+prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to
+take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the
+Mosquito Portage and we do not.
+
+We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca
+mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's
+Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the
+mosquito. He tells us that they are "of the order _Diptera_," "sub-order
+_Nemocera_," and chiefly "of the family _Culicidae_," and he also goes
+so far as to tell us that they "annoy man." As we bump along in the
+muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert
+that "the life of the adult insect is very short" and that it is the
+female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that "the
+natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant."
+We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on "Mosquito" out of some convent
+dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac. He is like the parson
+introduced by his friend of the cloth. "Brother Jones will now give an
+address on Satan. I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the
+reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes
+to you _full of his subject."_
+
+The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full
+of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a
+pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their
+digestion on an unnatural commissariat. And if the female mosquitoes do
+all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on
+Smith's portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into
+her own. We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a
+Slave River priest had said to us, "These have not delicate
+sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper
+appreciation of _material things_."
+
+Opposition is the life of trade. For every vantage-point as big as a
+match-head on our face and hands the "bull-dog" contests with the
+mosquito. An interesting study is the "bull-dog." He looks like a cross
+between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we
+went along to examine the different parts of his person under a
+microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm. The head of the
+insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he
+makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman
+enough to keep his tools always well sharpened. The Doctor was not
+"long" on the "bull-dog." He told us that his Sunday name was
+"_Tabanus_," and that was about all he could impart. The rest we could
+learn for ourselves by direct contact.
+
+Personally I have very little rancour against the "bull-dog." He looks
+worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel
+him. Four-legged brutes find it different. On the Bloody Portage we
+overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying
+to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites.
+Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from
+Fort Smith. Moose in the North, maddened by the "bull-dogs," often jump
+over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when _they_
+were possessed of devils.
+
+Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, "The
+deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs," ruminates audibly,
+"Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs! How interesting! Jolly
+resourceful beggars, these Colonials." A literary scientist sending out
+copy from the North wrote, "My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and
+bull-dogs," which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, "My two
+greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs."
+
+Bringing in our daily treasure-trove of flowers we can scarcely realise
+that at Fort Smith we are in latitude 60° North, the northern boundary
+of the Province of Alberta and in the same latitude as St. Petersburg.
+One day we gathered careopsis, pretty painted-cups, the dandelion in
+seed, shinleaf (_Pyrola elliptica_), our old friend yarrow, and
+golden-rod. Another day brought to the blotting-pads great bunches of
+goldenrod, a pink anemone, harebells of a more delicate blue than we had
+ever seen before, the flower of the wolf-berry, fireweed, and
+ladies'-tresses. The third day we identified the bear-berry or
+kinnikinic-tobacco (_Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)_ with its astringent
+leaves, and that dear friend of lower latitudes and far-away days, the
+pink lady-slipper. The last time we had seen it was in a school-room in
+far-off Vancouver Island where in early April the children had brought
+it in, drooping in their hot little fists. This same evening, watching a
+night-hawk careering in mid-air by the rapids of the Slave and enjoying
+its easy grace in twisting and doubling as with hoarse cry it fell and
+rose again, we were fortunate in literally running to ground its nest.
+
+[Illustration: A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing]
+
+[Illustration: Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company]
+
+Fort Smith, as places go in this country, is an infant in age, having
+been established only thirty-four years. Resting on the edge of the high
+bank of the Slave, it enjoys an eternal outlook on those wonderful
+rapids. The river here is a mile wide. The sweep and eddy-wash of ages
+have cut out a deep bay, on the inner shore of which stand the buildings
+of The Company, the little Roman Church, the houses of the priests. Back
+of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of
+the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the
+hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being
+more "dead" than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great
+things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort
+Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality
+will soon send unction into the dry bones of the valley.
+
+At the foot of the high hill looms a monument to the initiative and
+commercial enterprise of the H.B. Company,--a modern steamship in the
+waters of a wilderness-country. Ours is to be the honor of making in her
+the initial journey to the Mackenzie mouth. It is impossible coming from
+the South to navigate the Slave River rapids by steam. Any boat
+ambitious to ply on the waters lying northward between Fort Smith and
+the Arctic must be either taken in in sections or built on the ground.
+With enterprise and pluck, the Hudson's Bay Company has just completed
+the construction at Fort Smith of the steamship, _The Mackenzie River_.
+Its great boilers and engines made in far factories of the south came in
+over the Athabasca trail on sleighs in winter. Down that whole distance
+of ninety miles of Athabascan rapids they floated on scows as we
+floated, and while human ingenuity is bringing north the iron bowels,
+skilful hands out of native timber are framing the staunch body to
+receive them.
+
+The builders of the big boat have had disasters which would have daunted
+any but the dogged Company of Fur-Traders. Two land-slides threatened to
+slice off and carry into the river the partially-made boat, a fire
+burned up the blacksmith shop and with it all the imported doors,
+window-sashes and interior finishings, so that she sails to-morrow with
+carpenters still at work. While the hull of this carefully modelled
+vessel is necessarily of light construction, with special steel to
+enable her to navigate safely the waters of the Mackenzie River,
+longitudinal strength has been adequately provided in the form of five
+lattice girders and by numerous hog-posts and ties, and the diagonal
+bracing of the bulkheads will provide ample transverse strength. The bow
+also has been made especially strong to resist the impact of ice, snags,
+etc. The hull is one hundred and twenty-five feet in length, twenty-six
+feet broad at the water-line, and five and one-third feet deep to the
+structural deck. The strength and safety of the hull are increased by
+five water-tight compartments. Propulsion is effected by a pair of
+modern stern paddle-wheel engines capable of being worked up to over two
+hundred and fifty horse power, giving her a speed of ten miles an hour.
+She has stateroom accommodation for twenty-two passengers, draws three
+and a half feet of water aft, and eats up half a cord of wood an hour.
+She will carry to the northern posts their trading-goods for the year.
+
+Within a day's ride of Fort Smith grazes a herd of four to five hundred
+wood bison, the last unconfined herd of buffalo in the world. Doubtless
+the wood buffalo were originally buffalo of the plains. Their wandering
+northward from the scoured and hunted prairies has not only saved them
+from extinction but has developed in them resistance and robust
+vitality. These bison appear darker and larger than their pictured
+cousins of the past. Probably the inner hair of these is finer and of
+thicker texture, a difference which the change of habitat to more
+northern latitudes would easily account for. The bison have two
+enemies: the grey wolf and the Indian, one an enemy _in esse_, the other
+_in posse_. The Government of Canada has prohibited the killing of the
+buffalo, and my opinion is that this law, as all other Canadian laws, is
+obeyed in the North. I questioned every one I talked with who lives on
+the rim of the buffalo-habitat, and the concensus of testimony of
+priests, H.B. men, settlers, traders, and Mounted Police, is that the
+Indians do not molest these animals. The arch-enemy of the wood buffalo
+is the timber wolf.
+
+[Illustration: The World's Last Buffalo]
+
+Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to
+laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable
+mosquito-infested muskeg. An untoward frost is more to be feared by
+these great brutes than the attacks of any insect. Thirty-eight years
+ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a
+subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do
+not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated.
+In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North
+country. In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River
+and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay
+Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them
+for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort
+hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.
+
+In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past
+were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's
+first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake
+"observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the
+river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind."
+In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance
+into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on
+the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated
+by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which
+occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.
+
+One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd
+of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has
+shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the
+buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now
+ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well
+as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning,
+conclusively prove.
+
+Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his
+magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of
+Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the
+flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he
+assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
+pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout
+to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the
+timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the
+native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's
+belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole
+season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but
+if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although
+always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith
+while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, "There, it
+had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more." Shortly
+afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was
+held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a
+litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in
+both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.
+It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama
+as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison
+host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of
+the wolf. Archbishop Taché tells of the persevering fortitude of a big
+wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle â la Crosse. Thirty days
+afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with
+trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through
+the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those
+weary miles.
+
+With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and
+a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are
+extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the
+stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise.
+There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no
+means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find
+their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap.
+Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as
+manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in
+1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the
+same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than
+doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to
+France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173
+worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.
+
+More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox
+and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver,
+seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw
+furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother
+Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred
+thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that
+number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured
+article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur
+clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole
+or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by
+snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half
+round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and
+pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who
+declared, "I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow
+proud," would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this
+age.
+
+In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the
+fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are
+carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the
+scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the
+undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the
+nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big
+enough to market, it is "heads I win, tails you lose." The United
+States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild
+animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on
+coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.
+
+What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the
+harmless fur-bearers. Several causes make against the extermination of
+these in Canada. The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the
+animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures.
+Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and
+putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of
+active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The
+fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of
+personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur
+popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its
+original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.
+
+What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in
+showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of
+the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function,
+and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a
+wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to
+the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little
+minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the
+last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end
+no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The
+exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This
+truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of
+reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove
+to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.
+
+The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away
+with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables
+inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape
+the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For
+lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk
+rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the
+horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with
+cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and
+incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and
+Northern travellers drink boiled tea _au natural_. Cows are the eternal
+feminine and will not be explained by logic.
+
+But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most
+valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is
+the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the
+bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies.
+"How old is Ann?" pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves
+patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes
+and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip
+or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits
+often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a
+cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his
+shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to
+the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox
+for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at
+Isle â la Crosse in latitude 55° 30', about twenty years ago, an
+experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary--Burbanks
+got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were
+mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and
+black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was
+son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!
+
+We are told that Messrs. McDougall & Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the
+distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt
+ever paid on the London market,--$1700, that it was one of the most
+beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to
+the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state,
+"Of the American silver-fox (_Canis vulpes argentatus_) black skins have
+a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and
+by the nobles."
+
+[Illustration: Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage]
+
+And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter
+he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the
+London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased
+finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one
+cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds
+with keen discriminating sight, "Black's not so black nor white so very
+white." Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, "The silver-fox is but a
+phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a
+difference--!" Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we
+must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms,
+and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises
+greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative,
+the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat,
+Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.
+
+I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by
+the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the
+Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the
+river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game.
+He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without
+moving an eye-brow.
+
+At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican
+_(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)_ which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave
+finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of
+continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came
+across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in
+the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island
+in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we
+were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found
+something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The
+plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are
+slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid
+matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so
+far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the
+illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without
+shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight
+sepulture and was not "darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our
+bayonets turning." There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with
+conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and
+his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist
+robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on
+Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and
+neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified
+silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River
+pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest
+attempt to "open to her young her tender breast." It is rank libel for
+Byron to state
+
+"Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream
+To still her famished nestling's scream."
+
+And, when Keats states so sententiously in _Endymion_, "We are nurtured
+like a pelican brood," he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
+
+
+"Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use
+  Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,
+Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,
+  And the weird magic of old Indian tales."
+
+--_Archibald Lampman_.
+
+A double cabin is assigned us on _The Mackenzie River_ and the nightmare
+that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films
+vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water.
+Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg,
+still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction
+stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues
+into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the
+bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of
+sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the
+fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged
+race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated,
+and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having
+no popcorn, fizz, or Coney-Island red-hots to distribute, we did the
+next best thing,--became barkers and gave the calls that go with
+festivities. So now, as the boat swings out from the soft bank, it is a
+gay company of urchins who wave their caps and yell, "R-r-r-red
+lemol-lade, everybody drinks it!"
+
+There is only one Fort Smith! Established for three decades, it has as
+yet seen no wells dug. The people still climb that steep bank, carrying
+in pendant buckets from wooden shoulder-yokes water for the daily
+drinking and ablutions. At four o'clock in the afternoon, should you
+visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily
+procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,--the Aquarius sign of
+the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, "Why should they
+bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats
+from Scotland to tote their water up the banks."
+
+[Illustration: The "Red Lemol-lade" Boys]
+
+At noon we reach the Salt River, twenty-two miles up, which is one of
+the most marvellous salt deposits in the world. The Salt River winds in
+crescent curves through a valley wooded with aspen and spruce, and the
+Salt Plains six miles in extent stretch at the base of hills six or
+seven hundred feet high. The salt lies all over the ground in beautiful
+cubes,--pure crystal salt. It is anybody's salt plain; you can come here
+when you will and scoop up all you want. These plains have supplied the
+North country with salt since first white men penetrated the country. At
+the mouth of the Salt River are the shacks of the present
+representatives of the Beaulieus,--a family which has acted as guides
+for all the great men who ever trended northward. They have been
+interesting characters always, and as we look in upon them to-day
+neither Beaulieu nor salt has lost his savour.
+
+[Illustration: Salt Beds]
+
+The Slave River from where it leaves Fort Smith to its embouchure in
+Great Slave Lake is about two hundred miles long, with an average width
+of half a mile, except where it expands in its course to enclose
+islands. The big boat behaves beautifully in the water, and on we slip
+with no excitement until about five o'clock, when a moose and her calf
+are espied, well out of range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the
+sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The
+captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at
+the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of
+Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach Fort Resolution.
+
+To Samuel Hearne, the Mungo Park of Canada, belongs the double honour of
+tracing the Coppermine River and discovering Great Slave Lake. Just one
+hundred and thirty-seven years ago on Christmas Eve, Hearne got his
+first glimpse of this magnificent inland sea which is cut through the
+centre by the parallel of 62°, and which lies east and west between the
+meridians of 109° and 117°. No survey of Great Slave Lake has been made,
+but it is estimated to have a superficial area of 10,500 square
+miles--just one-third the size of troubled Ireland, and as great as
+Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.
+
+Great Slave Lake, lying wholly within the forested region, is three
+hundred miles long, and its width at one point exceeds sixty miles. At
+every place on its banks where the fur-traders have their stations
+ordinary farm-crops are grown. Barley sown at Fort Resolution in mid-May
+reaches maturity in a hundred days; potatoes planted at the same time
+are dug in mid-September. The gardens of Fort Rae on the North Arm of
+the Lake produce beets, peas, cabbages, onions, carrots, and turnips. As
+Fort Rae is built on a rocky island with a bleak exposure, this would
+seem to promise in some future day generous harvests for the more
+favoured lands on the south and west.
+
+The names given by the old fur-traders to their posts make the
+traveller think that in these North lands he, a second Christian, is
+essaying a new Pilgrim's Progress. At the south entry to the Lake we are
+at Resolution; when we cross it we arrive at Providence; away off at the
+eastern extremity is Reliance; Confidence takes us to Great Bear Lake;
+and Good Hope stretches far ahead down the lower reaches of the
+Mackenzie. Fort Resolution on the south side of Great Slave Lake, a
+little west of the mouth of the Slave, lies back of an island-sheltered
+entrance.
+
+[Illustration: Unloading at Fort Resolution]
+
+The striking feature as we enter is an immense Roman Catholic Mission
+school in process of construction, to supplement the existing church and
+school of that faith. There is neither station of the Mounted Police nor
+Church of England here; their places are taken by two independent
+fur-trading concerns operating in opposition to the Ancient Company.
+
+We had been told that the children down North had the kiddies at Fort
+Smith and Chipewyan "all skinned" for politeness, and we find it even
+so. The good nuns are trying to make reputable citizens of the young
+scions of the Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife nations and are succeeding
+admirably as far as surface indications go. We approach a group of
+smiling boys arrayed in their Sunday clothes, awaiting a visit of the
+Bishop. With one accord come off their Glengarry bonnets, smoking caps,
+and Christie stiffs, and a row of brown hands is extended to greet us.
+Very trim the laddies look in their convent-made cadet-uniforms, as,
+standing at "'Shun!" they answered our every question with, "Yes,
+missus," "No, missus." When we ask their names, without tittering or
+looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens. Here
+they have once more their white brothers "skinned"; no civilised man,
+woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal
+name in an audible tone without feeling a fool. I have seen grizzled
+judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses,
+squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed
+them "Archer Martin" or "Peter Secord" or whatever it might be.
+
+It is certainly Old Worldish. We speak with Father Laity who, all
+unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail
+and reads his breviary. He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age
+that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war. The Father
+came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.
+
+Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of
+the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow. The
+Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel.
+The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and
+shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole
+family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the
+pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this
+tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come
+across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. Afterward
+we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien
+Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to
+live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him
+by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means "_A
+man born_."
+
+Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the
+five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of
+His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh. The Yellow-Knives were so named
+by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons
+of native copper. Each head of a family is issued an
+identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to
+year. A father "draws treaty" for his olive-skinned branches until each
+marries and erects a tepee for himself. Government Agent Conroy, big
+bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and
+gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book.
+Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun. There
+are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation. The _Fiddler Anns,
+Waggon-box Julias_, and _Mrs. Turkeylegs_ of the Plains country are
+absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither
+waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.
+
+[Illustration: Coming to "Take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake]
+
+_Mary Catholic_ comes along hand-in-hand with _Samuel the Worm_. Full of
+animal spirits is a group of four--_Antoine Gullsmouth,
+Tongue-of-the-Jackfish, Baptiste Wolftail,_ and _The Cat's Son_. A
+little chap who announces himself as _T'tum_ turns out to be _Petite
+Homme_, the squat mate of _The Beloved_. It would be interesting to know
+just how each of the next couple acquired his name, for neither
+_Trois-Pouces_ and _Owl-Plucked-Out-His-Eye_ bears evidence of abnormal
+conditions. On a whole the names are more striking than our John Smiths;
+Richard Roes, and Tom Browns, as for instance the next three--_Le Père
+des Carriboux, Geroux the Eldest, Alixi To-rong-jo.
+The-man-who-stands-still_ is evidently a stand-patter, while one wonders
+if it would be right to call _The-Man-Who-Walks-With-The-Red-Hair,_ a
+Crimson Rambler.
+
+_Carry-the-Kettle_ appears with _Star Blanket_ and _The Mosquito,_ and
+the next man in line, who has the tongs from a bon-bon box stuck in the
+band of his hat, rejoices in the name of _Strike-Him-on-the-Back,_ which
+somehow suggests the match-box in the hotel hall-way. As the dignified
+father, _Having-Passed-Many-Birthdays,_ claims five dollars each for his
+four daughters, _Smiling Martin, My-Wigwam-is-White,_ and the twins
+_Make-Daylight-Appear_ and _Red-Sky-of-the-Morning,_ we acknowledge that
+here again, in the art of naming, the Yellow-Knife has his white brother
+"skinned."
+
+Birth, dowry, divorce, death, each must be noted on the treaty ticket,
+with a corresponding adjustment of the number of dollar-bills to be
+drawn from the coffer. If a man between treaty-paying and treaty-paying
+marries a widow with a family, he draws five dollars each for the new
+people he has annexed. If there is an exchange of wives (a
+not-infrequent thing), the babies have to be newly parcelled out.
+Through all the family intricacies Mr. Conroy follows the interpreter
+with infinite patience and bonhomie. To the listener it sounds startling
+as the interpreter, presenting two tickets says, "He married these three
+people--this fellow." "O, he give dat baby away to Charles." When we
+hear in a dazed way that "_Mary Catholic's_ son married his dead woman's
+sister who was the widow of _Anton Larucom_ and the mother of two boys,"
+we take a long breath and murmur, "If the angle ACB is not equal to the
+angle ABC, then how can the angle DEF be equal to the angle DFE?" A
+young couple, looking neither of them more than sixteen or seventeen,
+return with a shake of the head five of the fifteen dollars proffered
+them, and the interpreter explains, "Their little boy died--there's only
+two of them."
+
+Gregory Daniels in a Scottish voice, which cannot quite hide its
+triumphant ring, pushes back his five dollars and demands forty-five. "I
+got a wife and siven since last year, she's a Cree wumman." Another
+half-breed asks anxiously if he would be allowed to send for a "permit"
+like a white man if he refused to take treaty.
+
+One man with long black hair and a cheese-cutter cap creates
+consternation at the tent-door by claiming treaty for two wives and
+seventeen children. Mr. Conroy, scenting an attempt to stuff the
+ballot-box, produces seventeen matches, lays them at my feet on the
+tent-floor and asks _The-Lean-Man_ to name them. He starts in all right.
+We hear, "_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish, Birdtail, Little Bone,
+Sweet Grass, Ermine Skin_," and then in a monotone he begins over again,
+"_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish_," and finally gives it up, eagerly
+asking the interpreter to wait "a-little-sun." The drama of paying and
+recording has gone on for half an hour and we have quite forgotten
+_The-Lean-Man_, when back he comes with _Mrs. Lean-Man, Sr._, and _Mrs.
+Lean-Man, Jr_. Each spouse leads her own progeny. Seeing is believing,
+and off _Lean-Man_ goes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to
+see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at
+a box of stogies, and the clerk says, "He can afford to blow in his wad
+on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter."
+They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put
+his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year
+because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he
+wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.
+
+Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly
+the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two
+young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton
+with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed
+figures at ten shies for a quarter. "Every time you hit 'em, you get a
+see-gar!" They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it
+took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break
+the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, "Them
+chaps pinked them dolls every time."
+
+As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a
+glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy's head. It is
+the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or "De-deed." The
+lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kisses her
+gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The
+whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother
+at the open door.
+
+Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves
+down for an hour's rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light
+effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting
+sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued
+night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness.
+Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high
+point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts.
+The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over
+all a measureless silence. At three o'clock in the morning we haul into
+the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at
+the landing.
+
+[Illustration: On the Slave]
+
+This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole
+North--although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay
+River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls
+and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission,
+learning how to play the white man's game--jolly and clean little bodies
+they are. It looks like Christmas time. Parcels are being done up, there
+is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black
+eyes. Would you like to see the letters that _The Teaser, The Twin,
+Johnny Little Hunter_, and _Mary Blue Quill_ are sending out to their
+parents? For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented
+soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are
+writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father's and
+mother's name. The soap has been bought with the children's pennies
+earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights.
+The parcels will be passed from one trapper's jerkin to another, and
+when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or
+lodge of the deerskin, _Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-Foam_ and _Mr.
+Kee-noo-shay-o_, or _The Fish_, will know their boys and girls "still
+remember."
+
+One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten
+years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his
+quest here, and lived happily ever after. Their children are the most
+fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint
+at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and
+sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness,
+letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover
+the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in
+evergreen boughs for their summer bedding--a delightful Ostermoor
+mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in
+summer, and in the winter they haul hay. The hay causes our enquiry, and
+we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by
+some glacial drift of the long ago. And thereby hangs a tale. Charlie,
+an attaché of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day. As
+man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked,
+"Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?" "Bill balked," was the laconic
+reply. Tuesday's question would bring the same response, "Bill balked."
+And "Bill balked," on Wednesday. Thursday it is--"Bill didn't balk"; and
+so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter
+days.
+
+[Illustration: Dogs Cultivating Potatoes]
+
+The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60° Fahrenheit, and the
+monthly mean for January, 18° below zero. Vegetables of their own
+growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food
+supply of this thrifty Mission, one season's harvest giving them a
+thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of
+beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten
+thousand whitefish.
+
+Hay River has never been explored. It is supposed to head near the
+source of the Nelson and to flow northeast for three hundred miles
+before emptying, as we see it, into Great Slave Lake. This river marks
+the limit of those grassy plains which extend at intervals all the way
+from Mexico northward. Bishop Bompas, years ago, descended a long
+stretch of the river, discovering not far back from where we stand a
+majestic cataract, which he named the "Alexandra Falls" after the then
+Princess of Wales. He describes it as a perpendicular fall one hundred
+feet high, five hundred feet wide, and of surpassing beauty. "The amber
+colour of the falling water gives the appearance of golden tresses
+twined with pearls."
+
+Crossing Great Slave Lake, we think of Chant-la, Chief of the Slavis at
+Hay River. Bishop Reeves was anxious to convert him to the Christian
+faith, but had great difficulty in giving Chant-la a proper conception
+of the Trinity. The old man would not say he believed or understood what
+was inexplicable to him. Setting out once on a long journey, the cleric
+adjured the Chief to struggle with the problem during his absence. The
+Bishop returning, Chant-la came out in his canoe to meet him, eagerly
+reporting that all now was clear. "It is like Great Slave Lake," said
+the old man. "It is all water now, just like the Father. When winter
+comes it will be frozen over, but Great Slave Lake just the same; that
+is like the Son. In the spring when the ice breaks and the rain makes
+the snow into slush, it is still Great Slave Lake; and that is like the
+Holy Ghost."
+
+Beyond Great Slave Lake, forty-five miles down the Mackenzie, we reach
+Fort Providence, as strongly French in its atmosphere as Hay River is
+British. Our coming is a gala day. The hamlet flies three flags, the
+free trader sports his own initials "H.N.," the Hudson's Bay Company
+loyally runs the Union Jack to the masthead, over the convent floats the
+tri-colour of France. Fort Providence is hot. We walk to the convent and
+are hospitably received by the nuns. They call their Red flock together
+for us to inspect and show us marvellous handwork of silk embroidery on
+white deerskin. The daintiest of dainty slippers calls forth the
+question, "Where are you going to find the Cinderella for these?" A
+blank look is my answer, for no one in Providence Convent has ever heard
+of Cinderella! But then, convents are not supposed to be the
+repositories of man-knowledge (although a half-breed, on our passage
+across the lake, did whisper a romantic story of a Klondiker who
+assailed this very fortress and tried to carry off the prettiest nun of
+the north). The garden of the Sisters is a bower of all the
+old-fashioned flowers--hollyhocks, wall-flower, Canterbury bells, and
+sweet-William--and down in the corner a young girl of the Dog-Ribs
+discovers to us a nest of fledgling chipping sparrows.
+
+As we landed from the boat, Tenny Gouley dressed in his Sunday best had
+beamed, "Nice day--go veesit." And "veesit" we did. Mrs. Herron, of the
+H.B. Company, has spent many years at Old Fort Rae, and her thoughts
+hark back to one severe winter spent there. She turns to the wife of our
+good Captain with, "Hard living, Mrs. Mills, dry suckers." It is a short
+speech, but fraught with meaning. I honestly think a dry sucker (well
+sanded) the least succulent of all the impossible fish-dishes of the
+North. There are many young Herrons all as neat as new pins, the
+last--no, the latest, enshrined in a moss-bag. Tradition tells that
+once, when they were fewer in number, the father took the flock out to
+Winnipeg to school. The children cried so at the parting that Mr. Herron
+turned and brought them all back with him to the Mackenzie!
+
+[Illustration: David Villeneuve]
+
+The most interesting man in all Fort Providence is David Villeneuve, one
+of the Company's Old Guard. He was anxious to be "tooken" with his wife
+and grandchild, and over the camera we chatted. David goes through life
+on one leg--fishes through the ice in winter, traps, mends nets, drives
+dogs, and does it all with the dexterity and cheerfulness of a young
+strong man. He tells of his accident. "I was young fellow, me, when a
+fish-stage fell on me. I didn't pay no notice to my leg until it began
+to go bad, den I take it to the English Church to Bishop Bompas. He tole
+me de leg must come off, an' ax me to get a letter from de priest (I'm
+Cat-o-lic, me) telling it was all right to cut him. I get de letter and
+bring my leg to Bompas. He cut 'im off wid meat-saw. No, I tak' not'in',
+me. I chew tobacco and tak' one big drink of Pain-killer. Yas, it hurt
+wen he strike de marrow."
+
+"Heavens! Didn't you faint with the awful pain?"
+
+"What? Faint, me? No. I say, 'Get me my fire-bag, I want to have a
+smok'.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
+
+
+"Never the Spirit was born: the Spirit shall cease to be never.
+  Never was time, it was not; end and beginning are dreams.
+Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the Spirit,
+  Death hath not touched it at all, though dead the house of it seems."
+
+We have just finished supper and are sitting reading on the upper deck
+about seven o'clock, when a cry comes from below, followed by the
+rushing back and forth of moccasined feet. In a flash Bunny Langford,
+one of the engineers, has grabbed a lifebuoy, runs past us to the stern,
+and throws it well out toward a floating figure.
+
+It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution
+just twenty-four hours before. Finishing his turn at stoking, he had
+gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen,
+carrying the hatch with him. At first we think nothing of the incident,
+as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him. As soon as the
+startled people realise what has happened the steamer's engines are
+reversed and a boat is lowered. We call out to De-deed to swim to the
+buoy, but he doesn't see it or doesn't understand. The black head gets
+smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again. Down it goes
+for the second time. A strange, constricted feeling comes into our
+throats as we cry out, "Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming! They are
+almost up to you!" The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but
+a dozen yards away. Will he hold up? As we look, the head sinks, _and it
+does not come up_. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of
+De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with
+grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles
+down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before
+us--the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the
+rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is
+well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the
+Mackenzie, goes out with the current.
+
+The Mackenzie River, "La Grande Rivière en Bas," as the people of
+Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the
+greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers
+the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of
+either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the
+Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little
+Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight
+miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion
+of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from
+source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep
+to two and a half to three miles.
+
+From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom
+exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as
+"The Head of the Line." Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie,
+when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was
+at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains
+bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with
+muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of
+water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second.
+No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard
+a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for
+commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough "white coal"
+rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The
+Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range.
+The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the
+Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main
+river through passes in that range.
+
+At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated
+on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on
+their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course
+the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.
+
+We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River
+and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o'clock we are at
+Fort Simpson in latitude 62°, the old metropolis of the North. Fort
+Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie,
+the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of
+the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it
+was known in fur annals as "The Forks of the Mackenzie."
+
+Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its
+quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and
+try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In
+those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were
+received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes
+with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold
+stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front
+of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums
+have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in
+fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall
+unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a
+rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across
+the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the
+life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry
+feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and
+exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while
+the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history
+so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of
+the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent
+to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,
+
+[Illustration: Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson]
+
+"I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice,
+bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or
+reptiles would be acceptable. They may either be skinned or placed in
+rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of
+the body to admit the spirits to the intestines."
+
+Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most
+tickles my fancy.
+
+I think of the little group that we had forgathered with at Chipewyan,
+driven even in this year of grace to lavender-water and red ink, when
+permits run dry. One turns back the clock to the time of the Chartists
+and the year of the nuptials of the young Queen in England. We see up
+here on the fringe of things the dour and canny but exceedingly humorous
+Adam McBeaths, John Lee Lewises, and George Simpsons, the outer vedette
+of the British Empire; and, seeing them, get some half-way adequate
+conception of what a modicum of rum or "strong spirits of any kind"
+meant in the way of cheer at old Fort Simpson in those days. When we try
+to get a picture of one of these Hudson's Bay men gravely opening a
+shrew-mouse, mole, or "other small quadruped," while his chum pours in
+the _aqua vitae_ or precious conversation water, we declare that science
+asks too much.
+
+An outer stairway leading to the second story of a big building invites
+us. Opening the door, we find ourselves in the midst of an old library,
+and moth and rust, too, here corrupt. We close the door softly behind us
+and try to realise what it meant to bring a library from England to Fort
+Simpson a generation ago. First, there arose the desire in the mind of
+some man for something beyond dried meat and bales of fur. He had to
+persuade the authorities in England to send out the books.
+Leather-covered books cost something six or seven decades ago, and the
+London shareholders liked better to get money than to spend it. We see
+the precious volumes finally coming across the Atlantic in wooden
+sailing-ships to Hudson Bay, follow them on the long portages, watch
+them shoot rapids and make journeys by winter dog-sled, to reach Simpson
+at last on the backs of men. The old journals reveal stories of the
+discussion evoked by the reading of these books afterward as, along with
+the dried fish, deer-meat, and other inter-fort courtesies, they passed
+from post to post. Was never a circulating library like this one. And
+now the old books, broken-backed and disembowelled, lie under foot, and
+none so poor to do them reverence. Everything is so old in this North
+that there is no veneration for old things.
+
+It is but a few years since the founder of this library died, and his
+son now sits in his saddle at Fort Simpson. If you were to wander across
+the court, as I did to-day, and look into the Sales Shop, you would see
+the presentation sword of this last-generation Carnegie, ignobly slicing
+bacon for an Indian customer. _Sic transit gloria mundi_!
+
+What are the books which this sub-Arctic library sent out? We get down
+on the floor and gently touch the historic old things. Isn't it Johnson
+who says, "I love to browse in a library"? Judging by the dust and
+cobwebs, there hasn't been much browsing done among these volumes for
+years. Present-day Simpson has seldom "fed on the dainties that are bred
+in a book." Here is a first edition of _The Spectator_, and next it a
+_Life of Garrick_, with copies of _Virgil_, and all _Voltaire_ and
+_Corneille_ in the original. A set of Shakespeare with exquisite line
+drawings by Howard shows signs of hard reading, and so does the _Apology
+for the Life of Mr. Colly Cibber_. One wonders how a man embedded in
+Fort Simpson, as a fly in amber, would ever think of sending to the
+_Grand Pays_ for _Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy_, yet we find it here,
+cheek by jowl with _The Philosophy of Living or the Way to Enjoy Life
+and Its Comforts. The Annual Register of History, Politics, and
+Literature of the Year 1764_ looks plummy, but we have to forego it. The
+lengthy titles of the books of this vintage, as for instance, _Death-Bed
+Triumphs of Eminent Christians, Exemplifying the Power of Religion in a
+Dying Hour_, bring to mind the small boy's definition of
+porridge--"fillin', but not satis-fyin'." Two more little books with big
+titles are _Actors' Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of
+Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues_, and _The London Prisons, with an
+Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in
+Them_.
+
+But the book that most tempts our cupidity is _Memoirs of Miss A---- n,
+Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars_. We want
+that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the
+Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its
+silver mouths. We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we
+hunger to steal it. Jekyll struggles with Hyde. At last the Shorter
+Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it
+down and softly close the door behind us. And ever since we have
+regretted our Presbyterian training.
+
+At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an
+old cathedral. Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their
+kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic. We walk along the
+shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in
+washing clothes with washboards--the old order and the new. A little
+dive into the mosquito-ridden woods discloses a wonderful patch of
+Pyrola and a nest of Traills' flycatcher, and makes us wish that the
+minutes were longer and the mosquitoes fewer. What a beautiful tiling
+this Pyrola is, with its inverted anthers and the cobwebby margins of
+its capsule! Its bracted, nodding flowers run through all shades of
+white, pale yellow, and dark yellow.
+
+Down on the beach we chat with a prospector and his son, a lad of
+fifteen, who are building a skiff in which to ascend the Liard, hunting
+gold. Yesterday a Mr. and Mrs. Carl and a Mr. and Mrs. Hall passed us on
+the river. Outfitted for two years, they will prospect for gold in the
+Nahanni Mountains and toward the headwaters of the Liard. One of the
+couples has just come out from Glasgow and this is their honeymoon. We
+half envy them their journey. Can anything compare with the dear
+delights of travelling when you do not know and nobody knows just what
+lies round the next corner?
+
+[Illustration: A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson]
+
+The dogs at Simpson are "wicked." Picking our way among them, I
+particularly approve this term of the natives, attributing as it does a
+human conception and malice aforethought to these long-legged wraiths.
+The first articulate sound an Indian child of the Mackenzie learns to
+make is "Mash!" an evident corruption of the French "_Marche_." This is
+what Shakespeare meant when he speaks of "a word to throw at a dog." A
+brown baby just emerged from the cocoon stage of the moss-bag toddles
+with uplifted pole into a bunch of these hungry mongrels and disperses
+them with a whack of the stick and the lordly "Mash!" of the superior
+animal. For our own part we are "scared stiff," but follow along in the
+wake of our infant protector to a wee wooden church which staggers under
+the official title, "The Cathedral of St. David."
+
+[Illustration: A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson]
+
+We have had occasion to speak of the splendid service rendered to
+Northern and Western Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company and by the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police. A third factor through the years has been
+building Empire with these. Are we not as a people too prone to minimise
+the great nation-building work performed by the scattered missionaries
+in the lone lands beyond the railway? Ostensibly engaged in the work of
+saving souls, Canadian missionaries, both Roman and English, have opened
+the gates of commerce, prosecuted geographical discovery, tried to
+correct social evils, and added materially to our store of exact
+science. Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools
+established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to
+deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman,
+the last thing you ask is, "To what church does he belong?"
+Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running
+through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no
+Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton.
+The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide
+the field between them.
+
+The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure
+than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had
+two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade
+Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the
+wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan
+scribe merely as "a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the
+Portage." In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between
+his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago,
+only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is
+literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world's map has
+ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his
+sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we
+might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from
+London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson's
+Bay forts, and substituting for Europe's vineyards and pleasant vales an
+unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.
+
+We are told that Bishop Bompas's father was Dicken's prototype for
+Sergeant Buzfuz. A new vista would open up to the counsel for Mrs.
+Bardell could he turn from his chops and tomato-sauce to follow the
+forty-years' wandering in the wilderness of this splendid man of God,
+who succeeded, if ever man succeeds, in following Paul's advice of
+keeping his body under.
+
+Bishops Bompas was one of the greatest linguists the Mother Country ever
+produced. Steeped in Hebrew and the classics when he entered the
+Northland, he immediately set himself to studying the various native
+languages, becoming thoroughly master of the Slavi, Beaver, Dog-Rib, and
+Tukudk dialects. When Mrs. Bompas sent him a Syriac testament and
+lexicon, he threw himself with characteristic energy into the study of
+that tongue. There is something in the picture of this devoted man
+writing Gospels in Slavi, primers in Dog-Rib, and a Prayer Book in
+syllabic Chipewyan, which brings to mind the figure of Caxton bending
+his silvered head over the blocks of the first printing-press in the old
+Almonry so many years before. What were the "libraries" in which this
+Arctic Apostle did his work? The floor of a scow on the Peace, a hole in
+the snow, a fetid corner of an Eskimo hut. His "Bishop's Palace," when
+he was not afloat, consisted of a bare room twelve feet by eight, in
+which he studied, cooked, slept, and taught the Indians.
+
+They tell you stories up here of seeing the good Bishop come back from a
+distant journey to some isolated tribe, followed at heel by a dozen
+little Indian babies, his disciples for the days to come. Bishop Bompas
+lived in one continent, but manifested in two, keeping himself closely
+in touch with the religious and Church growth of the Old World. When the
+British press had been given over to any particular
+religious-controversial subject, and the savants had finally disposed of
+the matter to their own satisfaction, travelling out by summer traverse
+or winter dog-sled would come a convincing pamphlet by Bishop Bompas, to
+upset altogether the conclusions of the wranglers.
+
+There is one tale of this man which only those can appreciate who travel
+his trail. An Indian lad confides to us, "Yes, my name is William
+Carpenter--Bishop Bompas gave me my name, he was a good man. He wouldn't
+hurt anybody, he never hit a dog, he wouldn't kill a mosquito. He had
+not much hair on his head, and when it was _meetsu_, when the Bishop eat
+his fish, he shoo that mosquito away and he say, 'Room for you, my
+little friend, and room for me, but this is not your place: go.'"
+
+We call upon the present incumbents of the little church of St. David.
+They are young people, the Rev. and Mrs. Day, putting in their first
+year in this Northern charge. Their home with its spotless floors and
+walls papered with old copies of _The Graphic_ and _Illustrated London
+News_ is restful and attractive. The garden of the parsonage shows an
+amount of patient work on the part of some one. Potatoes eighteen
+inches high and peas twice the height of this, with turnips and cabbages
+and cauliflower are good to look at. There are records to show that,
+years ago, Fort Simpson produced tomatoes and decent crops of barley.
+
+[Illustration: Interior of St. David's Cathedral]
+
+Entering the little church we see the neat font sent here by Mrs.
+Bompas, "In dear memory of Lucy May Owindia, baptised in this Church,
+January, 1879." Owindia was one of the many red waifs that the good
+Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took into their big hearts. Her story is a sad
+one. Along the beach at Simpson, _Friday_, an Indian, in a burst of
+ungovernable temper murdered his wife and fled, leaving their one baby
+to perish. It was not until next day that the little one was found,
+unconscious and dying. The Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took the child into
+their loving care. To the name Owindia, which means _The Weeping One_,
+was added the modern Lucy May, and the little girlie twined herself
+closely round the hearts of her protectors. When the time seemed ripe,
+Owindia was taken back to England to school, but the wee red plant would
+not flourish in that soil. She sickened and died. Hence the memorial and
+the inscription we read this July day. Much history of militant energy,
+much of endurance, and countless chapters of benevolence did the good
+Bishop write into the history of the North before, off on the Yukon side
+in 1906, "God's finger touched him and he slept."
+
+Missionaries of the present day are not without their troubles. Mrs. Day
+tells of potato-whiskey making in some illicit still back in the
+mosquito-woods, the results of which she fears; and, even as we speak,
+an Indian lunatic pokes his head through the palings of the
+potato-patch. From far back in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and from
+Fort Liard, the Hudson's Bay men have come to make their reports to Mr.
+Brabant at Simpson. They brought their wives and babies with them,
+brought also a quantity of beautiful porcupine-quill work, Fort Liard
+being one of the few places in the North where this art flourishes.
+Tomorrow they will start back, tacking against the stream, as the
+imported brides are doing before them.
+
+To dive into the journals of the past, of which the loft above the
+offices here at Simpson is full, is even more interesting than talking
+with the people of the present. We take 1837, the year which saw the
+accession in England of the young and well-beloved Queen, and from
+these musty books unearth a running commentary of what is doing in Fort
+Simpson in that year.
+
+"_1837, January 1_. The people were brought into the Hall, and enjoyed
+their meal with great appetites, being also treated to a glass of wine
+and a fathom of tobacco and a pipe. Wind East."
+
+"_1837, February 11_. Rabbits are numerous, but the ladies of the
+Establishment make no great effort in snaring them."
+
+"_1837, February 14_. Late last night arrived a woman, _Thawyase_, and a
+boy, the family of the late _Thoesty_. They have all come to take refuge
+here as they are starving. The woman at dusk decoyed old Jack away to
+camp in the woods--and the old fellow has found a mate."
+
+One wonders if either _Thawyase_, the decoyed Jack, or the old
+chronicler was conscious of the fact that this was St. Valentine's Day.
+
+"_1837, March 27_. Two geese have been seen to-day, the first this
+season."
+
+"_1837, May 2_. _Marcel_ sowed some oats. Mosquitoes begin to become
+annoying."
+
+"_1837, May 5_. Wild fowl are beginning to frequent the small lakes of
+the neighbourhood. The willows and young trees are now budding forth
+beautifully."
+
+"_1837, May 18_. _Hope_ began to plough this morning with the bull, but
+as this is the first time he has been yoked, the day's work is found to
+be but poor."
+
+"_1837, May 19_. Felix and Roderick McLeod made twelve bags of pemmican
+to-day."
+
+_1837, May 21_. The Mackenzie River broke up to-day, and continued
+drifting pretty thick till evening."
+
+"_1837, June 18_. Some of the Indians killed a bear before the door and
+it supplied us with a little fresh meat."
+
+"_1837, June 19_. Flies so numerous that we are under the necessity of
+putting our cattle into the stable, otherwise they will fall victims to
+the cruel insects."
+
+"_1837, June 20_. Weather very suffocating, thermometer 85 above at
+three p.m., not as much as a cloud to be seen in the firmament and not
+the least air to afford any refreshment; this along with the solitude of
+the time is enough to make people dull. No Indian from any quarter: well
+supplied with ammunition last spring, they forget us when they can get
+their own mouths satisfied. Ashley grinding barley in the steel mill."
+
+"_1837, June 21_. _Le Mari_ has just brought in some fish and a little
+bearskin in order to get a chemise, he says he is not able to hunt
+without a chemise, as there are so many flies just now. I have taken it
+upon myself to give him the shirt on credit."
+
+Here a new hand writes the records, untrammelled by any orthographic
+rules.
+
+"_1837, June 24_. Flys very numerus and trublsome to the Cattel."
+
+"_1837, July 11_. Starvan Indians going and coming ourly."
+
+"_1837, July 13_. Six squas arrived with plenty Bearrys--that's all they
+subsist on in this part of the River."
+
+"_1837, July 26_. Barley is getting ripe. But small birds nip off the
+ends of the stalks as fast as it ripens."
+
+"_1837, August 23_. Last night the bull broke into one of the gardens
+where oats was sown and eat the whole up."
+
+"_1837, September 18_. An Express arrived from Fort Norman with
+despatches from the Gentlemen of the Arctic Discovery Expedition, and it
+is most satisfying to learn that the first object of the Expedition was
+successfully accomplished: on the 4th August the Company's flag was
+planted on Point Barrow."
+
+"_1837, September 19th_. _Louson_ put parchment in the window-frames."
+
+"_1837, October 11_. Ice is forming since yesterday along the beach."
+
+"_1837, November 1_. This being the holiday for All Saints, the men
+though no saints celebrated it off duty. The weather cold but fine."
+
+"_1837, November 2_. I have been these two days occupied with the
+blacksmith in making an oven, and this evening it being finished we give
+it a fair trial by placing a large trout in it for supper and it is
+found to answer most excellently."
+
+"_1837, November 3_. Strong northwest wind with drift and cold. About
+one o'clock of last night the Aurora had a most unusual appearance,
+seemingly black in place of the white commonly observed and forming an
+arch from east to west, consisting of five streaks, here and there
+broken off."
+
+"_1827, November 5_. Blacksmith making iron runners for our traineaux
+from old gun-barrels."
+
+"_1837, November 30_. This being the anniversary of the Tutelar Saint of
+Scotland, we had in addition to our usual dinner a roasted swan and a
+moose-nose, a rice pudding, a cranberry tart, and a glass of wine."
+
+"_1837, December 1_. I was obliged to give four pounds of dried meat to
+the dogs for there are some that are almost dead and they et all the
+windows of the Forge."
+
+"_1837, December 2_. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of
+insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and prevent
+them devouring themselves."
+
+_December 25_. Thermometer 35 below the cypher this morning, this being
+Christmas no labour done. Wind N.W."
+
+"_1838, January 1_. The morning was ushered in by a salute fired by our
+people at the windows and doors, after which they came to wish us a
+Happy New Year--and in return, in conformity to the custom of the
+country they were treated, the men with half a glass of brandy each, and
+the women with a kiss, and the whole of them with as many cakes as they
+choose to take and some raisins. One of our gentlemen who had a bottle
+of shrub treated them to a glass, and after some chit-chat conversation
+they retired, firing a salute on going out. In the evening they played
+at Blind-man's-buff, concluding the fête by a supper in the Hall. I also
+gave each of the men a fathom of twist tobacco and a clay pipe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
+
+
+"With souls grown clear
+  In this sweet atmosphere,
+With influences serene,
+  Our blood and brain washed clean,
+We've idled down the breast
+  Of broadening tides."
+
+--_Chas. G.D. Roberts_.
+
+About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we
+push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and
+parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen
+present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.
+We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed
+into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet
+photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the
+Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we
+proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due
+northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the
+pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the
+river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so
+low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we
+impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the
+Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course
+for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora]
+
+At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal
+mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow
+the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake
+Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A
+ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the
+pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed
+view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who
+understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have
+that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to
+attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when
+many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so
+blatantly dub "progress."
+
+It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence
+we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road
+to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to
+the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons
+passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the
+silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.
+
+Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded,
+and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's
+development and acceptance--banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings
+of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and
+unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the
+Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into
+its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the
+Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the
+Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams
+hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to
+the _inconnu_ and the Indian.
+
+It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream
+to its mouth, "discovering" a river along whose shores centuries before
+had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race,
+wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or
+chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age
+follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time
+these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed "the red men" and "the American
+Indian."
+
+We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply
+turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl--gulls in great
+variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny
+laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers
+and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are
+to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the
+banks--the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid
+golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss
+dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash
+breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the
+swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of
+upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being
+modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.
+
+Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters
+begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly
+south to kinder skies, the _inconnu_ hurry northward seeking the sea.
+Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's "_Le convert du bon
+Dieu_," silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and
+ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering
+Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated
+fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the
+six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or
+unwitting of shelter.
+
+According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the
+ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds
+the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for
+him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut
+etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest
+it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his
+man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys
+upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues
+a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great
+hunter, man.
+
+In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the
+intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the
+Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke
+not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice
+of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power--the
+Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his
+children.
+
+Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is
+saying "Spring," full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the
+open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the
+honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and
+darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary
+streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting
+ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and
+all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.
+
+Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and
+wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into
+a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever
+hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has
+always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along
+her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of
+life; their unvoiced prayer is, "Give us our fish in due season." From
+the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and
+dipped and seined their sustenance--inconnu, jack-fish, grayling,
+white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice
+or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway--a trail worn
+smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast
+in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.
+
+Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and
+lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of
+recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the
+great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along
+these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph,
+self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the
+noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the
+keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife,
+Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand
+despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise
+was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the
+Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game
+of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a
+man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.
+
+About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and
+Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size.
+One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is "just
+like a town." Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough
+record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will
+always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered
+the fringed gentian (_Gentiana crinata_) with its lance-shaped leaves,
+delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian
+is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and
+it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63°. Purple
+asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse
+or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled
+flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and
+purple columbines already forming seed.
+
+Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance
+from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche
+Trempe-l'eau or "The Rock by the Riverside," an outcrop of Devonian
+limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above
+the river. We come into view of the "boucans" or beds of lignite coal
+which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in
+1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his
+journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back,
+for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it
+would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would
+come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter
+monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there
+were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the
+Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their
+eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of "small white buffalo" which they
+hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the
+_Sass-sei-yeuneh_ or "Foolish Bear" of the Slavis.
+
+[Illustration: Indians at Fort Norman]
+
+It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast
+of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes
+into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in
+a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been
+in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the
+current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor
+against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is
+a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by
+the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.
+
+The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole
+of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the
+outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established
+winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water,
+probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave
+Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual
+shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and
+fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are
+surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very
+late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.
+
+March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three
+feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier
+water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs
+are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings
+blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September
+is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last
+of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre
+of the lake freezes over.
+
+When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one
+going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle "Boyne
+Water." The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across
+the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the "Nest of
+the Wind" of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this
+great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in
+thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that
+the Great Spirit, "in the beginning," spread out there to dry. We find
+Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning,
+the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and
+Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat
+coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to
+his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library,
+and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas,
+beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman
+lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the
+outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and
+pink-teas.
+
+[Illustration: Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman]
+
+[Illustration: The Ramparts of the Mackenzie]
+
+Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path
+leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It
+is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of
+children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and
+awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb
+flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at
+lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.
+
+Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the
+peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float
+between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass
+Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for.
+The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection.
+If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they
+have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a
+wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache
+of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when
+ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky
+replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.
+
+It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest
+spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,--the Ramparts. The
+great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here
+narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles
+forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred
+feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers,
+and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, "turned on edge," flows,
+maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of
+the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring,
+the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a
+skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the
+cliffs above.
+
+As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian
+artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with
+the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted,
+our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of
+this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the
+picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn
+and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and
+envelopes the earth as with a garment,--the light that never was on sea
+or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to
+pass the portal into the Arctic World.
+
+[Illustration: Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth]
+
+A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians
+has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting
+for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big
+steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their
+old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock,
+ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower
+down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed
+from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river;
+and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at
+midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle.
+
+The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say
+our "joggafy" lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar
+bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in
+America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the
+Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen
+silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there?
+Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his
+daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,--Mrs. Pierre la Hache.
+Tenny wears his "other clothes" and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for
+this is his home. "It looks like a swan on the water," he says, when the
+first white houses come into view. "You like it, do you not?" "Like it?
+Good Hope is God's Country!" There is no place like home, even when it
+is the Arctic Circle!
+
+The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the
+dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the
+big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr.
+C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand
+servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the
+greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has
+continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition
+is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employés a pension
+after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely
+deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old
+gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to
+his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the
+younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up
+the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr.
+Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope
+Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.
+
+Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses,
+and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.
+Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back
+from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women
+call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to
+rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is
+hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list
+of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the
+unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss
+Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide
+world.
+
+We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of
+pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your
+throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine
+and _galettes_, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the
+window-ledge and look around the walls of the "homey" room we wonder if
+this really can be the "Arctic Circle, 23-1/2° from the North Pole,
+which marks the distance that the sun's rays," etc., etc., as the little
+geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday
+School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women,
+earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and
+girls--the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a
+pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there
+a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned
+hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend
+runs,--"Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a
+bottle and a little loaf of bread."
+
+Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first
+Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the
+first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: "And
+how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?" Quick came the
+girlie's reply, "They had to leave The Company's service!"
+
+Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. "We get a mail every
+year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail." This is to her
+the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A
+letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope
+crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it
+travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the
+Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by
+dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence
+the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good
+Hope on the Arctic Circle.
+
+We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and
+devotion to The Company,--these are the two key-notes of her character.
+Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made "outside"
+to Montreal when she was a young mother--it was just fifty years
+ago,--measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died,
+"_Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants_!" Some years after
+this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies,
+snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until
+it was torn from her by force.
+
+We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the
+whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable
+gardens are in evidence here,--potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages.
+Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's
+Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the
+store of the "free-trader," he says, "Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman,
+kindly, and dear, but she doesn't approve of me. She makes a point of
+not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church."
+
+"Why?" we ask, much surprised.
+
+"Oh," with a laugh, "you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B.
+Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns
+and a tail!"
+
+We step into the "Little Church of the Open Door," and sit down and
+think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the
+mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see
+across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a
+transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a
+saint,--St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery
+outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts
+will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, "Our Lady of
+Good Hope," the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri
+Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
+
+
+"Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,
+And out of my full heart,
+Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold
+The Infinite thou art.
+What matter all the creeds that come and go,
+The many gods of men?
+My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow."
+
+--_A Pagan Hymn_.
+
+"The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber," said
+text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We
+didn't find him.
+
+It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel
+since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the
+true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a
+master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were,
+men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for
+tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing,
+and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of
+the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and
+this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is
+always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his
+dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is
+a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he
+is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing
+with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little
+half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of
+good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly
+round the neck with, "Everybody are my friend."
+
+One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode
+on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to
+trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco,
+looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with
+him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures
+between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began.
+"What for this fellow, huh?" and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a
+little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or
+the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap,
+the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which
+looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each
+bargain sealed with a handshake.
+
+Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of
+animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours,
+the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a
+Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did
+when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same
+place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the
+claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.
+
+[Illustration: A Kogmollye Family]
+
+Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats
+while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to
+do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their
+names and to ask ours. "Major Jabussy," "Missa Blown," they got the
+names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into
+roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no
+one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this
+Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one
+exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair,
+the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in
+physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and
+Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six
+feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage
+and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has "arrived"; he has an
+air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms "Outside" you seldom see.
+
+The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to
+the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the
+Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for
+the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from
+the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for
+the American whalers.
+
+One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the
+Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two
+wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did
+she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak
+the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big
+seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years
+followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of
+walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet
+sinks in a well.
+
+One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord
+the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot
+consistency which was his taste, she said, "I'm not as young as I was,
+you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get
+another wife to help me with the work." Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon
+the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak,
+dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and
+as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a
+rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.
+
+How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire
+trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North
+family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but
+never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a ménage of nicer
+adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of
+life, waggish and keen, "quick at the uptak'," as the Scotch say,
+presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing
+her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior
+economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet,
+dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and
+plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of
+height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a
+man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception
+where men of the world forgather.
+
+Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the
+Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet,
+the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple
+dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking
+back to Old World culture and distinction.
+
+[Illustration: Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family]
+
+How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for
+her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy
+and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family
+fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps
+with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of
+her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the
+exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had
+brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the
+matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two
+school-girls.
+
+The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in
+vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were
+all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking
+Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If
+no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony
+there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?
+
+Kipling declares, "There's never a law of God or man runs north of
+fifty-three." The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent
+quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He
+is his own man.
+
+In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of "One
+man, One wife," allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and
+elsewhere, so that it may read, "One man, one wife at a time." Are we so
+sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the
+Eskimo?
+
+Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread,
+in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On
+the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples;
+here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill
+as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of
+seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In
+many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women
+outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and
+provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo
+is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large
+families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now,
+the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and
+provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a
+floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and
+generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can
+comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from
+extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the
+Nunatalmutes?
+
+The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo
+equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a
+significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either
+the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment
+to the latitude of 68° North and take cognizance of the fact that no
+seductive "Want Columns" in the daily press here offer a niche whereby
+unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as
+chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To
+keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own
+proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind
+is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all
+must have in order to live.
+
+Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a
+man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each
+partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness
+fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of
+human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle
+perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it
+seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?
+
+I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always
+content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit,
+nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a
+reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of
+seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely,
+but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the
+Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three
+winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her
+feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.
+
+In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate
+to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her
+brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast
+consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The
+ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests
+present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one
+needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as "odours of Edom and
+offerings Divine."
+
+The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a
+retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight
+suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands
+above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a
+gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in
+the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the
+air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice
+repeated,
+
+"Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya--yae!"
+
+Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory
+and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride,
+pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.
+
+By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most
+admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most
+misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The
+Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known
+but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is
+an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line
+between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty
+miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four
+peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
+and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of
+Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days
+brought their most precious medium of exchange,--a peculiar blue jade,
+one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a
+tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so
+the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's
+ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.
+
+This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and
+merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old
+men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious
+oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and
+courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these
+Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of
+delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no
+red-hots nor "fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled
+and f-five a bag!", but the Arctic concomitants of these,--boiled
+beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that
+smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in
+the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the
+counters that are different.
+
+Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down
+into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and
+fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the
+world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south
+were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that
+disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great
+Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771,
+followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives
+their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at
+Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band
+of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in
+1820 was more happy. He says, "The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands
+in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile
+intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making
+bows." Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this
+tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, "I called out '_Tima_'
+(Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out
+'_Tima_.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily
+by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white
+man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and
+they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up
+a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would
+eat it."
+
+Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian
+missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of
+such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited
+the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but
+rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John
+Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen,
+the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them,
+and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and
+his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo
+is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid
+moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.
+
+Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated
+religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to
+turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell
+to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, "Goodbye, my
+dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never
+reach you."
+
+The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north,
+"keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole." But the Eskimo
+has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and
+it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what
+it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast
+it doesn't drop below 55.
+
+The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,--the land and the sea,
+with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his,
+that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the
+Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most
+insistent one would be, "Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but
+hang on to your fish-net."
+
+Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo
+and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the
+contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The
+Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together
+the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of
+revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the
+blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts
+Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but
+with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies,
+and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In
+the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of
+one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against
+misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo
+stays on the coast to-day because it is to him "God's country" and not
+because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.
+
+For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed
+the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different
+bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the
+Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the
+ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the
+season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the
+intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the
+Eskimo?
+
+Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta
+region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of
+that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever,
+consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling
+decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though
+consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian,
+measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal
+than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.
+
+What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them
+making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic,
+so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole
+horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but
+call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates
+once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and
+molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side
+of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the
+Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.
+
+The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by
+marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the
+whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its
+changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of
+the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the
+Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo
+mothers, and, for "floating fathers," marking their escutcheon with
+every nationality under the sun,--American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,
+Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all
+miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is
+different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a
+Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or
+Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.
+There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo
+"wives" outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.
+One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken
+"outside" by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or
+eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south
+to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the
+marriage-contract is "good for this season only," and the wife and
+children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him
+with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.
+
+What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her
+people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of
+Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the
+erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she
+is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and
+capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man
+of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her
+second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she
+shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she
+again essays Hymen's lottery.
+
+Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share
+that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a
+child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the
+half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness
+forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall
+below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the
+ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity
+plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the
+blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see
+and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied
+and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in
+this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, "The
+sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and
+fourth generation;" it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own
+inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally
+descend in direct line.
+
+We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he
+approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of
+hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft,
+his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But,
+most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children.
+"A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure," is a pretty theory,
+but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own
+footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the
+igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in
+and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe
+air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.
+
+The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but
+there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive.
+He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his
+place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent
+entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no
+power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of
+doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden
+Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily
+even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered
+into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is
+but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be
+born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day
+meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the
+clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born
+while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from
+the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at,
+much less fuss over, the little stranger.
+
+Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown
+man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy
+to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the
+newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers
+around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes
+possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in
+twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to
+influence the character and destiny of the growing child.
+
+We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The
+summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its
+earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's
+back under her _artikki_, or upper garment, which has been made
+voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King
+Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a
+bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is
+wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother
+who first crooned in love and literalness,
+
+"By-o, Baby Bunting,
+Daddy's gone a-hunting,
+To get a little rabbit-skin,
+To wrap his Baby Bunting in."
+
+Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet.
+While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer
+enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a
+beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins
+pendant,--rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the
+floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and
+jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of
+hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young
+hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the
+culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in
+one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.
+
+A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns
+to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon
+the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as
+the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the
+Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being
+inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.
+
+The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not
+unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for
+twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a
+little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out
+every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At
+eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line
+on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an
+air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not
+think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with
+the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam,
+and says, "The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so."
+
+These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their
+play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North,
+as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their
+vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no
+molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a
+walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was
+neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of
+tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball,
+down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft
+parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under
+dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."
+
+The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.
+It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated
+difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on
+each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his
+adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound
+by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to
+him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.
+All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a
+row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind,
+for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted
+discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the
+ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball
+diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line
+of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and
+out among the camps of the Eskimo,--"Self-reverence, self-knowledge,
+self-control."
+
+[Illustration: Farthest North Football]
+
+What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude
+imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and
+"visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas;
+but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up
+in her mother's long dresses.
+
+[Illustration: Two Spectators at the Game]
+
+When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in
+spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative
+of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time
+that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle
+are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the
+meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and
+south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the
+anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game,
+help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six
+months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever.
+The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any
+suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are
+finished and the new hunts not yet begun. "I'll eat my hat" is an empty
+threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing
+pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.
+
+At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me
+this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie
+Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and
+cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again
+indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken
+violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one
+little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained,
+alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young
+Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the
+silent camp.
+
+One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that
+little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing,
+waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies
+of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as
+its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went
+in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that
+A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too,
+and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have
+been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly
+compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.
+
+[Illustration: An Eskimo Exhibit
+
+A--Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.
+
+B--Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the
+missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word "Lamb" having no
+meaning to an Eskimo.
+
+C--Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.
+
+D--Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.
+
+E--Model of Eskimo paddle.
+
+F--Skin model of the _Oomiak_ or Eskimo woman's boat.
+
+G and H--Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half
+a thimbleful of tobacco.]
+
+As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of
+loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had
+never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry
+admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he
+is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with _after_ the fit of
+passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools,
+with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their
+wise papers on the training of "the child," the Eskimo children we saw
+were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense
+of the word, more truly "educated" than many of our children are.
+Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained
+admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern
+conditions.
+
+Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint
+of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the
+family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very
+nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the
+mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the
+fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national
+greatness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
+
+
+"I have drunk the Sea's good wine,
+Was ever step so light as mine,
+Was ever heart so gay?
+O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee,
+For this old joy renewed,
+For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued
+With sunlight and with sea."
+
+--_A Pagan Hymn_.
+
+On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow
+passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the
+steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants
+is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of
+running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial
+banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in
+the scow may sleep in peace.
+
+At Point Separation, 67° 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the
+east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles,
+the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden
+sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred
+miles east and west.
+
+The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It
+was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and
+Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in
+their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later,
+Richardson, this time concerned with the _Plover_ Relief Expedition of
+the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,
+
+"July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my instructions,
+a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug a pit at a distance
+of ten feet from the best grown tree on the Point, and placed in it,
+along with the pemmican, a bottle containing a memorandum of the
+Expedition, and such information respecting the Company's post as I
+judged would be useful to the boat party of the _Plover_ should they
+reach this river. The lower branches of the tree were lopped off, a part
+of its trunk denuded of bark, and a broad arrow painted thereon with red
+paint. In performing these duties at this place, I could not but recall
+to mind the evening of July 3rd, 1826, passed on the very same spot with
+Sir John Franklin. We were then full of joyous anticipation."
+
+As we look at these enduring lobsticks, we recollect that Commander
+Pullen, with two boats from the _Plover_ in 1849, visited the depot and
+found the precious pemmican. We leave the Mackenzie proper for the
+present and enter the easternmost channel of its farthest north
+tributary, the Peel, and follow this considerable stream thirty-three
+miles to Fort Macpherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.
+
+Fort Macpherson has a striking site. To the east, spreads a rolling
+wooded plain of alluvial origin, containing thousands of lakes. The west
+aspect gives us an uninterrupted view of the wooded valley of the Peel,
+backed by a heathery slope with the northern Rockies on the far horizon.
+Due north, upstarts a peak of the Rockies known locally as Black
+Mountain--a dark barren spur two thousand feet in height. A winter trail
+from Macpherson to Arctic Red River cuts no fewer than thirty-three
+small lakes.
+
+[Illustration: Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs]
+
+On the beach to meet us are Mounted Police and Eskimo from Herschel
+Island, Church of England missionaries, traders of the H.B. Co., and
+Loucheux Indians. But here, as at Arctic Red River, it is that Polar
+gentleman the Eskimo who claims our attention. Let Sergeant Fitzgerald,
+R.N.W.M.P., stationed at Herschel Island, speak for the Kogmollye and
+Nunatalmute Eskimo. In his departmental report this officer states, "I
+have found these natives honest all the time I have been at Herschel
+Island. I never heard of a case of stealing among them." He has been
+there five years. Up here on the Arctic the bare word of an Eskimo is
+accepted of all men. If he states to an H.B. Co. factor that he has an
+order from a whaling captain to get certain goods for himself, that
+unwritten order is honoured though it may date back two or even three
+years, whereas an order presented by a white man must be in writing and
+certified.
+
+Why should I enter the lists and take up icy spear for my Eskimo fellow
+British subject? Because he is so very worth while. Because through the
+years the world has conspired to libel him. Because within a decade or
+two he will have passed utterly off the map. And because it is so very
+much pleasanter to write appreciations than epitaphs. This man wins you
+at once by his frank directness; his bearing is that of a fearless
+child. The Indian, like Ossian's hero, scorns to tell his name, and on
+occasion will dodge the camera, but the Eskimo likes to be photographed.
+Young and old, they press to our side like friendly boys and girls round
+a "chummy" teacher, volunteering information of age, sex, and previous
+condition, with all sorts of covetable bits of intimate family history.
+You love the Eskimo because he is kind to his dogs and gentle to little
+children. His entire willingness to take you on credit is contagious,
+trust begets trust even in walrus latitudes.
+
+[Illustration: Two Wise Ones]
+
+The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a clever chap. With no school-teacher, no
+school, no modern appliances, he does many things and does each
+admirably. He is a hunter by land and sea, a fearless traveller, a
+furrier, a fisherman, a carver, a metal-smith, and he takes in every
+task the pride of a master mechanic,--"the gods see everywhere." The
+duties of the man and the woman are well-defined. The head of the
+Kogmollyc household is the blood-and-flesh-winner, the navigator of the
+kayak, the driver of dogs. It is he who builds the houses on the march,
+and when occasion requires he does not consider it _infra dig._ to get
+the breakfast or mind the baby. The wife dresses the skins, prepares
+the food, makes all the clothing, and the lord of the igloo demands from
+her the same perfect work that he turns out himself.
+
+[Illustration: A Nunatalmute Eskimo Family]
+
+When an Eskimo wife has finished making her spouse a pair of waterproof
+boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up. If there is one
+little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her,
+and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways. Either she
+must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word,
+or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker.
+We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was
+no recrimination. No word was spoken on either side, the exacting
+husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.
+
+With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin. Her
+tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a
+repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden
+dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs. The whole performance
+was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.
+
+If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo
+foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many
+surprises would await her. Instead of asking for references from her
+last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her
+teeth. In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as
+important a factor as your hands. The reporter for the funeral column of
+an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of
+speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little
+ones, would call pathetic attention to, "the tired and patient teeth
+worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household." A young
+wife's cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that
+shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the
+seagull and chew these into shape. You see, after the boots are wet
+each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with
+oil and chewed into shape. We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at
+this wifely duty. Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands,
+incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way
+round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking
+like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make.
+Solomon's eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70°
+North would read, "She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh
+willingly with her hands; she riseth also while it is yet night and
+cheweth the boots of her household."
+
+Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove.
+The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of
+the woman are brought into requisition. The raw sealskins or hides of
+the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up
+and dried thoroughly. Before this stiff material can be worked up into
+garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically
+chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task. Creasing the hide along
+its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way
+along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way
+back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of
+the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.
+
+It falls to the lot of the woman, too, to do her share of boat-making.
+The men deftly fashion the frames of kayak and oomiak, using in their
+construction not a single nail or piece of iron, but fastening the wood
+together by pegs and thongs of skin. Then the women come on the scene,
+measure the frame, and sew green hides of the proper shape to fit,
+making wonderful overlapping seams that are absolutely watertight. As it
+is necessary to put the skin covering on while the hides are raw, the
+whole job has to be completed at one sitting. So a bee is held of the
+women of the communal camp.
+
+[Illustration: Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks
+
+The scenes etched in the larger represent the events of one year of the
+carver.]
+
+Where did the Eskimo get his versatile ability? Only the walrus knows.
+The whalers have inducted the Eskimo into the art of making
+cribbage-boards. They use for each board a complete tusk of
+walrus-ivory, covering the whole with a wealth of descriptive carvings
+illustrative of all that comes into the yearly round of an Eskimo's
+life,--ice-fishing, bear-hunting, walrus-sticking. So far as we could
+find out, the Husky's connection with cribbage ceased with his making
+these _edition de luxe_ boards. He seemed himself to have gathered no
+inkling of the fine points of that game which one instinctively
+associates with Dick Swiveller as tutor and as pupil the little
+Marchioness, "that very extraordinary person, surrounded by mysteries,
+ignorant of the taste of beer, and taking a limited view of society
+through the key-holes of doors." In the world outside, far from igloos
+and ice-floes, where people gather round cheery Christmas fires with
+"one for his nob," "two for his heels," and "a double run of three,"
+these ivory crib-boards are sold for from seventy-five to one hundred
+dollars each. We have two among our most treasured trophies, and with
+them an ivory ring beautifully formed which we saw made. Set in the ring
+is a blue stone of irregular shape which was fitted into its ivory niche
+with a nicety of workmanship that few jewellers could attain. I had
+fashioned for me also a gavel in the shape of a sleeping seal, made of
+fossil ivory from the Little Diomedes. The contrast of the weathered
+brown of the outside of the ivory with the pure white of the inner
+layers, when worked up into a carved design, gives the effect of cameo
+and intaglio combined.
+
+We tasted many new Eskimo dishes. When, on our return, we confessed that
+the brain of the seal served here is a delicious dish, we ran against
+the sensibilities of refined natures. But why is it cruder to enjoy
+seal's brains _â la vinaigrette_, than to tickle our taste with brains
+of the frolicking calf? The seal furnished a more equivocal dinner than
+this, nothing less than entrails _au naturel_, which our hostess draws
+through her fingers yard by yard in pure anticipative delight, each
+guest being presented with two or three feet of the ribbon-like _pièce
+de résistance_. The scene that jumps to our memory as we watch this
+feast of fat things is connected with food-manipulations in Chicago. It
+was down at Armour's in the stockyards that we had seen Polacks and
+Scandinavian girls preparing in the succulent sausage a comestible that
+bore strange family semblance to that which our friends are now eating
+before us, this linked sweetness long drawn out.
+
+[Illustration: Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo
+
+A--Eskimo soapstone lamp which burns seal-oil. The wick is of reindeer
+moss.
+
+B--Eskimo knife of Stone Age.
+
+C--Its modern successor, fashioned from part of a steel saw, with handle
+of ivory. This is the knife used by the women; note how the old shape is
+retained.
+
+D--Eskimo Tam O'Shanter. The band is of loonskins, the cap proper being
+carefully constructed from swans' feet. This admirably shows the
+cleverness of the Eskimo in adapting natural forms to economic use, each
+foot of the swan being a true sector of a circle.
+
+E--Old-time stone hatchet.
+
+F and G--Knives filed from saw-blades, with bone handles.
+
+H--Mortar for pulverising tobacco into snuff.
+
+I--Needle set in a wood handle, and by rapid rotary motion used to
+pierce ivory.]
+
+
+Mr. John Firth, of the Hudson's Bay Company here, gives us much
+information regarding these people who for thirty-seven consecutive
+years have traded with him. The Kogmollycs have been here "from the
+beginning," the Nunatalmutes moving into this region in 1889, driven out
+of their hunting grounds inland from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, by a
+scarcity of game. The two tribes live in peace and intermarry. The aged
+among them are respected. Criminals and lunatics are quietly removed
+from the drama. Supposed incurables commit suicide and in that act
+reach immediately a hot underground heaven.
+
+Nature to these Eskimo is especially benign. The junction of the
+Mackenzie and the Peel is covered with a forest of spruce, and even to
+the ocean-lip we trace foot-prints of moose and black bear. In the delta
+are cross, red, and silver foxes, mink and marten, with lynx and rabbits
+according to the fortunes of war. The Eskimo declare that, east of Cape
+Parry, bears are so numerous that from ten to twenty are seen at one
+time from a high hilltop.
+
+The Chauncey Depew of the Kogmollycs, the man with the best stories and
+the most inimitable way of telling them, is Roxi. It was Roxi who gave
+us the love story of his cousin the Nuntalmute Lochinvar. This young man
+wooed a maid. The girl's father had no very good opinion of the lad's
+hunting ability and was obdurate. The lover determined to take destiny
+into his own hands. A ravine of ice stretched between his igloo and that
+of the family to whom he would fain be son, and over the chasm a
+drift-log formed a temporary bridge. Lothario, one night, crossed the
+icy gully, entered the igloo of his elect, seized her in her
+_shin-ig-bee_ or sleeping-bag and lifted the dear burden over his back.
+In spite of struggles and muffled cries from within, he strode off with
+her to his side of the stream. The gulch safely crossed, he gaily kicked
+the log bridge into the gulf and bore his squirming treasure to his own
+igloo floor. He had left his seal-oil lamp burning and now it was with
+an anticipative chuckle of joy that he untied the drawstring. We end the
+story where Roxi did, by telling that the figure which rolled out
+sputtering from the _shin-ig-bee_ was the would-not-be father-in-law
+instead of the would-be bride!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
+
+
+"Into this Universe, and _Why_ not knowing
+Nor _Whence_, like Water willy-nilly flowing,
+  And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
+I know not _Whither_, willy-nilly blowing."
+
+--_The Rubaiyat_.
+
+The Midnight Sun! The sun does not sink to the horizon, but pauses for a
+moment and rises again. Dawn and eventide are one. The manifestations of
+light ever since we left Athabasca Landing have been wonderful,
+uplifting. The supreme marvel of the Midnight Sun is not what we see but
+what we feel. Standing at this outpost of Britain's Empire, we give our
+imagination rein and see waking worlds and cities of sleep. As this red
+sun rises from its horizon-dip, it is the first of the unnumbered
+sunrises which, as hour follows hour, will come to the continents.
+Longfellow says:
+
+"Think, every morning where the sun peeps through
+The dim, leaf-latticed windows of the grove,
+How jubilant the happy birds renew
+Their old, melodious madrigals of love!
+And when you think of this, remember too
+_'Tis always morning somewhere_, and above
+The awakening continents, from shore to shore,
+Somewhere the birds are singing evermore."
+
+[Illustration: Home of Mrs. Macdonald.]
+
+How do the people of Macpherson divide into day and night their
+largesse of light? By common consent four o'clock in the morning seems
+to be bedtime, and by four in the afternoon people are busying
+themselves with breakfast. _In Polar Circles, do as the Polars do_, is
+good advice, and we follow suit. Individuality is strongly marked at
+this metropolis on the Peel. Every one you meet is a mine of interest,
+and sharp contrasts present themselves. Mrs. Macdonald discusses fur and
+deer-meat with Jack Johnson. He is a trapper who plays the game alone
+and who last year was reduced to killing his favourite dog for food.
+Current report credits him with having "killed his man in the Yukon."
+Mrs. Macdonald is a Loucheux woman who, at the age of fourteen or
+fifteen, married Archdeacon Macdonald of the English Church and for
+eight long years afterwards assisted him in his life work of translating
+the Gospels into the Loucheux language. She has come all the way from
+Winnipeg to the Arctic Circle to spend the summer visiting her people.
+We lose our hearts to her two sons, splendid fellows both.
+
+It is the Eskimo who brings both missionary and trader to Fort
+McPherson. Are these Eskimo, Christians? Are they _civilised_? These are
+the questions that confront us when we speak of these Farthest North
+Canadians. It is an age of classification. You cannot find a flower
+nowadays that some one has not tacked a Latin name to, and it goes by
+inverse ratio--the smaller the flower the longer the name. Every bird
+you hear sing, even though it stop but an hour to rest its tired pinion
+on its northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat.
+How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape? In the northeast of
+Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary. In Alaska,
+on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to
+its bosom. In between these two come the people we are studying. The
+Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to
+influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not
+Episcopalians. What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of
+integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one? Heathens?
+The question sets us thinking.
+
+The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as "Any irreligious, rude,
+barbarous or unthinking class or person." This Eskimo is not
+"irreligious," for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and
+an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death,
+and he accedes to Kipling's line without ever having heard it,--"They
+that are good shall be happy." He is not "rude," but exceedingly
+courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude.
+"Unthinking" he certainly is not. Six months' darkness within the igloo
+gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker
+has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated
+cobbler is your true philosopher.
+
+There remains but the one ear-mark, "barbarous." The dictionary declares
+that barbarous means, "not classical or pure," "showing ignorance of
+arts and civilisation." On the first of these indictments our poor
+Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical. And what man dare
+pronounce on the purity of another? Then we come to "arts" and
+"civilisation." In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every
+European who has visited him. The stumbling-block in this honest search
+for a tag to put on my people is the term "civilisation." One is
+reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons:
+"Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man's doxy." Was it not
+Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, "I am conscious that life has
+been trying to _civilise_ me for now seventy years with what seems to me
+very inadequate results"?
+
+If "Christianity" with the Eskimo means taking him into the white man's
+church, and "civilising" means bringing him into close contact with
+white men's lives, then he has not yet attained the first, and has but
+little to thank the second for. Two years ago eighty of these people in
+one tribe died of measles, a white man's disease. A stray chaplain
+wandered into an encampment of Eskimo, finding his way from a whaling
+ship. He told the people of Heaven, its golden streets, pearly gates,
+and harp-songs, and it meant nothing to these children of frost. They
+were not interested. Then he changed his theme, and spoke of Hell with
+its everlasting fires that needed no replenishing. "Where is it? Tell
+us, that we may go!" and little and big they clambered over him, eager
+for details.
+
+Prayer as presented by the white man is recognised as an incantation
+which should bring immediate and literal results. An enquiring scientist
+was seated one day with Oo-vai-oo-ak, the two fishing through adjacent
+air-holes in the ice. Calling across to the white man, Oo-vai-oo-ak
+said, "How is it, brother, have you any fish?"
+
+"No," replied the man of letters, "I have taken nothing."
+
+"Have you spoken to God this morning?" asked the Eskimo in a
+business-like tone.
+
+"No," said the wilted Walton.
+
+"Well, that's what's the matter," returned Oo-vai-oo-ak; "I always speak
+to God every morning before I go fishing. Once, when I went to Herschel
+Island, a missionary told me what to say. It always works. I have many
+fish."
+
+The scientist, interested, queried, "And do you do the same when you go
+duck-hunting or goose-hunting or when you are after seal?"
+
+"No," eagerly responded Oo-vai-oo-ak, dropping his line and pressing
+close to the geologist, "Is there a prayer for duck, and for geese, and
+one for seal? The missionary never told me that. You teach it to me, eh?
+I like to make sure what to say to catch that fellow,--goose and seal."
+
+But, unfortunately for both, the university man did not have the charm.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge]
+
+Broadly speaking, the Eskimo's theory of things, evolved from white
+spirits on the ice-floes or carried across in the age of the mastodon
+from sires and grandsires in Asia, does not differ materially from our
+own. There is a Good Spirit, called by different tribes Cood-la-pom-e-o,
+Kelligabuk, or Sidne, who dwells high in the zenith, and to whom it is
+good to pray. There is an Evil Spirit, Atti, symbolising cold and death.
+Their heaven is a warm underworld reached by entrances from the sea.
+Hell is a far, white, dreary plain. The Eskimo pray to Sidne; but it is
+wise to propitiate Atti or Tornarsuk, and in this last idea they but
+follow their Chinese or Tartar ancestors. In common with all nations,
+the Kogmollycs have a tradition of the flood. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the
+Elder said, "This world once covered with the sea." Asked why she
+thought so, she replied, "You have been down to the land of the
+caribou, eh? Little smooth stones from the sea are there, and shells."
+
+The labrets or lip-ornaments, shirt-stud shaped effects worn in holes
+pierced in the cheek, strike us with interest. Is it too daring a
+conjecture to trace in these, which Eskimo men so sedulously cherish and
+resolutely refuse to talk about, a religious significance? The term
+"Kelligabuk" in a literal translation means "Mastodon." This animal,
+whose bones not infrequently are unearthed from ice-floes, has been for
+all time venerated as a god of the hunting grounds. Is it too fanciful
+to suggest that the labrets are a sort of peripatetic idol carried
+around on the person as an imitation of the tusks of this God-Mammoth?
+
+East and south of the Mackenzie delta the Eskimo tell of a Supreme
+Goddess, Nuliayok, who was once a coy maiden and refused to marry a
+mortal. Wooed by a gull, she accompanied the bird to an inland home, to
+find instead of her dreams of delight a nest of sticks and rotten fish
+on a high-hung ledge. Jostled by the other fulmars, or gulls, who tried
+to push her off the rocks, she sent for her father. In the night-time he
+came and sailed with her over the water in an oomiak. The deserted
+fulmar-bridegroom, taking a leaf out of Prospero's book, raised a storm.
+The father, to lighten the craft and propitiate the storm-spirit at the
+same time, threw the poor bride over-board, and cut off her fingers as
+she clung to the boat. As the four fingers dropped into the sea they
+changed respectively into beluga the white whale, nutchook the common
+seal, oog-zook the big seal, and ibyl the walrus. After thus giving
+origin to the four great sea-friends of the Innuit, the Goddess
+Nuliayok let go the boat and went to the world beneath the sea, where
+she now lives in a whalebone house with a dog for husband. She cannot
+stand erect, but hunches over the ground, holding one foot under her as
+a baby does who has not yet learned to walk.
+
+It is to Nuliayok that the spirits of sea-animals go after staying three
+days by their dead bodies; and this is the reason why the Eskimo breaks
+the eyes of a killed seal. He does not want it to witness the indignity
+of seeing its own body denuded of its skin. This too is the _raison
+d'être_ of the ceremonies which every Eskimo punctiliously performs in
+connection with the animal he kills. Each animal has a soul or spirit to
+be offended or placated; if pleased, the spirit of the dead animal
+communicates with its living kin, who in turn will deem it an honour to
+be killed by such considerate folk as the ceremonious Innuit. Round the
+igloo fire we heard another tradition of Nuliayok. The Goddess of the
+Sea once gave birth to a litter of white and red puppies. These she put
+into two little water-tight baby-boots and set them floating before a
+north wind. The puppies landed on southern shores and became the white
+race and the red race, the Europeans and the Indians. The Innuit, of
+course, had lived from the beginning.
+
+We arrogate to ourselves the term of "white race," but if these Eskimo
+were to wash themselves daily (which they do not do yearly) they would
+be as white as we are. They have fleshy intelligent faces and eyes with
+more than a suggestion of the almond-slant of the Oriental. The idea
+occurs to us that the full appearance of the cheeks of the women is more
+likely to be caused by the exercise of chewing skins and boots than by
+an accumulation of fatty tissue. The men are distinguished by the thin,
+straggling growth of beard and moustache which adorns their Asiatic
+progenitors. The labrets of the men are offset by the long pendant
+earrings of the women, which are made from H.B. Co. beads and shells
+brought by Alaska Indians from the Pacific, It is only the women who
+here tattoo their faces, the three long stripes extending from lower lip
+to the chin. The men crop their hair in the style of the tonsure of the
+monk. Neither man nor woman provides any head covering except the hood
+of the _artikki_ or smock, which hood, fringed with waving hair of the
+carcajou or wolverine, hangs loosely at the back until called into
+requisition by a winter's storm or a summer's siege of mosquitoes.
+
+Eskimo clothing is much lighter in weight than it seems, and this is one
+reason why the Eskimo attachés of every Arctic expedition have moved
+around with less exhaustion than their European or American leaders. A
+well-made Eskimo outfit of inner and outer suits, with mittens, socks,
+and boots, weighs about thirteen pounds, while one imported fur coat of
+European deerskin will alone weigh more than that.
+
+A custom noted at the afternoon whale-meets and pink-teas might
+fittingly find way into the latitudes where narrow toes and French heels
+obtain. Two ingenious young Kogmollyc belles had placed applique pockets
+mid-leg on their lower garments. When the walrus was passed round and
+conversation became general, the boots were slipped off quietly and one
+foot at a time was thrust for a resting spell into the pocket provided
+on the opposite trouser-leg. This act of easement was done deftly, and
+the neat action of instep boot-jack never lost its fascination for us.
+
+[Illustration: A Wise Man of the Dog-Ribs]
+
+All the way from boundary-line to ice-barrier we had seen Indians
+tricked out in grotesque garments borrowed from the white man and used
+in combination with their own tribal covering of skins and furs. These
+sun-bonnets and shepherd's-plaid trousers, silk hats and red-flannel
+petticoats, the trader had persuaded the child of the woods to buy. The
+debonair Eskimo is a re-incarnation of the bastard brother of Aragon's
+Prince, and, leaning his furry back against the North Pole, says with
+him, "I smile at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no
+man's pleasure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business,
+laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour."
+
+[Illustration: A Study in Expression]
+
+You cannot induce an Eskimo to think he wants anything just because you
+have found that thing to your liking. There are two reasons for this.
+First, long experience in the most rigorous climate which the human race
+inhabits has taught this man what garments are the most suitable for him
+in which to live and move and have his being. Second, although the
+Indian may ape the white man as a superior being from whom eleemosynary
+grub and gew-gaws may be wheedled, the Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta
+considers himself to be the superior of every created being. The Eskimo
+knows what he wants; he is always sure of it, and there is no
+vacillating. When he comes into the H.B. Company's post to trade, skins
+are his currency, the pelts of the silver-fox his gold coinage. A good
+silver, or black-fox is worth here about one hundred dollars in barter.
+
+We saw a band of Nunatalmutes come into Fort Macpherson to do their
+summer shopping. They wanted English breakfast tea, superior rifles and
+ammunition, and a special brand of tobacco. Failing any or all of these,
+it was in vain that the Factor displayed before them the wares of John
+Bull, Uncle Sam, or Johnny Canuck, or any seductive lure made in
+Germany. Ig-ly-o-bok and Nan-a-sook-tok bought what they found to their
+liking, took small change out of two silver-fox skins, and put the
+remaining six pelts back into the wooden box which formed at once their
+savings bank and letter of credit for the season to come. The
+hungry-eyed H.B. man confided to us that two of these coveted pelts had
+been thus exhibited to him and thus tucked back into the Eskimo
+sinking-fund for three successive seasons.
+
+As regards weapons, we found Eskimo hunters in the transition stage. The
+old-time spears, four feet long and tipped with ivory, are still in
+active service. The bows, with arrows finished in copper, flint, and
+bone, have been relegated largely to the boys, while Krag-Jorgensen,
+Lee-Enfield, and other high-power guns are bought from American whalers.
+The fish-hooks which I got in friendly barter are interesting to any one
+born with angling blood in his veins. Beautifully fashioned of ivory,
+copper, bone, and beads, the contrivance is a sinker, bait, and hook,
+all in one. The daily baskets procured with this lure incontestably
+proves the Husky a judicious hooker.
+
+The Eskimo is a merger. Father Petitot shows us the close analogy
+between the Kogmollyc language and the tongues of eastern Asiatic
+tribes, ancient and modern. This Eskimo's speech, then, gives him a
+connection with the effete East (which is his west), while enamelled
+washbasins, with here and there a corrugated wash-board, prove that
+slowly but surely Canadian culture is reaching him from the south.
+
+With two modifications, this Eskimo is invariably truthful. Like the
+Indians to the south of him, seeking to please you by answering a
+question in the way that you desire, he will at times tell you an
+untruth, for it seems to him discourteous to answer your question other
+than in the way which you anticipate. For instance, if you say to Roxi,
+"Wasn't that a grey goose we heard overhead?" Roxi will readily assent,
+though he well knows it to have been a mallard duck, but he would spare
+your ignorance. Again, it is Eskimo etiquette to belittle your own
+success in hunting and, in so doing, be not literally truthful. When we
+place this delightful trait alongside the fish-stories we are familiar
+with, who would seek to change the heathen?
+
+Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of
+each other for better or for worse. It is an easy union entered upon and
+maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one
+manifest advantage,--Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When
+unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of
+the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes
+herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium
+attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam
+husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young
+Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways. She
+asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, "No. You may go
+to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction,
+and I hunt." Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e.,
+the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six
+nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father,
+for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the
+ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was
+strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a
+tree handy he would have been lynched. This would have been the first
+lynching recorded in Canada. The feeling of the Eskimo community was
+that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the
+bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper
+state to her father's door or to let her have the dogs.
+
+In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in
+re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical
+ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores. The ceremonies which
+approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the
+importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of
+what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them
+grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out
+each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a
+freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony,
+replied, "New light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was
+yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to
+igloo reminds us of the "first-footing" of the Scottish village. The
+mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the
+old Lord of Misrule.
+
+About the season of Christmas, a great meeting is held in the igloo,
+presided over by the Angekok or medicine-man, who entreats the invisible
+powers for good fortune, immunity from storms, and a plenitude of
+blubber for the ensuing year. This invocation is followed by a family
+feast. Next day the ceremonies are carried on out-of-doors, where all
+from oldest to youngest form a ring-around-a-rosy. In the centre of the
+circle is set a crock of water, while to the communal feast each person
+brings from his own hut a piece of meat, raw preferred. This meat is
+eaten in the solemn silence of a communion, each person thinking of
+Sidne, the Good Spirit, and wishing for good. The oldest member of the
+tribe, a white-haired man or tottering dame, takes up a sealskin cup,
+kept for this annual ceremony, dips up some of the water and drinks it,
+all the time thinking of Sidne, the Good Spirit, while the others close
+their eyes in reverent silence.
+
+Before passing the cup on to the rest of the company that they may
+drink, the old man or woman states aloud the date and place of his or
+her birth, as accurately as it can be remembered. The drinking and
+thinking ceremony is performed by all in succession, down to the last
+naked baby cuddling in its mother's _artikki_, the little child that
+cannot yet speak. The solemn rite is brought to a close by the tossing
+of presents across the ring from one to the other, the theory being
+that, as they generously deal with others, so Sidne will deal with them
+in the coming year. So up here on the edge of things, among our
+"uncivilised heathens," we have our Christmas presents and "_Peace on
+earth, good will to men_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
+
+
+"Man does not live by bread alone."
+
+Exigencies of life have caused the Mackenzie Eskimo to formulate on
+vital matters an unwritten law to which each gives assent. Succinctly
+stated, this system of Northland jurisprudence runs thus:--
+
+_(a) Should a man, inadvertently or by malice aforethought, kill
+another, the wife and children of the man so killed remain a burden on
+the murderer so long as he or they live._
+
+_(b) A drift-log found is treasure-trove, and belongs to the finder, who
+indicates possession by placing upon it a pipe, mitten, or personal
+trinket of some kind_. Whalers, missionaries and Mounted Police are a
+unit in testifying that precious flotsam of this kind has remained four
+or five years in a land of wood-scarcity without being disturbed.
+
+_(c) No one must eat seal and walrus on the same day_. Thus a check is
+given to luxuriousness and the Eskimo is self-prevented from falling
+into the fate which overtook Rome.
+
+_(d) All large animals killed are to be looked upon as common property
+of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them_.
+Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of
+the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's
+crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, holding
+all things in common.
+
+The Eskimo realises that the pleasure of life is in pursuit, not in
+acquisition. Where wants are many, joys are few; the very austerity of
+his life has made a man of him. Laying up few treasures for the elements
+to corrupt, accumulating no property except a little, a very little, of
+the kind designated by Wemmick as "portable," he, to better and saner
+effect than any man, decreases the denominator of his wants instead of
+increasing the numerator of his havings. Surrounded by the palcocrystic
+ice, the genial current of his soul has not been frozen by that ice. An
+Eskimo family accepts life with a smile and, in the faith of little
+children, goes on its way.
+
+An old Scot once prayed, "O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at
+this time the savin' grace o' _continuance_." Only one man has less need
+to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo.
+The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is
+spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are
+never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the
+little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no
+broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out
+dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning
+clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the
+opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the
+Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active
+ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.
+
+On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo
+attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live
+beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is
+happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother
+often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest
+of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and
+spreading over every life it touches.
+
+There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which
+we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his
+generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs
+met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man
+exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all
+carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or
+the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the
+leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his
+price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was
+dropped back into _artikki_ recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy
+child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift.
+It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be
+scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who
+tried to beat down his price as "the _cheap_ engineer."
+
+Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little
+group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs,
+and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while
+the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men
+were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet
+nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our
+researches. The whalers call him "Set-'em-Up," for his name bears the
+convivial translation, "Give us a drink." "You going to make better man,
+you get Outside--make him like Emmie-ray?" As Emmie-ray pursues the
+tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue,
+with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of
+the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating
+Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.
+
+Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people,
+instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him
+for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the
+world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts
+of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be
+a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's
+blood.
+
+Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came
+originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees
+before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their
+predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon
+estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil,
+its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel
+wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has
+another unit--blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and
+Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your
+apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber
+and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season.
+These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at
+the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the
+white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has
+pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.
+
+At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous
+Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder,
+but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had
+whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the
+whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater
+part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and
+who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty
+Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi
+had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of
+the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry,
+and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into
+the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to
+the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the
+sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the
+dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking
+bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard
+the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on
+Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the
+ocean from another age and a far land, "Thy necessity is greater than
+mine." Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the
+shores of many seas.
+
+Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of
+geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to
+the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination
+still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of
+rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if
+you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a
+thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was
+served, though he _would_ eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a
+distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the
+gastronomic line he drew. "Aw!" replied he, "No fellow eats owl, you
+know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all
+right. The crow's a kind of _rook_, you know, and every fellow eats
+_rook-pie."_
+
+Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin
+in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable
+compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this
+people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him
+through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a
+hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the
+light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly
+pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal,
+then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This
+jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of
+food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his
+own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.
+
+Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a
+feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so "bluggy." You feel
+differently about it at 70º North. You put prejudice far from you,
+comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese,
+and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with
+mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment.
+Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square
+there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.
+
+We had brought with us on our transport two years' provisions for the
+detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel
+Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated
+cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their
+commissariat. Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip
+bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick
+or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the
+tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old
+body herself. Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg,
+seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of
+desiccated vegetables. I know. I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed,
+"Honesty _is_ the best policy. _I've tried baith_."
+
+But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a
+bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back
+between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw
+or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes
+like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. If you have scooped shrimps
+from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a
+parasite.
+
+Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale
+which in life holds the baleen. What is whale-gum like? It tastes like
+chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber
+tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would
+liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a
+southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as
+lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled
+beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and
+gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and
+moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than
+pigs-feet.
+
+Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that
+overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You
+may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the
+musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's
+scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my
+vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw
+the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the
+association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat _must_
+taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first
+blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is
+that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing
+exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by
+cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much
+better frozen than cooked.
+
+Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much
+esteemed delicacy. During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide
+light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo. The
+blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in
+sealskin bags--the winter provision of gas-tank, electric
+storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this
+master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not
+centuries, the inventive adaptability of his "civilised" cousins. The
+blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its
+flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an
+inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land
+kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he
+has never seen. He doesn't eat it, but drops it into the cavernous
+recesses of his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of
+English undefiled. "Disgusting," you say. It's all a matter of latitude.
+Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet
+of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer
+period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of
+an "all-day sucker." These little babies have the digestion of an
+ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts
+until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at
+once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about
+as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little
+chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it
+with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled
+Fauntleroy on an imported apple. The Eskimo mother has no green apples
+to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon
+the troubled waters. Every day in the year her babies are crammed with
+marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.
+
+To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only
+vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their
+food is eaten. They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the
+marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised
+and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the
+Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen
+hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island
+sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis
+of the _Karluk_, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132
+ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked
+whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.
+
+Who are these people, and whence came they? Each little tribe is a book
+unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are
+confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they
+are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning
+himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation
+chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. "_We used to know
+it." "Our fathers have told us." "This land-whale with its tail in
+front once lived in the land of the Innuit_." We are now the ones to
+become excited. Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had
+been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest. "Where did
+your fathers see this animal?" we asked. "Here, in this country. In the
+ice his bones were hidden," said the old man. With this he relapsed into
+the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.
+
+Captain Mogg, of the whaling schooner _Olga_, two winters ago pursued
+his whaling operations far to the north and east. Ice-bound at Prince
+Albert Land, he stumbled upon a little settlement of Eskimo. These were
+completely isolated from and had had no communication with white men or
+any community of their own race. Only one of their number had seen a
+white man before--one old, old woman, the grandmother of the band. The
+captain of the _Olga_ speaks Eskimo fluently, and to him this ancestress
+of the "lost tribe" had an interesting story to tell. She remembered a
+white man who came across the Great Sea from the west in "a big kayak,"
+and she extended her arms to show its size. Her people had given this
+stranger seal-meat and blubber and the "Chief" from the great ship had
+presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the
+seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very
+child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early
+fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage
+and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the
+little girl's questioning wonder,--"Of what animal is this the skin?"
+Thus does history manifest itself on the other side of the shield "after
+many days."
+
+Through the years, the Eskimo has fared better than the Indian. It
+would seem that the London Directorate of the H.B. Co. expected its
+servants within the Arctic Circle in the days that are past to do almost
+a Creator's part and make all things of nothing. The scanty provisions
+and trading goods from England which filtered in thus far were to be
+given to the Indians in exchange for furs, while the Factor and his
+people were largely expected to "live on the country."
+
+Cannibalism was not unknown. The winter of 1841-2 was an especially hard
+one. On the 18th March, 1841, J. William Spence and Murdock Morrison
+were dispatched with the winter express from Fort Good Hope to Fort
+Macpherson. During the second night out, while they were asleep in the
+encampment, they were knocked on the head by four starving Indian women,
+immediately cut to pieces, and devoured. It is further reported that
+these women previously had killed and eaten their husbands and all their
+children except one little boy. Of the two murdered Scots they ate what
+they could that night and made pemmican of what was over, reporting
+afterward that one was sweet but that the other, tasting of tobacco, was
+not so good.
+
+Father Petitot gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His naïve
+words are, "_Chie-ke-nayelle,_ a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning
+fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his
+features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his
+youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine of 1841. He
+killed his young daughter with a hatchet-blow, cooked her like flesh,
+and ate her as a meat-pate. It is said that after one has partaken of
+human flesh, the appetite for it often returns. I hasten to add that
+_Chie-ke-nayelle,_ in spite of the soubriquet _mangeur de monde_ which
+is irrevocably rivetted to his name, has not succumbed to such an
+appetite. He is indeed an excellent Christian. Nevertheless, I would not
+like to camp with _Chie-ke-nayelle_ in time of famine."
+
+Another starvation story related by the good Father is not quite so
+ghastly. He tells us of one "M. Finlaison of burlesque memory," who,
+when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of
+his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish
+reel. That was their dinner for the day,--instead of meat they had
+sound. The narrator adds, "In America they would have lynched the
+too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed and
+applauded the master."
+
+The winter of 1844 also was a season of distress. Referring to this
+year, a beautiful young Indian woman said to the sympathetic priest, "I
+did not wish to eat the arm of my father. I was then a small child of
+eight, and I had not been able to see my old father eaten without crying
+out with loud screams. But my mother called to me in rage, 'If you do
+not eat of it, it is that you condemn us and hate us, then you will
+surely go the same way.' And I ate the flesh of my father, hiding my
+sobs and devouring my tears, for fear of being killed like him; so much
+was I afraid of the eyes of my mother."
+
+Another Indian woman confesses, "I left my husband, a hunter at the
+fort, and took with me by the hand my only child, a boy of six, and
+directed my steps towards _Ka-cho-Gottine._ It was indeed far. I only
+knew the way by hearsay. Once I myself have eaten of my father, but now
+I am a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm
+in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days.
+Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on
+the final resurrection day?" Here Father Petitot interpolates, "Ah! if
+she had only read Dante!" "I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he
+was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart
+for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and
+knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death
+that awaited my only child. But what could I do?" This story has a more
+comfortable ending than the previous one. We breathe relief in learning
+from the priest that the following night the little boy overtook his
+mother. He had walked all day and all night, following her snowshoe
+tracks. They went on together, the third day they snared some hares, and
+their troubles were over.
+
+Father Petitot tells of a Rabbit-skin Indian who found a mummified body
+in the forks of a tree near the Ramparts of the Mackenzie and who came
+running into the Mission, his hair on end with fright, asking excitedly,
+"Did God make that man or was he made by the men of the Hudson's Bay?"
+
+Another tale of his is of an Indian, _Le Petit Cochon_, who had a
+tape-worm and thought it was a whale. "Unfortunate!" exclaims the
+Father, "possessed of a whale! That's the difference between _Le Petit
+Cochon_ and Jonah." Sucking Pig said he would join the Church if the
+priest would rid him of the tape-worm. But we must use the words of
+Petitot himself, for they are too delicious to lose. "Christmas night,
+1865, after midnight mass, _Le Petit Cochon,_ carefully purged, both as
+to body and soul, by an emetic, two purgatives, and a good confession,
+content as a King, received holy baptism. I gave him the name of Noel."
+
+In starvation times, guests were not appreciated. Robert Campbell of the
+H.B. Company, writing from Fort Halkett in 1840, says, "God grant that
+the time of privation may soon end, and that I may not see a soul from
+below till the snow disappears." These days of the early forties when
+England was engaged with the Chartist risings at home and her Chinese
+wars abroad, were surely parlous times up on this edge of empire. The
+Fort Simpson journals of February 4, 1843, record, "The _Cannibal_, with
+young _Noir_, and others of the party of _Laman_, arrived this evening
+in the last stage of existence, being compelled by starvation to eat all
+their furs."
+
+Still these sonsy Scots kept a good heart and were able to jest at their
+misfortunes with the grim humour that belongs to their race. Neither
+empty larder nor other misfortune disheartened them. The recurrence of
+New Year's Day and the Feast of St. Andrew were made ever occasions for
+rejoicing. Up on the Pelly Forks under date of November 30th, 1848, the
+record reads, "Though far from our native land and countrymen, let us
+pass St. Andrew's Day in social glee. So fill your glasses, my lads, and
+pass the bottle round." Three years later, on the same anniversary, the
+lines are, "Very cold for St. Andrew's, and no haggis for dinner."
+
+And as January Ist ushers in the year 1845, the Factor at Fort
+Macpherson bursts into verse:
+
+"This day, Time winds th' exhausted chain
+To run the twelvemonths' length again.
+I see the old bald-pated fellow
+With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,
+Adjust the unimpaired machine
+To wheel the equal, dull routine.
+
+Underneath the record a postscript appears, in another hand:
+
+"Oh let us love our occupations,
+Bless the Co. and their relations,
+Be content with our poor rations,
+And always know our proper stations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TALE OF A WHALE
+
+
+"In the North Sea lived a whale."
+
+What is a whale? Well, although the whalers dub it so, it is not a fish,
+but is a true mammal, the last of the mammoth creatures that trod the
+earth and floundered the seas of a past age. The whale is the biggest,
+the meekest, and the most interesting of living animals. As we go north,
+we readjust all our ideas of distance and immensity. Rivers are longer,
+lakes more majestic, and whales bigger than we have ever dreamed.
+Examining a stranded whale at Herschel, we see the flippers to be really
+hands with four fingers and a thumb enveloped in a sheath, and
+rudimentary hind-legs are discovered under the tough skin. Without
+doubt, the ancestors of the whale were land mammals which became adapted
+to a littoral life, and in splashing round the shore acquired the habit
+of swimming. Subsequently carried out to sea, they became under the new
+environment the structure as we see it.
+
+Off the delta of the Mackenzie, the Circumpolar of Arctic Bowhead whale
+_(Balaena mysticetus_) is making his last stand. Unless a close season
+is enforced, this cetacean carrying round his ten thousand dollar
+mouthful of baleen will soon fold his fluked fins like the Arab and
+swing that huge body of his into line with the Great Auk, the
+Sea-Otter, the Plains Buffalo, and all the melancholy procession of
+Canadian Has-Beens.
+
+[Illustration: We Tell the Tale of a Whale]
+
+Whales divide themselves into two great classes: those furnished with
+teeth (the _Denticete_) and those in which the place of teeth is
+supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or "whalebone" of
+commerce (the _Mysticete_ or _Balaenidae_). The members of the Baleen
+Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the
+Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality
+of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the "Arctic
+Whale," "Polar Whale," "Greenland Whale," "Bowhead," "Right Whale," or
+"Icebreaker."
+
+Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to
+one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of
+exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons.
+Comparisons are illuminating. The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field
+Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in
+longitudinal measurement. The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen
+to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil
+each,--lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy! The eyes placed
+in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange. The
+tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of
+which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he
+feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil. The
+aorta is as big as a man's waist and, at each pulsation of the heart,
+spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood. The heart itself is more
+than a yard in transverse diameter. The toothed whales carry the teeth
+in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti
+or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca'ing Whale, the White
+Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as
+Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins. Only the toothed whale eats fish;
+the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life,
+called "brit" by the whalers. The Bowhead that we have come up to the
+Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria. He couldn't eat a herring
+if by that one act he might attain immortality.
+
+Whale errors die hard. Artists persistently depict the big animals as
+spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales
+breathe out air only from their lungs. They come to the surface for
+that purpose, the "blowing" being quite analogous to the breathing of
+land mammals. Noticing the condensation of a whale's breath up here in
+the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular
+blunder. Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale)
+bulls. "At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea."
+Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything
+but common or seaside air.
+
+The Bowhead is hunted for his "whalebone"; the Cachalot or true Sperm,
+the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and
+spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his
+head.
+
+It is customary to call whales "fierce," "savage," "murderous," but this
+is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate. Every family,
+however, has its black sheep. The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of
+sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales. One Killer taken
+up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals,
+and it choked to death on the fifteenth. Banded in Molly Maguire groups,
+the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in
+swimming off the Pribilofs. We have seen them, a pack of hungry
+sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale! A number of these brigands of the
+Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened
+mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead's tongue is
+eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles. At the approach of the Killer
+even sea-lions seek the shore. And the Alaska Indian who would pose as
+Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the
+crest of his totem.
+
+The American is more aggressive--shall we say progressive?--than the
+Canadian. The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his
+summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada. Each of these
+floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen
+thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been
+content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into
+their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.
+
+[Illustration: Two Little Ones at Herschel Island]
+
+Is there much money in whales to-day? Are not oil and whalebone drugs in
+the market? Let us see. Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island
+anchorage. Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out
+from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter
+waiting-quarters. One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of
+outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit.
+In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer _Orca_, captured
+twenty-eight whales. The _Jeanette_ in 1905 got ten whales and a calf,
+the _Karluk_ got seven whales, the _Alexander_ eight, the _Bowhead_
+seven. The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them
+thirty-three whales and one calf. At fifteen thousand dollars each (San
+Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very
+nearly half a million. Two years later the _Narwhal_ took out fifteen
+whales, the _Jeanette_ and _Bowhead_ each four. Although the average
+bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far
+beyond that figure. A whale caught by Capt. Simmons of the ship _John M.
+Winthrop_ carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its
+head,--$16,750! One of these at a time would be good fishing.
+
+The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American
+steam-whaler _Grampus_, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one
+whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go
+"to the east'ard of P'int Barrow" for this big whale; since that date
+the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five
+whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the "bone" (baleen) at
+two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a
+pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half
+millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the
+past twenty years, by the back-door route.
+
+Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert
+evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the _Narwhal_, in 1907
+lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen
+whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous,
+but that they are on the move east and north.
+
+The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San
+Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go
+into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible
+next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can
+stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its
+catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible;
+dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over
+again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks,
+and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a
+lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one
+twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one
+forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth,
+fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth.
+Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It
+looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco
+waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B.
+overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the
+vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come
+across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land
+or marine) induces in most of us.
+
+A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific
+route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a
+half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the
+whaling-fleet. "The farther north the finer fur" is a recognised law.
+The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns,
+ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the
+choicest furs this continent produces.
+
+The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this
+international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British
+Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver
+Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur
+bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would
+think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the "feel" of
+Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta
+claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs,
+feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60° and the uttermost edge of
+things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be
+hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the
+rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by
+interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of
+these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.
+
+Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by
+deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its
+biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern
+Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon
+the shingle. "As far as we go!" This is essentially the Island of
+Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's
+last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings.
+We are in latitude 69-1/2° N. and just about 139° west of Greenwich; we
+are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in
+South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never
+dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above
+sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel
+at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is
+twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For
+six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice
+hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose
+from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for
+twenty years to make their home!
+
+The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one
+corner,--who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from
+Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste
+hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is
+interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily
+lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his
+boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the
+whaler picked up and attached to his ménage the Eskimo from the mainland
+in little bunches _en famille_. Ensuing connubial complications brought
+the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from
+each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American
+citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax
+Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty
+whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.
+
+Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can
+winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a
+feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and
+automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers'
+quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest
+Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear
+panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.
+
+North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy
+arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief
+smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly
+desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that
+they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above
+ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between
+this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is
+nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid
+disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of
+America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have
+been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the _Penelope_ off
+Shingle Point, the _Bonanza_ off King Point, the _Triton_ on the shores
+of Herschel itself, the _Alexander_ near Horton River, a little
+missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship _The Duchess of
+Bedford_, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in
+Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the
+ocean of her quest.
+
+The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for
+miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with
+drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,--a boon more prized by
+them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps
+and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where
+whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.
+
+In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,--saxifrages, white anemones
+through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox
+dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight
+Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It
+sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the
+evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints
+and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish,
+shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature
+whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the
+short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds
+nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming,
+the "cockshut light" of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the
+morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the
+day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into
+activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are
+cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter
+deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the
+year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring "leads"
+in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend
+out in the track of the big Bowhead.
+
+Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for
+"Outside" got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel
+all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy
+threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are "mounted" in
+imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride
+here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got
+to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One
+able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a
+medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the
+request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the
+island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was
+signed "T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.," and, after making it, the A.B., M.D.
+saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury
+spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes
+"you never can tell."
+
+Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size:
+they are "suckers" under a year, "short-heads" as long as they are
+suckled, "stunts" at two years, "skull-fish" with baleen less than six
+feet long, and "size-fish" at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A
+whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds
+enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the
+greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand
+years! A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles
+when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring
+with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an
+Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps.
+Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a
+thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of
+Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual
+migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and
+salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads
+trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey
+in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept
+them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year
+by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in
+successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family
+of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm,
+excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change
+in the season of their amours.
+
+A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended
+motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds
+beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface
+horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same,
+a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale
+of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an
+hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five.
+Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that
+a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains
+23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead
+feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. He quaintly elucidates
+this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons
+would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in
+the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive
+and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.
+
+The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and "long years
+afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke." Those who stick
+harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating
+rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in
+blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and
+a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage
+connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir
+John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the "North
+Sea" lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of
+having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of
+Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his
+inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked _Ansell Gibbs_.
+The _Ansell Gibbs_ was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield
+Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871. Imagination sees opportunity in
+this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept
+apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern
+Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of
+utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's
+enamoured dolphin?
+
+Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday,
+while officers from three ships were "gamming" over their afternoon
+walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, "I hear a Bowhead!" There was
+much chaffing about "Kelly's band," but Kelly weighed anchor and went to
+find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the
+bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made
+by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to
+give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice.
+Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the
+water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths.
+Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck,
+at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is "gallied" or
+stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but
+there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From
+the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out "hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo" of the
+hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that
+"beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before
+slipping back to 'F' again." He assures us that, "with the Humpback the
+tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a
+violin."
+
+Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year
+men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a
+mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they
+strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to
+the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He
+carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers
+and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the
+ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm,
+and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He
+had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.
+
+[Illustration: Breeding Grounds of the Seals]
+
+Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has
+entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have
+shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out
+strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a
+cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on
+Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention
+of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance
+which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which
+clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the
+harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the
+"fish" is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound,
+and hot air from the engine pumped into the "proposition" keeps it
+afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales
+in one day,--Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.
+
+The Eskimo say, "There is no part of a seal that is not good," and the
+same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The
+viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear
+in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From
+the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields
+of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers
+for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn
+can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is
+absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the
+Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more
+than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders
+find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the
+Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward
+and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now,
+enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow
+fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she
+must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like
+it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will
+bear the legend, "Whale cream soda" and "Best Whale Milkshake."
+
+To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the
+whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of
+ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.
+
+What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and
+flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all
+the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made
+from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone
+horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a
+dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last
+generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never "broke its mighty heart"
+in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible
+steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new
+avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers
+of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine
+filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the
+manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and
+elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this
+writing advertises:
+
+WHALEBONE TEETH $5
+A GREAT DISCOVERY
+THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST
+AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN
+DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH
+Guaranteed ten years
+YOU BITE CORN OFF THE COB
+
+Spermaceti, the solid waxy body carried round in the Cachalot's head in
+solution, is a valuable whale-product. Bland and demulcent, spermaceti
+is employed as an ingredient in ointments, cosmetics, and cerates.
+Spermaceti candles of definite size form the measure of electric light,
+giving rise to the phrase "of so many candle-power." Present-day
+spermaceti is both a saving and a destructive agent. Large quantities of
+it are used in Europe in the manufacture of ecclesiastical candles, and
+part of the same consignment may help to make self-lubricating
+cartridges.
+
+Most valuable of all whale-products, the costliest commodity on this
+earth ounce for ounce with the one exception of radium, is ambergris. As
+amber was once considered "the frozen tears of seagulls," so ambergris
+for ages puzzled the ancients. Some called it "the solidified foam of
+the sea," with others it was a "fungoidal growth of the ocean analogous
+to that on trees." When people in the old days came across anything
+exceedingly costly they wanted to eat it, on the same principle which
+makes the baby put each new gift into his mouth. So we have historic
+record of pearl soup a la Cleopatra, and dishes dashed with ambergris.
+Milton sings of,--
+
+"Beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
+In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
+Grisamber-steamed."
+
+What is this choice tidbit? It is a morbid secretion of the intestines
+of the sick Sperm-whale, and sells for from thirty to forty dollars an
+ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a
+dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or
+cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island
+beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that
+solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy
+odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a
+floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In
+pharmacy, it is regarded as a cardiac and anti-spasmodic and as a
+specific against the rabies. For years it has been used in sacerdotal
+rites of the church; and suitors of old times sought with it to charm
+their mistresses. The dying sperm, spouting up the ghost, offers of his
+very vitals to aid the lover and serve the church.
+
+Fascinating are the finds of ambergris. The barque _Sea-Fox_ of New
+Bedford, in 1866, off the coast of Arabia, took a one hundred and
+fifty-six pound mass of ambergris, which was sold to the Arabs of
+Zanzibar for ten thousand dollars in gold. The _Adeline Gibbs_, in the
+same year, took one hundred and thirty-two pounds from a bull-sperm
+south of St. Helena, and sold the hunk for twenty-three thousand
+dollars. Three winters ago an Arctic whaling-crew put into Seattle, and
+there leaked out the interesting story of how, not recognising the
+priceless unguent, they had greased their oars, masts, and knee-boots
+with "a big lump of ambergrease."
+
+In modern whaling not an ounce of the carcase is cast as rubbish to the
+void. The intestines make a soft kid which takes any dye and is largely
+used for artistic leather-work. The size of these immense strips makes
+possible splendid belts for machinery with a minimum of joinings. The
+chemically-macerated bones are turned into an "indestructible"
+crockery-ware which is far more enduring than anything made of
+vegetable-fibre. The Beluga gives us the best shoe-strings in the world.
+You can lace your shoes with a Beluga lace for two years and be sure it
+will not break the morning you are in an especial hurry to catch an
+inter-Reuben train.
+
+An interest attaches to living whales which outweighs the fascination
+with which we study their dead parts. Each species of the whale
+propagates with one of its own species only. The fidelity of whales to
+each other exceeds the constancy of birds. The whale mother gives birth
+to one calf, and in extremely rare cases two calves, producing every
+second year, the young being born between the end of March and the
+beginning of May. When the mother suckles her young she throws herself
+on one side on the surface of the sea and the calf regularly feeds at
+the breast (like a young Eskimo) for nearly two years. During this time
+the baby is extremely fat and the mother correspondingly emaciated.
+Perhaps nothing in nature is more touching than the devotion of a female
+whale to its wounded young. Whalers harpoon the babe at the breast so
+that they may afterwards secure the dam. In this case, the mother joins
+the wounded young under the surface of the water, comes up with it when
+it rises to breathe, encourages it to swim off, assists its flight by
+taking it under her fin, and seldom deserts it while life remains.
+
+Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the
+thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities
+in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great
+Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to
+restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which
+has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a
+thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant
+generations of man grow another one to take its place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
+
+
+"The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
+That blaze in the velvet blue.
+They're God's own guides on the Long Trail--
+The trail that is always new."
+
+--_Kipling_.
+
+A tax on tea caused the revolt of the thirteen Colonies, a taunting load
+of tennis-balls lost France to the Dauphin. Eighty years ago on this
+Arctic edge, white beads, or the lack of them, lost a lucrative
+fur-trade, alienated the Loucheux and caused the death of whites.
+"Trifles make the sum of human things."
+
+The old records tell the story. John Bell from Fort Good Hope, under
+date of August 14th, 1827, writes to the Factor at Fort Simpson:
+
+"The beads sent in for the Loucheux trade are not sufficiently large to
+please them. I request you will endeavour to send in the largest size
+for the trade of the ensuing year. A specimen of the kind wanted I send
+enclosed."
+
+The Factor at Fort Simpson, under date of November 22nd of the same
+year, writes to the Governor and Chief Factors at Montreal:
+
+"I now forward a specimen of the common white beads wanted for the trade
+with the Loucheux Indians. It is their request and I hope it will be
+attended to. I would not venture to make the demand, were it not from
+conviction that without this favourite article these Indians look with
+indifference on the best of our goods. No other ornamental article is
+ever asked for or wanted by these natives."
+
+The same official on March 15th, 1828, pleads with Montreal:
+
+"The white beads demanded for the Loucheux trade I hope will be sent,
+and of the size according to sample enclosed. May I use the freedom of
+representing the importance of getting this article to the liking of the
+Indians, to come up by the Montreal canoes and be ready for outfit 1829?
+Three kegs will contain the quantity required, 200 to 250 pounds."
+
+Again on the 29th of November, 1829, he writes Montreal:
+
+"The White Beads asked for the trade with the Loucheux are not according
+to the order sent, 15 pounds only of the quantity received (200 pounds)
+are of the proper size, the remainder being the same as those in outfit
+1825 so much complained of. They will not be satisfactory to the
+Indians. We request you will be pleased to make a strong representation
+to their Honours at Home that this article be sent according to order
+and sample. We now conceive to say anything further would be tiresome."
+
+The Fort Simpson Factor on March 19th, 1830, reports to Montreal:
+
+
+"The goods came. The white beads was too small and not according to
+order or sample asked for. The Indians would not take them and left the
+Fort dissatisfied."
+
+The Trader at Fort Good Hope augments the story by recording that the
+Indians would be better pleased in trade with two small kegs of the
+special beads they wanted than with half a ton of any other trade goods
+which London could manufacture and send out. The sequel of the story is
+that, disappointed time and again in not getting their favourite beads,
+the Loucheux Indians failed to bring in the autumn supply of meat to
+Fort Good Hope and in consequence, before the snows of the winter of
+1831 had melted, many of the white men attached to that post died of
+starvation.
+
+[Illustration: The Keele Party on the Gravel River]
+
+We had gone North with the birds in spring and now, as we turn our faces
+homeward, the first migrants with strong wing are beginning their
+southward flight. Our travel is against current now, for we make slower
+time than we did coming in and consequently see more of the passing
+shore-line. The last specimens we gather within the Arctic Circle are
+the blue blossoms of the flax. In them we see the earnest of many a
+cultivated farm of the future. The days are getting perceptibly shorter
+and one by one the old familiar constellations come back in the
+heavens. We find it a relief to have once more a twilight and a
+succeeding period of dusk. Yet are we loath to leave this fascinating
+North with its sure future, its quaint to-days, and all the glamour of
+its rich past.
+
+We had just passed Fort Norman when the sharp eyes of an Indian
+deck-hand saw three figures on the beach ahead. Pulling in at the point
+where the Gravel River joins the Mackenzie, we find a regular Robinson
+Crusoe group,--Mr. J. Keele, of the Dominion Government Survey, and his
+two associates. Going in on the Yukon side, Mr. Keele's task has been to
+cross the Divide between the Yukon and the Mackenzie, mapping the rocks.
+The only white man they had seen in sixteen months was a French priest
+who had passed yesterday, and whose knowledge of current events in
+Canada and Europe was scanty. They were glad to see us. A moose-skin
+boat showed how they had run the rough Gravel; the meat of two moose
+smoked over the camp-fire; their dogs were fat. These are men who know
+the woods--no hard-luck story here. It needs only Friday's funny fat
+umbrella to complete the picture, with the goat scampering in the middle
+distance.
+
+Coming on board, the surveyors are greedy for newspapers, and we in
+return learn somewhat of that great slice of land which they are the
+first to traverse. The Gravel River is two hundred and fifty-five miles
+long, with "white water" all the way. The force of the current may be
+appreciated from the fact that it is forty-four hundred feet above the
+sea-level at the Height-of-Land, and only four hundred feet here where
+it enters the Mackenzie. All along the banks of the Gravel are moose,
+mountain sheep, and caribou. The winter cabin of the party was built on
+the Ross River and there, during the past winter, they experienced a
+temperature of 54° below. A party of this kind must be to a large extent
+self-supporting, as it would be impossible to carry from the outside
+food for such a long sojourn. Speaking with Mr. Keele, one is forcibly
+struck with the fact that what the technical schools teach their
+students forms but a small part of the equipment of the man who would do
+field work in Northern Canada--packing, tracking, hunting, and breaking
+trail,--each man must do his share of these.
+
+The Keele party on the great watershed, as they travelled east, crossed
+two families of Mackenzie River Indians going westward to hunt, on the
+west side of the ridge, the marten and the beaver. It was 32° below, and
+cold. The whole families were on the march, a little baby tucked in the
+curve of the sled, and tottering on foot an old, old woman, bent and
+wrinkled and scarcely able to move. As the Indians were on their return
+journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again.
+But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow
+falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in
+the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many
+journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering
+capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of
+hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that
+luxurious garment. In order that one might be warmly clad, many have
+gone cold, more than one sad, tired, old head has lain down for the last
+time by the lonely camp-fire.
+
+Sad is the lot of the Indian woman of the North. Fated always to play a
+secondary part in the family drama, it is hard to see what of pleasure
+life holds for her. The birth of a girl baby is not attended with joy or
+thankfulness. From the beginning the little one is pushed into the
+background. The boy babies, even the dogs, have the choicer bed at
+night, and to them are given the best pieces of the meat. The little
+girl is made to feel that she has come into a world that has no welcome
+for her and her whole life seems to be an apology. You read it in the
+face of every Indian girl or woman you meet, from the shrinking pathetic
+little figure in the camp to the bent old crone, whose upturned face
+with its sadly acceptive look gives you the flicker of a smile.
+
+Storm-stayed at Wrigley Harbour at the entrance to Great Slave Lake, we
+have some splendid fishing,--jackfish, whitefish, loche, inconnu, "and
+here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling." Within an
+hour I get fifteen graylings to my own rod. Collectively they weigh just
+a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the
+fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish.
+Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and
+the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had "The Complete Angler"
+for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the
+catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the
+grayling is eating fit only for "anglers and other honest men."
+
+The traverse of Great Slave Lake in the teeth of a wind is not without
+its interest, for the new steamer has yet to be tried in the waters of
+what practically amounts to an open sea. She behaves well, and brings
+us dry-shod into Fort Rae.
+
+[Illustration: The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake]
+
+We are the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae, and we
+afford as much interest to the Indians as they afford us. Lone Fort Rae,
+clinging to the Northern Arm of Great Slave Lake, was noted in the past
+as a "meat-post." It supplied the Mackenzie District with dried
+caribou-meat, and formed an outfitting point for the few big game
+hunters who trended east from here into the Barren Grounds seeking the
+musk-ox. Its foundation dates back to some time before the year 1820. We
+cross a bridge of clever Indian construction and sit for a while to muse
+on a flat boulder of primal rock. This stands as bell-tower to a quaint
+bell cast in Rome and bears an inscription to some dead and gone Pope.
+The missionary priest over half a century ago paddled in here bringing
+the Gospel to the Dog-Ribs.
+
+[Illustration: The Bell at Fort Rae Mission]
+
+The musk-ox _(Ovibos moschatus)_ is a gregarious animal which would
+appear to be a Creator's after-thought,--something between an ox and a
+sheep. The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the
+appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd. The
+present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and
+between the meridians of 86° and 125°. As it is the most inaccessible
+game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being
+hunted to extinction. Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed
+like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up
+wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees
+fit. Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle
+and horns outside, to meet a common danger. The robe of the musk-ox is a
+rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being
+very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base. According to
+the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April. The
+mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a
+sheltered place for the cradle. Three days after its post-natal burial
+it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf's
+burden.
+
+[Illustration: The Musk-ox]
+
+We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to
+Fort Resolution. Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the
+topics of conversation. Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk,
+and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and
+deposited at the front door of the H.B. Co. Factor there--a cow but no
+cow-food. All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North. She was
+fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her
+kind. One of Mr. Keele's men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which
+ate bacon-rinds with a relish. The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb
+trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become
+burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish
+enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead. A dog in
+the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the
+asphodel meadows. I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner
+probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to
+work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.
+
+From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories
+from the outgoing traders. We learn that when the church was still
+young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the
+wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were
+to be considered fish, or flesh. Rome evidently was not "long" on North
+American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever
+by declaring said tails "fish" and not flesh. This is why you can
+discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and
+commit no sin.
+
+The stories give us some idea of the difference between winter and
+summer travel across Great Slave Lake. Captain Mills tells of two Indian
+women, one old enough to have a daughter of forty, who drove a dogsled
+one hundred and forty-eight miles from Providence to Rae, in four days.
+The older one walked ahead of the dogs and made the trail while the
+other drove. Coming back, it took them five days, and the old woman
+explained, "We didn't make such good time, as we had a man with us." It
+was her son-in-law whom she brought back with her.
+
+A striking picture is given us of a woman who walked alone from Hay
+River to Province on snowshoes, taking thirteen days to do it. She had
+no matches, and carried her fire with her, keeping it alight in a little
+copper kettle. This, of course, necessitated her guarding it very
+closely and stopping to renew the fire from time to time; for if the
+burning wood was once permitted to die down, her life in that intense
+cold would go out with it.
+
+How cold does it get? Mr. Campbell Young, of our little group, says that
+he has been out when a thermometer--one obtained from the U.S.
+Meteorological Station--registered seventy-six degrees below zero, and
+has worked in weather like that. "I've been trapping in that
+temperature, when of course the weather was absolutely still, and I tell
+you I'd rather be out in seventy-six below than to cross Smith Portage
+with the mosquitoes." Mr. Christie, of the Keele Survey Party, says,
+"Last winter I had to go out and get a moose for the camp, and on the
+second day I met the Mounted Police boys who told me it had been
+seventy-five below. I had started out when it was quite mild, only
+forty-five below. You know when it is below fifty, for then your breath
+begins to crackle, and that's a sure sign." Mr. John Gaudet says, "I
+was driving last winter on Lesser Slave Lake when it was sixty-four
+below. Yes, it was quite cold."
+
+At Resolution we see once more our old friend Dr. Sussex, happy and
+busied among his Indians. It is just hail and farewell. The little "red
+lemonade" kiddies are the first to greet us as we come into Fort Smith,
+and here everybody goes visiting. Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald tells us
+that her grandfather had two wives, and was the father of twenty-two
+children. She says she and her brother are glad of this, as it gives
+them so many friends in all parts of the country; and we notice that at
+every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit--a cousin
+here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling
+cards and little friendly gifts up here is a "musky-moot"; the more
+formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may
+stay a day or two, is a "_skin-ichi-mun."_ Visiting a little on our own
+account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the
+gaudy calendars of the advertiser have not yet made their way. Each man,
+foolish enough here to want a calendar, marks out his own on pencilled
+paper. We come across an H.B. Journal of the vintage of 1826 where the
+reckless scribe introduces two Thursdays into one week, acknowledging
+his error in a footnote with the remark, "It is not likely that the eye
+of man will ever read this record."
+
+At Fort Smith we leave the steamer _Mackenzie River_ to take passage in
+the _Grahame_ from Smith's Landing, and once more essay the Mosquito
+Portage. We find our winged friends in fine fettle. Their eyes are not
+dimmed, their strength not abated. For miles we notice blackened and
+dead stems of young spruce, cut off as if by machinery, at a uniform
+height of two and a half feet from the ground. The top of the dead stem
+shows the depth of the snow when the rabbits, running along the surface,
+had nibbled off and eaten the growing spruce. A fur-trader at our side
+says, "While at Fort Macpherson I noticed that the ice always melted in
+the spring in Peel's River before it did in the Mackenzie. It would
+break up in the Peel about the Queen's Birthday and begin to go out.
+Reaching the Mackenzie, it came up against a solid mass of unbroken ice
+which sent it back to flood the whole country. It was a curious
+experience to paddle round in a canoe for miles and miles where one had
+set rabbit snares but a few weeks before. The poor rabbits themselves
+were at a loss, for no kind monition apprised them of the coming flood.
+We could see whole colonies of them,--each a shipwrecked sailor on his
+own little raft of bark, buffeted here and there with the stream and
+peering out across the swollen waters, like Noah's dove, seeking some
+green thing."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TO MCMURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
+
+
+"Think o' the stories round the camp, the yarns along the track--
+O' Lesser Slave an' Herschel's Isle an' Flynn at Fond du Lac;
+Of fur an' gun, an' ranch an' run, an' moose and caribou,
+An' bull-dogs eatin' us to death! Good-bye--good luck to you!"
+
+Our arrival at Chipewyan is opportune. Honorine Daniels, unceremoniously
+known as 'Norine among her friends (and they are legion), is about to
+join hand and fortune with one of the Mercredi boys. 'Norine owns a
+cottage in her own right, and to-night under her roof-tree there is to
+be a wedding-dance. We wait round, hungering for an invitation, finally
+to be told largely, "You don't need no invitation, everybody goes."
+
+We go with the crowd. The room is full to overflowing. Babies are
+deposited on the benches along the wall, dogs look in at the window. The
+air is heavy with mosquitoes and tobacco-smoke. But joy reigns. Nobody
+is too old or too obese to dance. Old Mr. Loutit and lame Jimmy Flett
+each secures a sonsy partner. There are three fiddlers, and these
+relieve each other in turn, for fiddling, beating time with your
+moccasin on the earthen floor, and "calling out" is hard work for one
+man. There are but two kinds of dances,--the Red River jig, and a square
+dance which probably had for honourable ancestors the lancers on the
+father's side and a quadrille on the mother's.
+
+Endurance is a sign of merit in the Red River jig. A man or woman steps
+into the limelight and commences to jig, a dark form in moccasins slips
+up in front of the dancer, and one jigs the other down, amid plaudits
+for the survivor and jeers for the quitter.
+
+It is the square dance that interests us, our attention being divided
+between watching the deft forms in the half light and listening to the
+caller-off. _Louie-the-Moose_ first officiates. His eyes look dreamy but
+there is a general's stern tone of command in his words:
+
+"Ladeez, join de lily-white han's,
+Gents, your black-and-tan!
+Ladeez, bow! Gents, bow-wow!
+Swing 'em as hard's ye can.
+
+"Swing your corner Lady,
+Then the one you love!
+Then your corner Lady,
+Then your Turtle Dove!"
+
+Over and over again Louie reiterates his injunction, to the
+accompaniment of pattering moccasins and a humming chorus from door and
+windows. There are phrases of variation, too. We catch the words,
+"_Address your pardner," "Adaman left," "Show your steps," "Gents walk
+round, and all run away to the west_."
+
+Then Michel Manvil takes hold of the situation. He stands up to it, and
+we hear
+
+"Ladies round ladies, and gents all so!
+Ladies round gents, and gents don't go!"
+
+Why should they, we wonder!
+
+The third fiddler is a full-blooded Chipewyan. In some dancing academy
+in the woods he has learnt a "call-off" all his own, and proud indeed is
+he of his stunt. We manage to copy it down in its entirety, fighting
+mosquitoes the while and dodging out into the open now and again for a
+little air.
+
+"'Slute your ladies! All together!
+  Ladies opposite, the same--
+Hit the lumber with yer leathers,
+  Balance all, and swing yer dame!
+Bunch the moose-cows in the middle!
+  Circle, stags, and do-si-do--
+Pay attention to the fiddle!
+  Swing her round, an' off you go!
+
+"First four forward! Back to places!
+  Second foller--shuffle back!
+Now you've got it down to cases--
+  Swing 'em till their back-teeth crack!
+Gents, all right, a heel and toeing!
+  Swing 'em, kiss 'em if you kin--
+On to next, and keep a-goin'
+  Till you hit your pards ag'in!
+
+"Gents to centre; ladies round 'em,
+  Form a basket; balance all!
+Whirl yer gals to where you found 'em!
+  Promenade around the hall!
+Balance to yer pards and trot 'em
+  Round the circle, double quick!
+Grab and kiss 'em while you've got 'em--
+  Hold 'em to it; they won't kick!"
+
+The perspiring musician pushes his instrument into the hands of _Running
+Antelope_ and turns to us with, "There's another verse, but I don't
+always give it." We ask him to repeat it for us, but he seems a little
+at a loss. "It's hard to call it out without the fiddle. When yer
+playin' you just spit it out--the words come to you."
+
+It is August 6th at Chipewyan, and once again we are at the parting of
+the ways. Every one we know is heading for "Outside" by way of the
+steamer _Grahame_ and the Athabasca scows. Our own ambition is to make a
+traverse of the great Peace River Country before the snows. We have had
+no mail since last May, and the temptation to follow the multitude as
+far as McMurray in the hope of finding letters there is too strong to be
+resisted. We will then return and try to perfect arrangements for the
+Peace.
+
+The outgoers are a cosmopolitan and happy "bunch,"--Major Jarvis,
+R.N.W.M.P., fur-traders galore, three Grey Nuns and a priest, Mr. Wyllie
+and his family bound for the Orkney Islands, fifty-four souls in all,
+without counting the miscellaneous and interesting fraternity down on
+the lower deck among the fur-bundles.
+
+It is essentially a _voyage de luxe_. When Mr. Keele imagines a place is
+good, the steamer stops and we all gather fossils. When lame James, the
+steward, our erstwhile jig-expert, is about to serve coffee, he pokes
+his head over the side and orders the engines stopped that we may drink
+the beverage without spillage. The beardless prospector buys tinned
+peaches from the commissariat, opens them with a jack-knife and passes
+them round the deck with impartiality and a
+to-hell-with-the-man-that-works smile. Who would envy kings?
+
+We arrive at McMurray in time for treaty-payment. Tethered horses at the
+tepee-poles, store-dolls for the babies, and unmistakable "Outside"
+millinery prove the prosperity of these Crees, and proves also their
+proximity to Edmonton. One little group looks tattered, out-at-heel,
+and hungry,--a Cree widow presenting her four offspring that they may
+receive the annual payment. The officials within the treaty tent declare
+the youngest baby an illegitimate child and will pay it no treaty,--it
+"has no name." I catch the anxious look in the mother's eye. Five
+dollars goes a long way when baby bodies have to be fed and clothed. The
+situation is crucial. Without a sponsor, the priest will not name the
+baby. With no name, it cannot draw treaty. I conclude to father the
+child, as its own (un)lawful father will not. My offer to give my name
+to the girlie, after due deliberation of Church and State, is accepted.
+Under the name of Agnes Deans Cameron the Cree kiddie is received into
+the Mother Church and finds her place on the list of treaty-receiving
+Indians--No. 53 in the McMurray Band. May she follow pleasant trails!
+
+[Illustration: A Meadow at McMurray]
+
+Back of McMurray lies a lush land. We tread a path a full mile in length
+leading to meadows where, belly-high, the horses graze. Every yard of
+our way is lined with raspberry bushes bent with their rich, red burden.
+
+While the furs are being transferred from the _Grahame_ to the scows,
+the working of our typewriter is a matter of much wonderment. Old Paul
+Fontaine, a half-breed who thinks he is a white man, first looks through
+the door, then comes into the dining hall where we are, takes his hat
+off, and watches respectfully. Then, with an air of great conviction,
+"This is the first time I ever see that. It is wonderful what man can
+do--wonderful. There is only one thing left to be done now--and that is
+to put the breath of life into a dead body." Solemnly putting on his
+hat, he turns and walks out.
+
+Mrs. Loutit, another fellow-passenger attracted by the click of the
+machine, comes in and recounts her arts, wild and tame. In winter she
+goes off in dog-cariole, traps cross-foxes off her own bat, shoots
+moose, and smokes the hide according to the ancient accepted mode.
+Coming home, she takes the smoked hide and works upon it silk embroidery
+of a fineness which would be the envy of any young ladies' seminary in
+Europe or America. She weaves fantastic belts of beads and sets the
+fashion for the whole North in _chef d'oeuvres_ of the quills of the
+porcupine. She is a most observant "old wife." Watching, fascinated, the
+lightning play of the machine, "Much hard that, I think, harder than
+bead-work, eh?" Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to
+find out how the dickens when you strike capital "A" at one end of the
+keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small "o" at the other
+end. There is something uncanny about it, and our stock goes up.
+
+[Illustration: Starting up the Athabasca]
+
+We confess to being a little homesick as we wave farewell to the half
+hundred passengers in the familiar scows embarked for their two hundred
+and thirty-eight mile journey up the Athabasca. It will be a tiresome
+enough trip, though, for every foot of the way the big boats will have
+to be tracked (towed) by teams of half-breeds scrambling along the
+shore, now on land, now splashing in the water. The party will have the
+mosquito as companion on the sorrowful way and it will take them four
+weeks to make Athabasca Landing, the distance which in the spring we
+dropped down in little over a week. We send letters home, and with
+hand-shaking all round bid farewell to Mr. Wyllie, the Grey Nuns, and
+the rest.
+
+[Illustration: On the Clearwater]
+
+Our way back on the _Grahame_ to Chipewyan is not without adventure. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon we run up hard and fast on a batture!
+There is no swearing, no shouting of orders. The deck-hands from long
+experience know exactly what to do. The engines are reversed and, in
+their efforts, seem to speak Cree, for we catch the sound of the
+familiar "Wuh! Wey!" But it is no go. The sun sinks behind the bank,
+over the tops of the poplars floats a faint rosy glow which fades into
+purple and then into black, and we are still there hard and fast. The
+drifting sand piles up against us, and, in scows, the whole cargo is
+removed. The captain throws out a kedge-anchor, and in a mysterious way
+we pull ourselves off by hawsers, as a man lifts himself by his own
+boot-straps.
+
+We have head-winds all the way. At four o'clock on the morning of August
+14th, stress of weather causes us to run in under the lee of an island.
+We tie up at the base of some splendid timber. Spruce here will give
+three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground. With an improvised
+tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big
+poplars (rough-backed). The first ran seven feet three inches, the
+second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches. Within
+view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and
+interspersed with them were spruce with a base-girth scarcely less.
+
+Arrived at Chipewyan, we are able to arrange to be taken up the Peace in
+the same little tug _Primrose_ which had before carried us so safely to
+Fond du Lac.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
+
+
+"What lies ahead no human mind can know,
+To-morrow may bring happiness or woe.
+We cannot carry charts, save the hope that's in our hearts
+As along the unknown trail we blithely go."
+
+When we leave Chipewyan August 17th, the fall hunt of waveys has already
+begun. We learn afterwards that the Loutit boys alone made a bag of
+sixteen hundred of these birds which, salted down, form a considerable
+part of the winter food of the old Fort. Mrs. William Johnson comes down
+to see us embark. She has overwhelmed us with generous kindness at our
+every visit to Chipewyan, kindness we cannot soon forget. It is a small
+group which now starts out in the little tug on the bosom of the mighty
+Peace,--Major Routledge, R.N.W.M.P., Mr. and Mrs. John Gaudet with their
+two olive-branches "Char-lee" and "Se-li-nah," now returning to Lesser
+Slave Lake from a visit to Fort Good Hope, Miss Brown and myself.
+
+This part of the journey we are to enjoy more keenly than all that has
+gone before. Rising on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, the
+Peace River is the largest affluent of the Mackenzie, being already a
+splendid stream when it cuts through that range. With but one break, the
+Peace River affords a nine hundred mile stretch of navigation, and we
+can justly describe the country through which it flows as a plateau in
+which the river has made for itself a somewhat deep valley. Extensive
+grassy plains border it on both sides, and north of Fort Vermilion
+country of this character extends to the valley of the Hay River.
+Crossing the Quatre Fourches, an offshoot of the Peace at the Lake
+Athabasca edge, we turn our faces due west to a land of promise. The
+Mackenzie River and the banks of the Great Slave may some day afford
+homes to a busy and prosperous populace, but there are many fertile and
+more accessible lands to be settled first. With the Peace River Country
+there is no conjecture, for it is merely a question of the coming of the
+railway. Given a connection with the world to the south, the district
+watered by the Peace will at once support a vast agrarian population.
+The advance riders are already on the ground.
+
+It is not our intent to go to the expense of using a steamer for our
+whole journey up the Peace. Scows will allow us to proceed more
+leisurely and to see more as we go, so the second day we turn the
+steamer back and transfer ourselves and our belongings into a little
+open craft or model-boat _The Mee-wah-sin._ We have a crew of five men,
+one on the steering-sweep and four to track, and in this wise we make
+our way for three hundred miles up the great river to Fort Vermilion.
+One day we improvise a sail and so make fifty miles in a favourable
+wind, but, with this exception, every other mile of the journey is by
+patient towing.
+
+Incidents are many. The first morning after we turned back the little
+tug, the Kid and I left the slow trackers behind and were glad to
+stretch ourselves in a long forenoon's tramp along the sandy beach. The
+mosquitoes were practically gone and for the first time all summer one
+could really enjoy the woods, where a tang of autumn in the air made
+every breath a tonic draught. Exulting in the fact that we were alive,
+we turned a sharp corner and came suddenly face to face with a grey
+wolf, loping along at a swinging pace at the water's edge, muzzle close
+to the ground! To make the story worth telling, one should have
+something to say of "yawning jaws" and "bloodshot eyes" and "haunches
+trembling for a spring." But this grey wolf simply refused to play that
+part. He took one look at us, evidently didn't approve, and turned up
+from his tracks quietly into the cottonwoods above. As we on our side
+had brought neither gun nor camera from the _Mee-wah-sin_, we are unable
+to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture. _Sic transit lupus_!
+
+A week out from Chipewyan, where the Swan River makes into the Peace, we
+came one glorious afternoon upon a camp of Crees, the family of the
+_Se-weep-i-gons_. They had just killed two bears. We bought the skins
+and a large portion of meat from them, and Mrs. _Se-weep-i-gon_ very
+kindly added to the feast of fat things some high-bush cranberries "in a
+present." As an excuse for listening to their soft voices, before we
+left the camp we asked the name of every member of the little group,
+scratching the list down on a piece of birchbark. The Crees evidently
+considered this an official ceremony, for after we had paid our score
+and shaken hands with everybody from Grandpa to the latest baby and were
+well out in mid-stream, Mrs. _Se-weep-i-gon_ came running down to the
+bank to call us back. Rowing to the shore we found that she had
+remembered one more child whose name she wanted to add to the list. She
+assured us that this one too had a little brass cross hanging round his
+neck, so we will be sure to know him if we meet him in the woods.
+
+We lived for the next two days on bear-meat and cranberries.
+
+[Illustration: Evening on the Peace]
+
+So one wonderful day follows another as our little boat is towed first
+against one bank then another of this majestic stream. The forest growth
+is a marvel. We measure one morning three of the spruce trees to which
+our tent-ropes are tied, and get for base measurement six feet eight
+inches, five feet two inches, and five feet respectively. The trees
+averaged ninety feet in height and would give perhaps one thousand feet
+to each tree. The autumn tints on the willows and alders of the high
+river-banks are indescribably beautiful. We pass through one hundred
+miles of a veritable field of the cloth of gold. We look out of our
+tent-flaps at night on this living glory, and wake up to it again with
+each new morning sun.
+
+One Sunday evening at dusk we slip into the Hudson's Bay post where the
+Little Red River makes into the Peace, the dear home of Tom Kerr, his
+Scottish wife, and their four bairns. Let me try to give the picture.
+Tom had been off all day cutting meadowgrass, and now wended his way
+home with a load of it in a little Old Country cart drawn by a wall-eyed
+mare. At her side frisked a foal, and two great stag-hounds ran back and
+forward between the master and his home by the riverside. Three children
+bounded out to greet their father. "Oh! Daddy, Daddy, the red coo broke
+away from the byre and is far awa on the ither side o' the burn!" Here,
+in a nutshell, you have the difference between the Mackenzie River of
+to-day and the Peace River. On the Mackenzie, swarthy forms are in
+evidence, Cree and French is spoken on all sides, there are no great
+fields of waving grain, and the dog is the only domestic animal. On the
+Peace is an essentially white race, cows, chickens, trustworthy old
+nags, porridge for breakfast, "the tongue that Shakespeare spake,"
+rendered in an accent born far ayont the Tweed. Right across the mouth
+of the Little Red River, Tom Kerr has a fishing scine. We go down with
+him to lift it, after the cows have been brought back to the narrow
+path. The net yields seven fish and they are of five different
+species,--trout, ling, sucker, jack-fish, and something else that Tom
+calls a "Maria." Daily this net is set, and for three hundred and
+sixty-five days every year it furnishes food for the family, in summer
+in the flowing water, and in winter under the ice. You couldn't starve
+at Little Red River if you wanted to. This is one of the most beautiful
+spots in the whole North Countree. Long after Tom and we and Mrs. Tom
+are under the gowans, and the little Kerrs possess the land, there will
+be populous cities along the Peace, and millionaires will plant their
+summer villas on the beauteous spot where we now stand.
+
+[Illustration: Our Lobsticks on the Peace]
+
+Bidding the bairns good-bye, we press onward on our way, Tom Kerr
+accompanying us. A great honour awaits us round the next corner, when
+the boatmen announce that they are going to make us each a lobstick. We
+land, as pleased as Punch over the suggestion. We now know what it feels
+like when the philanthropist of a village takes his after-dinner walk
+through the square and sees the sparrows drinking from the memorial
+fountain surmounted with his own bust, done in copper, life-size. It
+takes fully two hours to trim the trees into significant shape, but the
+beauty of this particular kind of Cook's Tour is that you go down when
+you like and stop when you want to. The lobsticks furnished, the men
+form a circle and discharge their muskets in salute, and on we go. We
+learn that the ethics of lobsticks is that each of these men, should
+Fate take him past this point again, will salute the lobstick just made
+and send a strong thought across the spruce-tops to us. There is a
+reverse to the shield. Should we, at any time before this journey ends,
+fail to make good, the men on the return voyage will cut the lobstick
+down. We are going to make no impertinent enquiries regarding the
+ulterior fate of these family trees. Is it not sufficient glory to say,
+"On the Peace River we _had_ a lobstick"?
+
+The Chutes of the Peace! These will live forever with the Ramparts of
+the Mackenzie as the two most majestic visions which the whole North
+Land gave us. We had not been prepared for that wonderful spectacle
+which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars
+for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its
+great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite
+across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet
+and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara,
+yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this
+land so pregnant with possibilities, a land which, though it echo now
+only the quiet foot of the Cree, is so unmistakably a White Man's
+Country, intensifies the sense of majesty and power which here takes
+possession of us. The men talk of the water-power furnished by the great
+falls, and hazard guesses of the future economic purposes to which it
+will be put. For our own part, our one wish is to get away from the
+noise of even these subdued voices and in silence feast our very souls
+on this manifestation of the power of God. The thoughts that we feel
+cannot be put into words. Why attempt the impossible?
+
+[Illustration: The Chutes of the Peace]
+
+Our way lies beyond this, and the Chutes have to be overcome. These
+half-breeds know exactly what to do in every emergency which arises.
+Only one of the men has traversed this river before, and he gives
+orders. We strip our little _Mee-wah-sin_ of her temporary masts and
+canvas awning and take out all our belongings. Everybody works. A
+purchase is obtained by throwing a pulley and rope over a nearby
+jack-pine, and the boat is pulled out bodily from the water. Then the
+crew drag her along the shore well beyond the head of the rapid, and we
+make camp.
+
+[Illustration: Pulling out the _Mee-wah-sin_]
+
+These delicious nights within the tent are memories that will remain
+through all the years to come. It is cool and silent and productive of
+thought. We are selfishly glad that fifty people went out by Athabasca
+ways, leaving to us all the mighty reaches and pleasant pastures of the
+Peace. The midnight is flooded by a glorious moon, and the thoughts born
+this afternoon of that stupendous fall have driven sleep far away.
+Opening the tent-flap, I slip through the camp of sleeping Indians to
+the edge of the fast-flowing stream. The feeling is insistent here which
+has been ever-present since we entered this valley of the Peace--here is
+the home prepared and held in waiting for the people who are to follow.
+
+"Listening there, I heard all tremulously
+Footfalls of Autumn passing on her way,
+And in the mellow silence every tree
+Whispered and crooned of hours that are to be.
+Then a soft wind like some small thing astray
+Comes sighing soothingly."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
+
+
+"Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and cheerily wise,
+With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes,
+Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,
+Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood,
+Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,
+As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world."
+
+--_Service_.
+
+It is on August 27th, in the evening, that the crew, all slicked up in
+their Sunday-go-to-meetings, draw us up on the beach of the City in the
+Silences, this Past-in-the-arms-of-the-Present,--Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+The first thing to meet our eye is the red roof of the flour-mill of the
+H.B. Co., a picture of progressiveness set in a living frame of golden
+wheat, the heavy heads nodding to the harvest.
+
+Vermilion is an old post of the Old Company. Alexander Mackenzie on his
+way to the Pacific found people at work here far back in 1792. The
+Vermilion of to-day stands a living monument to the initiative faith and
+hard work largely of one man, Mr. Francis D. Wilson, who has had charge
+of H.B. Co. interests here for nineteen years. Mr. Wilson found this
+place a fur-post on the edge of civilisation, and he has made of it a
+commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre. And his example has
+been contagious, for the half-breeds around him have become farmers, the
+Indians who traded furs a dozen years ago now buy harness and ploughs
+and breach-loading guns from The Company, paying for the same with wheat
+of their own growing.
+
+[Illustration: The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace]
+
+Vermilion is in latitude 58° 30' N.,--that is, about four hundred miles
+due north of Edmonton, and on practically the same parallel as
+Stockholm. The flour-mill that we now inspect is the most northerly
+wheat-mill on this continent, and it has been running for five years. It
+is the roller process, with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, the
+motor-power being a 40 H.P. Corliss engine. The wheat which feeds these
+rollers is all grown in nearby fields, and the resultant flour is
+consumed by the people of the lone posts of the Peace and the lower
+Mackenzie. Two years ago the H.B. Company paid to farmers, all of whom
+lived within a radius of five miles from the mill, the sum of $27,000
+spot cash for their wheat. An electric plant lights the mill and fort
+buildings, affording fifty six-candle-power lights.
+
+Right up to the door of the mill extends the sixty-acre wheat-field of
+the H.B. Company, from which Mr. Wilson computes that he will this year
+thrash two thousand bushels. If the H.B. wheat-field were to sell the H.B.
+mill these two thousand bushels at $1.25 a bushel (the ruling
+Vermilion price), there would be a net profit of $1500, after paying all
+expense of culture, to the credit of one branch of Mr. Wilson's
+commercial institution. For thirty years, wheat, oats, barley, and
+vegetables have been grown in Vermilion, not as an experiment, but as
+regular commercial crops. Cereals are sown late in April or early in
+May, and the harvest is gathered in August. More than once, wheat has
+matured in eighty-six days from seed-sowing to seed-garnering.
+
+Vermilion farmers boast sulkies and gang-ploughs and the latest geared
+McCormick, Massey-Harris, and Deering farm implements,--self-binders and
+seeders. Everything is up-to-date. We ourselves counted fifteen
+self-binders at work. And grain is not the whole story. The farmers own
+thoroughbred Ayrshire stock and splendid horses. I happened to be at the
+garden of the Church of England Mission when the potato-crop was being
+harvested, and found that seven bags of seed planted in the middle of
+May produced one hundred bags by the end of August. Five potatoes that I
+gathered haphazard from one heap weighed exactly five and one-half
+pounds. I photographed and weighed a collection of vegetables grown by
+Robert Jones on the Dominion Experimental Farm.
+
+[Illustration: Articles Made by Indians
+
+A--Wall-pocket of white deerskin, embroidered in silk-work, and bordered
+with ermine--the work of a Cree woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+B--Gloves of white deerskin embroidered in silk, the work of a Slavi
+woman on the Liard River (a branch of the Mackenzie).
+
+C, D, E, F, G, H, I--Moccasins as worn respectively by the Crees,
+Chipewyans, Slavis, Dog-Ribs, Yellow-Knives, Loucheux--all the work of
+the women.
+
+J.--Flour bag from the mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace, the most
+northerly flour-mill in America.
+
+K--Sinew, from close to the spine of the moose--used by the women of the
+North instead of thread.
+
+L--Very valuable net of willow-bark made by an old squaw at Fort
+Resolution. This is almost a lost art, and harks back to the pre-string
+days.
+
+M--The "crooked knife" or knife of the country.
+
+N--Match-box made from a copper kettle by an old Beaver Indian at Fort
+Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+O--_Babiche_, or rawhide of the moose or caribou--"the iron of the
+country."]
+
+One cauliflower weighed eight pounds, half a dozen turnips weighed nine
+pounds each, and twenty table beets would easily average six pounds
+each. The carrots and onions were sown in the open in mid-May and were
+as inviting specimens as I have ever seen. Tomatoes ripened in the open
+air on this farm on July 13th. Peas, sown on May 23rd and gathered on
+August 12th, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel. Experimental plots
+of turnips gave sixteen tons to the acre, and white carrots twelve tons.
+Apple-trees and roses we found flourishing on this farm, with
+twenty-five varieties of red, black, and white currants. The wheat story
+is of compelling interest. Preston wheat, sown on May 6th and cut on
+August 22nd, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel; Ladoga wheat, sown
+on the last day of April and cut on September 5th, ran sixty-four pounds
+to the bushel also, and early Riga weighed sixty-three pounds. In the
+garden of the R.C. Mission we were presented with splendid specimens of
+ripened corn and with three cucumbers grown in the open air, which
+weighed over a pound each.
+
+[Illustration: The Hudson's Bay Store]
+
+Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in
+extent than the whole of Belgium. There are probably a million acres of
+land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops
+like those cited. Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there
+are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white. They
+all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by
+hunting, trapping, and freighting. The settlement boasts two churches,
+two mission schools, and two trading stores,--a happy, prosperous, and
+very progressive community. Everything in the place points to this
+conclusion.
+
+The H.B. Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing
+$1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the
+monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats. This
+sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer _Peace River_,
+built here four years ago of native timber. She is a hundred and
+ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half
+feet and carrying forty tons burden. She can accommodate thirty
+passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes
+fifteen knots an hour. The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this
+boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.
+
+Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one
+man's logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of
+Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill. Edmond Paul's logs in
+one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at
+the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber. The biggest log in this raft was a
+twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which
+cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.
+
+Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and
+arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful
+of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and
+seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what
+has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole
+country spring when it is given rail communication with the
+plains-people to the south?
+
+Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious
+autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.
+Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these
+walls? Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and
+stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us
+to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home. It is a modern
+house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of
+hollyhocks on all sides. The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace,
+here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty. To the visitor who
+steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the
+reading man and the clever artificer. Scientific works of reference,
+good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged
+travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and
+human-nature, for five long months. The office furniture, hand-made of
+native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson's individual work in both
+design and execution. Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also
+a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these
+carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any
+one in the settlement, whether fort employé or not, who cares to come in
+here for a quiet hour to read.
+
+Kipling says, "You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile," but the
+Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line. In a corner of
+the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history. The
+honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of
+Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a
+sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by
+portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton. It
+carries on it the name of John Broadwood & Sons, London. Mrs. Wilson
+tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house
+to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance.
+The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of
+the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod
+Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.
+
+Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and
+the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B. Co., has put in a
+life of loving service among the people of Vermilion. Her knowledge of
+medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of
+need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother
+and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion.
+These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly
+kindness.
+
+Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with
+the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper. The country
+furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and
+bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made
+butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies
+whose four constituents--flour, lard, butter and fruit--are products of
+the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid
+fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild
+game--moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs,
+and mallards. Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen
+different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry,
+blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon. The salt comes from
+Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion
+beets if there should arise a market. What more would you? The
+Vermilionese on his fertile acres is as independent of the world outside
+as is the Eskimo in his Arctic igloo. The farm of Sheridan Lawrence,
+exhibiting its wide-stretching wheat-fields, some heads of which counted
+seventy-one kernels, with its patches of one-pound potatoes, twelve-foot
+sunflowers, and its quiverful of happy, tow-headed children, gives as
+sweet a picture of Canadian thrift and happiness as one would wish to
+see. Indeed, happiness seems to be the keynote of Vermilion, whether we
+seek it within the fort walls of the H.B. Co., on the fat acres of the
+farmers, or within the folds of Protestant or Roman Mission.
+
+[Illustration: Papillon, a Beaver Brave]
+
+We carry away with us two pictures, that we like to cherish, of the
+convent kiddies of Vermilion. The first thing we saw when we peered
+round a corner of this old-fashioned building was the bright face of
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury playing see-saw with a dozen wide-grinning
+Slavi babies. When the morning came when we were to bid reluctant
+good-bye to Vermilion and all its spontaneous kindness, the last sight
+that met our eyes before we turned the corner of the Peace was the whole
+convent force of Vermilion perched high on stumps and fence-rails,
+wishing us _bon voyage_ with fluttering pocket-handkerchiefs, while
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury, on a ladder, surmounted the crowd and waved
+her farewells with a table-cloth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
+
+
+"'Tis a summer such as broods
+O'er enchanted solitudes,
+Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods,
+And with lavish love outpours
+All the wealth of out-of-doors."
+
+--_James Whitcomb Riley_.
+
+[Illustration: Going to School in Winter]
+
+On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the
+little _Mee-wah-sin,_ and in the tiny tug _Messenger_ of the H.B.
+Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we
+puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around
+us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing
+cranes are flying.
+
+Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months
+of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect
+and created for herself a warm place in every heart. Se-li-nah, though,
+makes it impossible for us to pose as brave endurers of hardships. Each
+night and morning she carries her little pack on and off shore, takes
+her share of pot-luck at _meat-su,_ and is never cross. Bless the
+kiddie! If ablutions seem to her a work of supererogation and our daily
+play of toothbrush furnishes all the fascination of the unknown, still
+hers is the right stuff for pioneer lands and she has lessons to teach
+us in pluck and endurance.
+
+The first night out from Vermilion we made camp after dark and, on
+waking, found that in our blankets we had lain directly across four new
+bear-tracks. Moose-tracks are plentiful at every stopping-place, so we
+see to it that both guns and camera are primed. At eight next morning we
+pass Not-in-a-gu Seepee. Some Indians hail us, asking for tea, and from
+these we learn that ten families who made this their winter camp last
+season bagged eighty moose among them.
+
+At half-past two our chance came. To get away from the noise of the
+engine, the Kid and I had moved our work directly after breakfast to a
+flour-laden scow that we had in tow, and I was dictating this story to
+the machine when the sharp eyes of Showan in the distance spied a moose.
+He was on the shore cropping willows. It had been generously agreed that
+if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine, so in excited
+whispers the news is telegraphed to our end of the scow and my rifle is
+handed up. The fireman slows up on the engine, but still its throbbing
+sounds distressingly loud as we creep up on the feeding moose and scan
+the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are
+high,--perhaps one hundred and fifty feet--and sheer, but there are two
+gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly
+creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,--a
+regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those
+animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet
+biscuit. And now at last he sees us. I fire, and the shot just grazes
+his spine. Will he take to a gully? No, he plunges into the river
+instead and we follow him up in the little tug. One more shot is
+effective, and I have killed my premier moose. "Cruel!" you say. Well,
+just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat, as, with
+the exception of Vermilion's flesh-pots, we have done, and then find out
+if you would fly in the face of Providence when the Red Gods send you a
+young moose! To illuminate the problem I transcribe the menu of one
+sample week of the summer.
+
+[Illustration: My Premier Moose]
+
+This is the literal "dope sheet" of the camp cook:
+
+_Monday_:--Dried caribou and rice.
+
+_Tuesday_:--Salt fish and prunes.
+
+_Wednesday_:--Mess-pork and dried peaches.
+
+_Thursday_:--Salt horse and macaroni.
+
+_Friday_:--Sow-belly and bannock.
+
+_Saturday_:--Blue-fish and beans.
+
+_Sunday_:--Repeat.
+
+Dragged ashore, the moose proved to be a male of two prongs, about
+eighteen months old, and weighed perhaps four or five hundred pounds. A
+full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton. We are
+to learn that there are many viewpoints from which to approach a moose.
+The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo and Mrs. Gaudet each eloquently
+argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it,
+and Se-li-nah, looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in
+Cree, "_Marrow_ is nice." Poor young stripling of the Royal House of
+Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!
+
+The first thing Baptiste does is to plunge his penknife into the back to
+see how deep the fat is. We had noticed this testing process before. A
+bunch of feathers is always plucked off the new-killed bird that one can
+immediately gauge the gastronomic niche at which to set one's waiting
+stomach. No more voyaging to-night. The moose is cleaned and skinned.
+Mrs. Gaudet draws the skin. I claim the head. A little Indian boy, who
+with his mother had been added to our ship's crew at Carcajou Point,
+appropriates the kidneys, which he proceeds to roast in the ashes.
+Ten-year-old Bill evidently likes his devilled kidneys rare, for within
+three minutes we see him prancing round the camp, nibbling his dripping
+dainty from the point of an impaling stick.
+
+[Illustration: Beaver Camp, on Paddle River]
+
+Having sat round the barbecue half the night, we pull out late the next
+morning. And now, apprised by moccasin telegraph, we are all on the _qui
+vive_ to catch sight of a floating bride. A fur-trader attached to "The
+French Company" at Vermilion has been out on six months' leave and is
+bringing in a bride from Paris. We are to expect them to cross our
+course on a raft, floating in with the current of the Peace as we make
+our way upstream. We see the raft. All is excitement. We direct the
+steersman to draw close in, and the men prime their rifles for a salute.
+She is not visible,--floating brides on the Peace shrink evidently from
+being the cynosure of passing eyes. Our men fire their salute, the
+steersman on the raft looks puzzled when we, smiling our sympathy, peer
+over the edge of his craft, and see, instead of the Parisian bride,--a
+load of Poland pigs for Vermilion! It is the wrong raft. The real bride
+passes us in the gloaming ten hours later, when it is too dark to get a
+satisfactory photograph!
+
+On the evening of September 22nd we arrive at Peace River Crossing, or
+Peace River Landing, just a week out from Vermilion. Our course from
+there has been almost due south. We turn the little _Messenger_ back
+here and regretfully bid good-bye to our staunch and friendly boatmen.
+No people in the world could be pleasanter to travel with than these
+splendid men of the North. Indefatigable and ready for any emergency,
+they know their business and are always master of the situation;
+moreover, nature has dowered them with an intuitive delicacy as rare as
+it is pleasing. Through all these weeks, intensely interested as they
+are in everything that is new, never for a moment have they intruded
+upon us or our doings. At night there is not a man of them who will not
+walk a quarter of a mile through the woods rather than pass between our
+occupied tent and the camp fire. But let us offer to show them pictures
+or to explain the workings of the camera or the typewriter and it is a
+different story, for then every man Jack drops his oar or tump-line and
+rushes to our side like an excited schoolboy.
+
+Peace River Crossing is in latitude 56° N. and longitude 117° 20' W.
+From that far-off day in spring when we first touched the Clearwater we
+have been following in the historic footprints of Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie. We now take a day off, with the object of locating
+Mackenzie's last camp on the Peace, which he reached in 1792 and from
+which, in the spring of 1793, he started west across the map seeking an
+unknown route to the Pacific Ocean. We find the remains of that camp. It
+is in the corner of a potato-field a little way beyond Peace River
+Crossing and on the opposite side of the river. Only the foundations of
+the walls are left and the crumbling bricks of two old chimneys.
+Mackenzie was the first man to cross the continent from sea to sea north
+of the latitude of Mexico, and it was from this point where we stand
+that he launched his ambitious canoe. There is no more historic spot on
+the continent than that on which we stand this September day, and as yet
+it is all unmarked of commemorative stone or recording tablet. The lost
+camp had never been photographed until we brought our inquisitive camera
+to bear upon it.
+
+I stoop and pluck from where it nods behind the old chimney a wild
+larkspur, and as I half-mechanically count its forty-two seed-pods, I
+try hard to throw back my thoughts to the year 1792,--one hundred and
+sixteen years. It is a far call! Canada is tardy in her recognition of
+her early builders of Empire. Our cousins to the south would appear to
+be more appreciative. In song and story and by a memorial World's Fair
+the people of the United States have honoured the discoveries of Lewis
+and Clark, but Mackenzie crossed the continent a full dozen years in
+advance of these explorers.
+
+[Illustration: The Site of old Fort McLeod]
+
+Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where,
+amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company,
+a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is
+Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the
+noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours
+of dawn and "when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the
+grey." He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if
+he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting
+whisper, but its burden is ever the same.
+
+"Something lost behind the Ranges,
+Lost and waiting for you: Go!"
+
+No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to
+Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty
+and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his
+name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought
+uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not
+pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in
+astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for
+a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791.
+His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western
+Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of
+Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves "somewhere" far beyond
+the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong
+determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort
+Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we
+stand. The breaking of the spring ice of 1793 sent him forth on the
+quest of that Northwest Passage by Land.
+
+"O Young Mariner,
+Down to the harbor call your companions,
+Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas,
+And, ere it vanishes over the margin,
+After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!"
+
+We have not time to recount the chapters of the story, to name the
+streams ascended, the boiling gorges passed, the discontent allayed, the
+encouragement given, the lonely night-watches when the leader himself
+looked for comfort to his new-found stars. The Fraser was discovered,
+traced for a while; and then, striking westward, Mackenzie heard the
+beat of the surf upon the rocks, and came out from among the pines to
+the silver Pacific sparkling in the sun. It was a sweet day in summer's
+prime, and as the gulls cried overhead and the sun mixed scent of
+seaweed with balsam breath from in-shore, we can imagine but not divine
+the feelings of that brave man who had thrown himself face-downward on
+the sand and from whose presence the awed companions stole silently
+away. We remember the words of another builder of Empire,--
+
+"Anybody might have found it,
+But God's whisper came to me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
+
+
+"A haze on the far horizon,
+  The infinite tender sky,
+The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,
+  And the wild geese sailing high,--
+And all over upland and lowland
+  The charm of the goldenrod.
+Some of us call it Autumn,
+  And others call it God."
+
+--_W.H. Carruth_.
+
+At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is
+here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good
+Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they
+left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs
+twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons,
+which weigh over ten pounds each.
+
+To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies
+present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and
+the Pouce Coupé. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square
+miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water
+are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been
+damaged by frost.
+
+Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande
+Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande
+Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square
+miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their
+cattle longer than six weeks each winter.
+
+[Illustration: Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace]
+
+The Pouce Coupé would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace
+River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves
+the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in
+mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September.
+Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give
+abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in,
+tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and
+pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the
+naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn,
+and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This
+is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and
+the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that
+tickle his palate,--blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries,
+willow-berries, and saskatoons.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Dunvegan on the Peace]
+
+On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles
+south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in
+our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand
+miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the
+suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost
+all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times
+and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us
+through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open
+glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us
+bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this
+land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail
+is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and
+tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are
+fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the
+very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this
+Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling
+amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56° N. I pluck
+a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.
+
+Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser
+Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer
+civilisation,--the "civilisation" of Chicago! A strong desire possesses
+us to about-face and back to the woods again.
+
+It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we
+intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into
+sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,--men, women,
+children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering
+flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look
+up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the
+south,--one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty
+picture,--the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns
+with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. "It is the _Man with
+the Hoe_," I murmur. "Yes," assents the Kid, "and _The Angelus at Lesser
+Slave_."
+
+We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey.
+Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear
+delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the "horse
+latitudes"--though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey
+leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page.
+The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat
+and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs.
+Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole,
+this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses'
+mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the
+act making possible the writing of this "immortal work"!
+
+[Illustration: Fort St. John on the Peace]
+
+Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody
+rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a
+gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed
+on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey
+and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in
+Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly
+rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at
+dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the
+latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the
+vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant
+bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year.
+To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot
+straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the
+healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.
+
+[Illustration: Where King Was Arrested]
+
+There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in
+which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and,
+driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph
+giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.
+
+[Illustration: Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons]
+
+By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,--tall, straight,
+fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch
+blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one
+granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His
+grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a
+century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He
+married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the
+time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the
+notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to
+lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum,
+he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the
+flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy.
+It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can
+navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this
+Scots-Sioux,--strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party
+of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching
+Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who,
+too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec
+Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating
+sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile,
+of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of
+the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec
+has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, "Do
+not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?"
+
+Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young
+fellow of the H.B. Co. says, "It's beastly bad form to ask any man who
+comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a
+wilful-missing, that's his privilege." However, fate has thrown in our
+way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan
+up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down
+at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or
+less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise
+herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon
+make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs.
+Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.
+
+[Illustration: Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron]
+
+Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty
+years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged
+eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little
+brothers and cousins, _en famille_, they pitched off from Little Red
+River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger
+men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was
+seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it,
+and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless,
+they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who
+nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.
+
+How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the
+woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her
+clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little
+children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters
+who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat
+came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike
+became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate
+of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her
+sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket
+between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make
+Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful
+experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each
+feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out,
+thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping
+companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas.
+The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then
+the sister died. _How_ she died God and the watching stars alone know.
+Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as
+food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but
+admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.
+
+Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language
+which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same
+word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own
+volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human
+imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony
+undergone by these poor creatures--women and children with affections
+like our own--shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel
+camp of death!
+
+Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a
+recluse, shunned of all Indians as a "Wetigo" or "Cannibal." A friend
+was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon
+Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years
+passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is
+The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been
+born.
+
+As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly
+caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the
+Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat
+difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is "even
+as you and me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
+
+
+"I hear the tread of Nations yet to be,
+The first low wash of waves where soon shall roll a human sea."
+
+[Illustration: A Peace River Pioneer]
+
+Taking passage on the steamer _Northern Light_, we leave the settlement
+of Lesser Slave Lake, this world-in-small, on the first day of October,
+and, from here to Athabasca Landing, travel in company with Mr. J.K.
+Cornwall, President of the Northern Transportation Company. Between the
+time of our journey and this writing, Mr. Cornwall has been returned as
+Member of the Alberta Legislature for the district we are now
+traversing. He certainly knows his constituency better than most
+representatives do. There is scarcely a mile of these unmapped ways that
+he has not tramped alone; not an Indian guide in the North can last with
+"Jim" for a week, in summer, or on snow-shoes. When some Lesser Slave
+half-breeds were told that Mr. Cornwall was going to run for the
+legislature against Allie Brick, one of them said, "Jim wins. Allie
+Brick can't run. Not much fun in that race. No man on Peace River can
+run like Jim."
+
+Mr. Cornwall's pronouncement on the North Country can be taken as
+authoritative. He says, "Practically all the timber of any commercial
+value between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains is in these
+northern watersheds. This timber will be a very important factor in the
+coming development of Prairie Canada to the south, and fortunately, too,
+it is most get-at-able. There are thirty-six hundred miles of river and
+lake in the North on which steamers are plying to-day and which are open
+for navigation for six months in every year. The first railway that
+comes in will tap a system of transporation equalled only on this
+continent by the Mississippi and St. Lawrence with the Great Lakes. The
+American Government has spent two hundred million dollars on the
+improvement of Mississippi navigation, and to-day it is not as valuable
+a national asset as the great Athabasca-Mackenzie-Peace system is as it
+came from the hand of Nature. Thirty thousand bushels of wheat that
+would grade 'No. 1 Northern' was produced in the Peace River Country
+this year, besides thousands of bushels of oats and barley. In this
+Northland there are 100,000,000 acres of land fit for the growing of
+grain."
+
+Charles Dickens used to carry a note-book in his vest-pocket in which he
+jotted down names that tickled his fancy. Were Dickens to travel this
+route with us, his name-note-books would bulge. Where Lesser Slave River
+issues out of Lesser Slave Lake, we found Tom Lilac in earnest
+conversation with Jilly Loo-bird. Jilly has navigated the North all the
+way from Athabasca Landing to Hudson's Hope on the Peace, seeking a
+wife, and still lacks his connubial rib. Being told that ladies are on
+board, he breathlessly asks, "What colour?" When he learns that we are
+white, Jilly makes a dash for some cache in the woods which takes the
+place of clothes-closet, but the steamer has passed on before he
+emerges. Another lost chance, both for Jilly and the writer! For two or
+three miles here, where the river runs out of the lake, it never
+freezes, and ducks and wild-fowl remain here all the winter in open
+water. Last month, in this immediate vicinity, no fewer than one hundred
+moose were killed. Lilac tells us that last winter there was no snow
+here until March, and two winters ago absolutely no snow fell whatever,
+so that the sleighs were not gotten out and all the freighting had to be
+done with waggons. "No need to starve here," says Lilac, "the trout run
+up to forty pounds each. There are whitefish and grayling, and I gather
+berries all the year round. In summer, I get the red and white currants,
+raspberries, saskatoons, blueberries, gooseberries, and strawberries,
+and all winter long there are both high-bush and low-bush cranberries."
+
+[Illustration: Three Generations]
+
+Travelling with us are Judge Noel and Judge Beck, making the first
+circuit of justice through this country. Although they had come all the
+way from Edmonton looking for trouble, so splendid has been the
+surveillance of the Mounted Police here that no one could scrape up one
+case for the judges to try. The Peace River people seemed somehow to
+think that in greeting the judges with an empty house the settlement had
+failed to make good. Some one comforts them with setting forth as the
+ethics of the case the fact that the judges should be presented with
+white gloves, as the traditional sign of an empty docket. Again is Peace
+River chagrined, neither The Company nor the French Company has white
+kids in stock. Each judge is made the recipient of a handsome pair of
+moose-skin gloves, as a substitute, ornamented with beads and quills of
+the porcupine.
+
+At Norris's, we leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift
+Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout. The Dominion Government, with a
+series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to
+make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel. Where the Lesser Slave
+River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, and from
+there to Athabasca Landing float down the last stretch of our northern
+waterways of delight. There is frost each night now and the deciduous
+trees on the banks are a rich riot of colour. We resurrect from the
+depths all the warm clothing available and have opportunity of testing
+in their own latitudes the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and
+other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.
+
+Every passenger who floats with us enlarges our knowledge and enriches
+our vocabulary. Judge Noel's bodyguard is a young stripling of the
+Mounted Police, born in dear old Lunnon. It is always interesting to
+note the different things of which people are proud. Old men boast of
+their age and young ones of their youth. The fat woman in the side-show
+is arrogant over her avoirdupois; the debutante glories in her slender
+waist; and the globe-trotter triumphs in the miles he has travelled.
+Wyllie claimed distinction in never having left Chipewyan. This Mounted
+Policeman, who stretches out on the scow, plumes himself on two things:
+"I 'old the dahnsin' championship of Edmonton. I got a gold watch lahst
+winter for waltzin'." We smile approval, and the constable continues, "I
+waltzed,--reversin',--an 'our-an'-a-'alf! And--," straightening himself
+up, "I am the best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta."
+
+[Illustration: A Family on the Lesser Slave]
+
+Rich is the descriptive language of the North, and we lie awake on the
+scows, rolled in our blankets, loath to lose any of it. "Jim" is at the
+sweep. Many of the men are going out from the North for the first time
+in four or five years. They also seem too interested to slumber, and all
+night long the conversation goes on. A priest is describing some man who
+seems to be hard to identify. "You know him,--the son of the ole man
+with the patch on his nose wot died. I christen him last winter." No one
+is more apt at naming than these men. Two days ago, at the treaty at
+Lesser Slave, when a smiling couple drew five dollars for a baby one day
+old, a Cree bystander dubbed the baby "dat little meal-ticket." A young
+girl who came up to claim her money was nicknamed "Pee-shoo," or "The
+Lynx," because of her bad temper. So we see where all the old cats of
+the south come from.
+
+[Illustration: A One Night Stand]
+
+
+The scow glides on, and we doze, but do not sleep. In the dark she hits
+something and bumps us wide awake to hear the reassuring, "This is where
+Pat Cunningham's horses were drownded last week." Under Jim's command,
+everybody works, even learned judges from Edmonton. He says, "Take
+another shot at the oars, and then you can hit the feathers." In the
+morning, one half-breed fails to turn up for _meat-su_ and the comment
+is, "He feels the feathers pullin'." "Don't blime 'im," remarks the
+constable, passing the tea, "only fools and 'orses work."
+
+"He reached out his hand for a drink," rendered into trans-Athabascan
+would be, "He got his thievin' irons on the joy-juice," or "He stretched
+his mud-hooks for the fight-water." "He set him a-foot for his horse"
+means "He stole his horse," and from this we derive all such phrases as,
+"He set him a-foot for his blankets," "He set him a-foot for his furs,"
+"He set him a-foot for his wife."
+
+The springy tussocks of grass growing in swampy places are _têtes des
+femmes_, a name that pleased our fancy and made us think each time we
+negotiated them of walking over the swaying heads of women in a crowd.
+To call the tribes together, Indians are wont to send out significant
+little pieces of wood. The announcement in the society columns, if the
+Indians had any, would be, "The Crees sent out chips for a crush." An
+Indian far down the Mackenzie had a name that kings might envy. He was
+known among his tribe as _The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps_. When a
+beardless and ardent missionary approached this splendid chief, wanting
+to "convert" him to the Christian religion, the old man replied with
+indulgent dignity, "My son, for eighty years have I served the Great
+Spirit in my own way. I fear I am now too old to change."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
+
+
+"The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as
+the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself."
+
+--_Leviticus, XIX_, 34.
+
+[Illustration: A Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba]
+
+Edmonton once more. Two Spanish sailors shipwrecked and navigating the
+Pacific on a log, search the shore for a sign. Into what land are they
+drifting? The one at the bow (does a log have a bow?) sees something
+through the haze--"_Gracias a Dios_! Praise be to God, it is a
+Christian country! I see the gallows!" We too get our sign. We reach
+Edmonton on Convocation Day.
+
+Most young countries for the first ten years of their lives confine
+their energies to roads, bridges, transportation--things of the
+market-place. Alberta has been a full-fledged Province of Canada for
+barely three years, and, coming out of the wilds, we sit on the back
+benches and see her open the doors of her first Provincial University.
+The record is unique and significant. On the banks of the Saskatchewan
+rise the walls of the new Parliament Buildings, a replica in small of
+Minnesota's State Capitol at St. Paul. This new Province, carved out of
+the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within
+it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil
+in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a
+hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young
+people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of
+happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would
+you?
+
+The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan.
+On his promised visit to the Orkneys the old man had gotten as far as
+Winnipeg, where the crowds of the modern city affrighted him. "Miss
+Cameron, the men on the streets were as trees walking, and no man
+stopped to ask how the other was doing. If that is the world, I wanted
+to go no farther. I'm going back to Chipewyan, and I will take my family
+with me. We go home with dogs on the first ice!" Poor Wyllie! Before the
+bells rang out the Old Year, his soul heard the summons none may
+disregard, and alone he went out on the Long Journey.
+
+What of Inspector Pelletier, Walker, Joyce, and Conway, essaying the
+traverse from Resolution to Hudson Bay? For weeks after coming out we
+waited for news of the party. Month succeeded month and no word came out
+of the white silence. Hudson Bay has no daily mail service. "There ain't
+no busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay." It is not until March that
+the welcome word comes that the original party safely made salt water.
+The relieved tension at Regina headquarters and the joy of personal
+friends is dimmed by the news of the death of Corporal Donaldson, who
+joined the others at Chesterfield Inlet. Donaldson, in company with
+Corporal Reeves, started down Hudson Bay in an open boat and encountered
+a herd of walruses. Enraged and maddened at the shots of the men, one
+huge animal made a charge, the boat was upset, and Donaldson, trying to
+make shore, was drowned. Reeves survived.
+
+It seems to be a chapter of accidents. Just as this book goes to press
+we learn of a double fatality which attended the transport of the 1909
+outfit of Count von Hammerstein. This plucky developer of McMurray
+oilfields, while running Grand Rapids on the Athabasca (the rapids which
+we had descended in an empty while the other sturgeon-heads were
+discharging freight at Grand Rapids Island), struck a boulder. The boat
+turned turtle and the three men were tossed into the torrent,--von
+Hamerstein, V. Volksooky, a young Russian, and a French half-breed, La
+France. The Count was washed ashore and escaped, but the others were
+drowned. Deaths such as these are the price of Empire. When the
+railroad reaches the Athabasca, the running of these dangerous rapids
+will no longer be necessary.
+
+[Illustration: Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway]
+
+In the footprints of Back and Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and Sir
+John Franklin, for six months we have been treading the silent places.
+We have thought much of these faith-possessed men who found the roads
+that others follow. In faith they wrought. Canada does well to honour
+these great of old, and that she appreciates the work of her early
+explorers is shown in the fact that British Columbia recently granted a
+pension to the granddaughter of Simon Fraser, the man who in 1808 first
+sailed down the great river that bears his name. But the day of our
+great men is not over; Canada still in her great North and West has
+Pathfinders of Empire. The early voyageurs made their quest in the
+dugout and the birchbark; and the tools of these are rails of steel and
+iron horses.
+
+[Illustration: William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern
+Railway]
+
+We are accustomed to look upon a railroad as a cold thing of dirt and
+sand and rock, ties and steel,--a mechanical something associated with
+gradients and curves. But the history of railroading in Canada is one
+long romance; back of each line is its creative wizard. We are too near
+these men to get their proper measure; the historian of the future will
+place their names on Canada's bead-roll:--Charles M. Hays, the forceful
+President of the Grand Trunk Pacific; Mackenzie and Mann; William Whyte
+of the Canadian Pacific. Canada owes much to Caledonia. Nine-tenths of
+those pioneers of pioneers, the trading adventurers of the H.B. Company,
+came from Scotland, that grey land where a judicious mixture of
+Scripture and Shorter Catechism, oatmeal and austerity, breeds boys of
+dour determination and pawky wit, boys who, whatever their shortcomings,
+are not wont to carry their wishbone where their backbone ought to be. A
+conspicuous example of the dynamic Scottish Canadian, hale at sixty-six,
+is William Whyte, Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At an
+age when most men are content to "drowse them close by a dying fire,"
+William Whyte finds himself in complete charge of all the affairs of the
+Canadian Pacific Railway Company between the Great Lakes and the
+Pacific. Through the positions of brakemen, freight clerk, yard master,
+conductor, night station-agent, passenger agent, this man worked on his
+own passage along Fame's ladder. Twenty years of adolescence and
+preparation, twenty years with the Grand Trunk, a quarter of a century
+with the Canadian Pacific, this is William Whyte's record of splendid
+service. He has always played the game and he is still in the harness.
+
+[Illustration: Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern
+Railway]
+
+[Illustration: William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway]
+
+When people enquired of the early Christians, "What do you call your new
+religion?" they answered, "We call it _The Road_." If religion is the
+best work of a man made visible, as I think it is, then the Canadian
+Northern Road may well stand for the religious expression of the men
+who made it. It takes more than money, more than dreams, more than
+ambition, for two men in twelve years to build, own, and personally
+control five thousand miles of railway. As Riley says, it takes sweat. A
+mile a day for twelve years,--this is the construction-record of the
+Canadian Northern. It sounds like the story of Jonah's gourd. In 1896,
+nothing. In 1909, a railroad line with earnings of ten million dollars a
+year west of Port Arthur alone, and twelve thousand people on the
+regular pay-roll. Beginning in Manitoba and operating in the three
+prairie Provinces, the Canadian Northern is primarily a western railway,
+its remarkable growth being coincident with and closely related to the
+tide of immigration.
+
+[Illustration: In the Wheat Fields]
+
+As a case in point, on our way south from Edmonton we pass through the
+divisional point of Vermilion on the Canadian Northern, which is not to
+be confounded with our Far North Vermilion-on-the-Peace. Vermilion
+exemplifies wonderfully the Go-Fever and the Grow-Fever of the
+Prairies. Before it was three months old its citizens had organised a
+Board of Trade, had given it a Methodist Church, a newspaper, a bank, a
+public school, three lumber-yards, three hotels, three restaurants, four
+implement warehouses, two hardware stores, two butcher shops, four real
+estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a
+steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a
+bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two
+doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There
+were two pool-rooms and a bowling-alley.
+
+Farther south we reach the town of Vonda. The Canadian Northern reached
+this neighbourhood, and the town-site was surveyed in June, 1905. That
+year Vonda shipped over the line one hundred thousand bushels of wheat,
+and in 1906 her exports were five hundred thousand bushels. The Canadian
+farmer looks upon the railroad as his friend; you cannot expect _him_ to
+use the inclusive condemnation, "Corporations have no souls." The main
+line of the Canadian Northern runs from Port Arthur on Lake
+Superior--where, by the way, stands the world's largest grain
+elevator--to beyond Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan, operating in the
+heart of one gigantic wheat-farm. The method of construction has been
+unique. The owners commenced to build branch railways almost before they
+had a main line. Little spurs to small elevators grew into long branches
+flanked with bigger elevators, and the elevators evolved into villages,
+towns, and cities, until to-day the result of twelve years' growth shows
+a main line of thirteen hundred miles, with over three thousand miles
+of branch railways. An orchard tree is a good fruit-bearer when the
+thick clustering branches are more in evidence than the long thin trunk,
+and the same applies to railroads. But this main line will grow, too.
+Working out from its wheaten heart, its natural line of growth is east
+to Hudson Bay, north beyond Edmonton, and west to the Pacific. Surely
+the tentacles are pushing out. Already the Alberta Legislature has
+granted the Canadian Northern a charter to Athabasca Landing, and one
+hundred miles of steel will here tap all the lush land watered by the
+Peace and the Athabasca.
+
+More interesting than the line which gridirons the wheat-lands we are
+passing through, are the men who made it. To try to write the history of
+Western Canada's development and not speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann
+would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without
+mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil
+Rhodes of Canada--gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and
+with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher,
+he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of
+action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a
+saw-mill. Three things come to him as priceless treasure out of the
+self-discipline of these experiences: a rare aptitude to see and to
+focus the central idea of any proposition, quick and unerring decision,
+and the power of ready calculation. "I am seldom wrong in a figure," is
+one of his few admissions about himself. The President of the Canadian
+Northern travels without a secretary, dictates letters sparingly, and
+works in an office as bare of adornment as a monk's cell.
+
+And his working partner? Donald D. Mann is a man of deeds rather than
+words. James J. Hill has declared Mr. Mann to be the greatest railway
+builder in the world. Mr. Mann was born in Ontario not far from the
+sleepy town of Acton and just six miles east of Rockwood, the birthplace
+of James J. Hill. These two boys learned to swim in the same
+swimming-hole. One wonders from what roadside spring they quaffed the
+draught which sent them railroad-building. Mr. Mann thinks it a great
+advantage to be born a country boy, for he says it makes a lad frugal,
+strong, and resourceful. It worked out this way in his own case at
+least, for there is not a thing in railroad building that Mr. Mann
+cannot do with his own hands, from shoeing a mule to finding the best
+pass in the Rockies through which to slide his iron horse down to the
+sea. Direct, strong, simple, he knows how to control himself and manage
+others. D.D. Mann is a conspicuous example of what a Canadian boy has
+managed to accomplish by his own efforts. The beauty of this Western
+Canada is that it holds out opportunities to every plucky lad who has
+initiative and who is willing to work; nothing is stratified, the whole
+thing is formative.
+
+While the steel kings are letting the light of day into this great
+granary, they are being helped by a government representative, as
+democratic and direct as any of the pathmakers whose visible work we
+have been noticing. The Hon. Frank Oliver, Canada's Minister of the
+Interior, is essentially a self-made man. Before the railroad men
+realised their vision splendid, young Mr. Oliver and his bride rode into
+Edmonton on an ox-cart, with a modest little printing-press tucked away
+among the wedding-gifts and household goods. Oliver was a practical
+printer and soon issued a hand-dodger called by courtesy a newspaper.
+The editing habit sticks. The Minister of the Interior owns and
+publishes the Edmonton _Bulletin_. Mr. Mann says, "I like building
+railroads"; Mr. Oliver might parody him and say, "I like building
+newspapers."
+
+[Illustration: Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior]
+
+Arrived at Winnipeg, we look back across this great prairie we have
+twice traversed. The land stands ready to produce bread for the nations;
+Nature has done her part, now man must do his. The two greatest needs of
+Western Canada to-day are transportation and immigration. Of the one we
+have spoken; the other claims our interest even more compelling, for man
+is more vital than machinery. Canada is a country with a meagre past, a
+solid present, and an illimitable future.
+
+She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man's
+sky,--where wilderness and man are meeting. The flood of immigration
+hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the
+immigration policy of a government. It is the natural sequence of the
+economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least
+resistance to a more favourable situation. The people who are coming in
+are not dreamers but workers. "The world's greatest wheat-farm," says
+the economist. It is more than this: it is a human crucible, and we are
+witnessing here the birth-throes of an entirely new nation.
+
+[Illustration: Threshing Grain]
+
+While seventy-five per cent of Canada's wheat-farmers are either
+Canadian, American, or British-born, and of the class that preserves the
+homogeneity of the race, every country on the map pays tribute to the
+plains. Austrians are here and Galicians, Hungarians and Belgians,
+Dutch and French and Germans, Italians and Polish, the Russian
+Doukhobortsi, Finns and Danes and Icelanders, Swedes in thousands and
+stalwart Norwegians. South Africans and West Indians are coming in with
+Bermudians and Jamaicans and the bearded Spaniard. Far off on the
+Pacific Coast, strangers are knocking at the western gate,--Chinese,
+Japanese, and Hindoos.
+
+[Illustration: Doukhobors Threshing Flax]
+
+There is no Established Church in Canada; it is the freest land in the
+world. On his one hundred and sixty government-given acres, the new
+arrival may worship his God in his own way. The Greek Church in Winnipeg
+has a Bishop who one day each year makes holy water of the Red River
+when the Czar is performing the same blessing on the Neva. Down in
+Southern Alberta refugee Mormons from Salt Lake grow sugar-beets,
+revere the memory of Brigham Young, and multiply after their kind. Until
+within two years ago the expatriated Russian Doukhobors maintained a
+commonwealth of ten thousand souls, eschewing liquors and flesh-meats,
+making the prairie blossom into bumper harvests, and holding all things
+in common.
+
+Winnipeg has three thousand Icelanders who, every August, take a day off
+to celebrate the fact that the Danish King, in 1874, granted a
+constitution to Iceland. When you ask them why they came to America,
+they say, "Did not our Lief Ericcson discover this continent, why
+shouldn't we come?" The Icelanders boast two members in the Manitoba
+legislature. A Mennonite is a member of the Parliament of Alberta. The
+first graduate of Wesley College in Winnipeg to find a place on the
+staff of his Alma Mater is also a Mennonite. Winnipeg has several, Roman
+Catholic Polish lawyers. Statistics prove that the young Jewish people
+of Western Canada patronise the public libraries more than any other
+class or race. All the citizens-in-the-making are closely interested in
+politics. Recently there was chronicled the formation in Winnipeg of a
+Syrian Liberal Club and a Syrian Conservative Club. Up in Edmonton the
+Galicians (Ruthenians?) have just organised a corps of volunteer militia
+to serve the Canadian country of their adoption.
+
+[Illustration: Sir William Van Horne, First President of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway]
+
+The Americanisation of Canada? During the past seven years over three
+hundred and fifty thousand people have come to us from the United
+States. Is this American invasion to be feared politically? Western
+Canada has no more desirable citizens than those who come to us from
+the south. They are not failures, but are people who have made good,
+intent on making better. One generation at the most,--sometimes but a
+few years,--converts these into Canadian voters. The troubled English
+brother should remember that when "American" farmers in Canada pronounce
+on Canadian matters they do so constitutionally at the polls and as
+Canadian citizens. As Canadians we believe that our national
+institutions, though far from perfect, are in some respects superior to
+those of the United States. We believe they are at once more elastic,
+more responsive to the popular will, and more stable because more
+elastic. The west is gaining in political power as it gains in
+population and prosperity, and fortunately our government machinery has
+been well tested before it is called upon to feel the strain of our
+rapidly-increasing population. Canada may construct where older nations
+must reconstruct, and if we borrow an American institution or two,
+provided it be a good one, let no man hold up hands in holy horror.
+Japan has borrowed nationally whenever she saw, lying around loose,
+something she could use, and Japan is as Japanese at heart as she was in
+the days of the Tycoon and the two-sworded Samurai. Belgium to-day,
+after centuries of contiguity and intercourse, is not exactly France;
+and little Switzerland, surrounded by the Powers, will be Switzerland
+till the last curtain-fall.
+
+"Is Canada loyal to England?" is a question that sometimes meets us. No,
+Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let
+England see to it that she, too, is loyal.
+
+Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the
+Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace,
+are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated
+as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and
+the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land.
+God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the
+diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people in
+time will intermarry,--Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with
+these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations.
+Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type
+will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into
+the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who will step out?
+
+In the point of population, Canada begins the twentieth century where
+the United States began the nineteenth. The race is ours to run. Wise
+the nation, as is the individual, who can learn his lesson from a page
+torn out of his neighbour's book, learn what to follow and what to
+avoid. Our fore-elders who laid the foundations for us laid them
+four-square. As Canadians, we owe a debt to the Fathers of Confederation
+and their successors. In the West, our particular thanks are due to the
+Hudson's Bay Company, the R.N.W.M.P., and all those factors which
+established British law "in the beginning." Canada has never seen a
+lynching; we have had no Indian war; with but one weak-kneed exception
+there has been no attempt to hold up a train within our Western borders.
+This is the inheritance of the people of this generation, and on this
+foundation we must build. Our hope is in the children.
+
+On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had
+been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New
+Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary. They were
+all singing "_The Maple Leaf Forever_." It is the lessons these children
+are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the
+future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel
+wheat. In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed. Many
+signs are full of hope. Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with
+dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children
+in school. Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post. At
+all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed
+out with them!
+
+May I close with a purely personal note? At the end of a summer which
+had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman
+priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my
+life. We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls,
+the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the
+Lake of the Woods country. I was anxious to get the story of the
+recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs. But
+the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve. We
+turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary. Looking in
+at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a
+blackboard problem. "If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a
+trench 82 yards long----." And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse
+stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.
+
+"You are interested?" queried the Father.
+
+"Yes," I acknowledged, "I once taught school."
+
+He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.
+
+"I taught school for twenty-five years," I admitted.
+
+We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he
+turned to me with, "And you taught school--for twen-ty five years?"
+
+I nodded my head, and we went on. At the next landing the remark was
+repeated. At the foot of the stairs he excused himself and came back
+with the photographs which he presented to me with an Old World courtesy
+and dignity. Grasping my hand in farewell, once more the man of God
+wondered, "And for twen-ty five years you taught school. And you remain
+so--" He hesitated for the word, and I wondered what it would be. At
+last it came,--the tribute of one who expected to teach school all his
+life to one who had put in a quarter of a century at the work and still
+survived,--"You have taught school for twen-ty five years, _and you
+remain so glad!_"
+
+And this is the keynote of what the summer has left with us. As
+Canadians, looking at this Western Canada which has arrived and thinking
+of the lands of Canada's fertile Northland far beyond, for the future we
+are full of optimism, and of the present we are _glad_.
+
+
+
+ROUTES OF TRAVEL
+
+ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO THE ARCTIC VIA THE ATHABASCA AND MACKENZIE RIVER
+SYSTEMS.
+
+MILES     PLACE                PASSENGER              FREIGHT TARIFF      MODE OF TRAVEL                               TIMES
+                                TARIFF                  per cwt.
+  0   Edmonton
+100   Athabasca Landing         $8.00                    $1.00         Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy              Twice a week all year round
+
+
+                            DOWN      RETURN     DOWN    RETURN
+                           STREAM    UPSTREAM   STREAM  UPSTREAM
+  0   Athabasca Landing                                                Northern Transportation Co.'s SS.
+120   Pelican Rapids       $ 7.50    $ 7.50     $  .75   $  .75         _Midnight Sun_ (when business offers)
+165   Grand Rapids          10.00     15.00       1.50     1.50          or scows. From Athabasca Landing
+                                                                         to Grand Rapids.
+252   Fort McMurray         20.00     27.50       3.25     3.25        Scows from Grand Rapids to Fort
+                                                                         McMurray
+437   Fort Chipewyan        35.00     45.00       4.50     4.50        H.B. Co's SS. _Grahame_ (sternwheel
+539   Smith's Landing       45.00     55.00       5.50     5.50          river steamer, 130 ft. x 28 ft.;
+                                                                         accommodates 30 passengers; blankets
+                                                                         supplied; bathroom; meals served 50         From June to
+                                                                         cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).         August inclusive[1]
+                                                                         From Fort McMurray to Smith's
+                                                                         Landing.
+555   Fort Smith             48.00     58.00       6.25    6.25        H.B. Co. Transport, portage by teams
+                                                                         from Smith's Landing to Fort Smith.
+749   Fort Resolution        56.00     68.00       7.25    8.25        H.B. Co's SS. _Mackenzie River_
+819   Hay River              59.00     73.00       7.75    9.25          (strong new sternwheel, lake and
+869   Fort Rae               62.00     78.00       8.25   10.25          river steamer; accommodates 50
+917   Fort Providence        65.00     82.00       8.25   10.25          passengers, same conditions as _Grahame_
+1078   Fort Simpson          73.00     92.00       9.25   12.25          above). From Fort Smith to Fort
+1214   Fort Wrigley          80.00    102.00      10.25   14.25          Macpherson.
+1398   Fort Norman           87.00    112.00      11.25   16.25
+1572   Fort Good Hope        93.00    122.00      12.25   18.25
+1780   Arctic Red River     100.00    130.00      13.00   19.50
+1854   Fort Macpherson      103.00    133.00      13.75   21.25
+        (Peel's River)
+
+[Footnote 1: For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Edmonton Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO PEACE RIVER, VIA THE ATHABASCA RIVER (UP
+STREAM), LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LESSER SLAVE LAKE.
+
+MILES       PLACE                 PASSENGER     FREIGHT TARIFF  MODE OF TRAVEL                                                     TIMES
+                                    TARIFF         per cwt.
+   0   Edmonton
+ 100   Athabasca Landing            $8.00           $1.00       Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy                      Twice a week all year round
+
+
+   0   Athabasca Landing                                        Northern Transportation Co.'s SS.
+  75   Mouth of Lesser Slave                                    _Midnight Sun_ (sternwheel river
+       River                        $6.00          $ .80        steamer, 120 ft. long x 24 ft. beam;
+                                                                accomodates 35 in staterooms; passengers
+                                                                supply their own blankets;
+                                                                meals served 50 cents each; freight-carrying
+                                                                capacity 50 tons). From
+                                                                Athabasca Landing to Mouth of
+                                                                Lesser Slave River.
+
+  91   Norris's (head of rapids)    8.00            1.40        Portage 16 miles in N.T. Co's passenger
+                                                                and freight waggons from                             From May 15 to
+                                                                Mouth of Lesser Slave River to                       Oct. 15.[2]
+                                                                Norris's (head of rapids).
+
+ 194   Shaw's Point on Lesser
+       Slave Lake                  16.00            2.50        N.T. Co.'s SS. _Northern Light_ (sidewheel
+                                                                river and lake steamer, 100
+                                                                ft. long x 26 ft. beam; accommodates
+                                                                35 in staterooms; passengers
+                                                                supply their own blankets; meals
+                                                                served 50 cents each; freight capacity
+                                                                30 tons). From Norris's to
+                                                                Shaw's Point.
+
+ 201   Lesser Slave Lake Settlement                             Portage 7 miles to the settlement.
+
+
+   0   Lesser Slave Lake Settlement                             From Lesser Slave Lake Settlement to
+                                  $10.00            2.00        Peace River Crossing, teams and
+                                    to                          drivers may be hired; fare depends
+                                   25.00                        on number of passengers; takes 3                      All the year round
+                                 according                      days. Stopping places at intermediate
+                                 to number                      points, with stabling and hay;
+                                                                bunkhouses for travellers who supply
+  90   Peace River Crossing (Peace                              their own bedding and provisions.
+       River Landing)
+
+[Footnote 2: For further particulars regarding dates and rates, application 
+should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K. Cornwall, M.P.P.,
+of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to A.G. Harrison, 
+Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+PEACE RIVER ROUTES:--(1) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING UP TO HUDSON'S HOPE.
+(2) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING DOWN TO FORT CHIPEWYAN.
+
+MILES       PLACE                 PASSENGER             FREIGHT TARIFF          MODE OF TRAVEL                                                     TIMES
+                                    TARIFF                 per cwt.
+
+                                UPSTREAM RETURN         UPSTREAM RETURN         Having arrived at Peace River Crossing,
+                                          DOWN                    DOWN          the traveller may go up the
+                                         STREAM                  STREAM         Peace by H.B. SS. _Peace River_
+   0    Peace River Crossing                                                    (sternwheel river steamer, electric               From June to August
+  70    Fort Dunvegan            $10.00   $ 5.00          $1.00   $ .75         light, bathroom; accomodates 40                   inclusive.[3]
+ 200    Fort St. John's           25.00    15.00           3.00    2.25         passengers; blankets supplied; meals
+ 240    Hudson's Hope             35.00    20.00           5.00    4.25         served 50 cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).
+
+
+                                  DOWN   RETURN          DOWN   RETURN
+                                 STREAM  UPSTREAM       STREAM  UPSTREAM
+   0    Peace River Crossing                                                    Or, having arrived at Peace River
+ 280    Fort Vermilion           $15.00  $25.00          $1.00   $3.00          Crossing, the traveller may go down
+                                                                                the Peace.--
+ 330    Chutes of the Peace       17.00   30.00           1.75    4.00          By the H.B. SS. _Peace River_, from          From June to August
+                                                                                Peace River Crossing to the Chutes                inclusive.[3]
+                                                                                of the Peace.
+ 570    Fort Chipewyan            37.00   60.00           3.25    7.00          By H.B. SS. _Grahame_ or Tug _Primrose_,
+                                                                                from Chutes of the Peace to
+                                                                                Fort Chipewyan.
+
+
+[Footnote 3: For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New North, by Agnes Deans Cameron
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The New North, by Agnes Deans Cameron.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New North, by Agnes Deans Cameron
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New North
+
+Author: Agnes Deans Cameron
+
+Release Date: July 10, 2004 [EBook #12874]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW NORTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brendan Lane and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>THE NEW NORTH</h1>
+
+<h3><i>Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic</i></h3>
+
+<h2>BY AGNES DEANS CAMERON</h2>
+
+<center><i>WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR</i></center>
+<p>
+<br>&nbsp;<br>
+
+<center><i>Published November, 1909</i></center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0001"></a>
+<img src="images/img0001.jpg" width="362" height="575" alt="A Magnificent Trophy" title="">
+<BR><B>A Magnificent Trophy</B>
+</center>
+
+<p align=right>TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, JESSIE ANDERSON CAMERON</p>
+
+<p align=right>AND</p>
+
+<p align=right>TO ALL THOSE WHO TRY TO LIVE OUT HER SIMPLE RULE:
+<B>&quot;WE MUST JUST TRY TO DO THE VERY BEST WE CAN&quot;</B></p>
+
+<br>
+
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+<p>It is customary to write a preface. Mine shall be short. Out of a full
+heart, I wish to thank all the splendid people of the North who, by
+giving me so freely information and photographs, and chapters out of
+their own lives, have facilitated the writing of this story. For their
+spontaneous kindness to me and mine no acknowledgment that I can here
+make is adequate. What we feel most strongly we cannot put into words.</p>
+
+<p>AGNES DEANS CAMERON.</p>
+
+<p>August, 1909.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I: THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The Mendicants leave Chicago&mdash;The invisible parallel of 49 where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver&mdash;Union Jack floats on
+an ox-cart&mdash;A holy baggage-room&mdash;Winnipeg, the Buckle of the
+Wheat-Belt&mdash;The trapper and the doctor&mdash;Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks&mdash;Boy
+Makers of Empire&mdash;The vespers of St. Boniface</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II: WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The 1,000-mile wheat-field&mdash;Calgary-in-the-Foothills&mdash;Edmonton, the end
+of steel&mdash;The Brains of a Trans-Continental&mdash;Browning on the
+Saskatchewan&mdash;East Londoners in tents&mdash;Our outfit&mdash;A Waldorf-Astoria in
+the wilderness&mdash;The lonely cross of the Galician&mdash;Height of
+ Land&mdash;Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., the sleuth of Lesser Slave</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III: ATHABASCA LANDING</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Athabasca Landing, the Gateway of the North&mdash;English gives place to
+Cree&mdash;Limit of the Dry Martini&mdash;Will the rabbits run?&mdash;The woman
+printer&mdash;Hymn-books by hand in the Cree syllabic&mdash;Baseball even
+here&mdash;Rain and reminiscences&mdash;The World's Oldest Trust</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV: DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS</b></a><br>
+
+<p>&quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot;&mdash;The rainy deck of a &quot;sturgeon head&quot; under a
+tarpaulin&mdash;Drifting by starlight&mdash;The wild geese overhead&mdash;Forty-foot
+gas-spout at the Pelican&mdash;The mosquito makes us blood-brothers&mdash;Four
+days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling
+Athabasca&mdash;Nomenclature of the North&mdash;Sentinels of the Silence</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V: NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The <i>Go-Quick-Her</i> takes the bit in her mouth&mdash;Mallards on the
+half-shell&mdash;We set the Athabascan Thames afire&mdash;Sturgeon-head breaks her
+back on the Big Cascade&mdash;Fort McMurray&mdash;A stranded argosy, wreckage on
+the beach&mdash;Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader&mdash;A land flowing with
+coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI: FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Old Fort Chipewyan&mdash;In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John
+Franklin&mdash;Sir John turns parson&mdash;Grey Nuns and brown babies&mdash;Where grew
+the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial&mdash;Militant missionaries
+fight each other for souls&mdash;The strong man Loutit&mdash;Wyllie at the
+forge&mdash;An electric watch-maker&mdash;Where the Gambel sparrow builds&mdash;&quot;Out of
+old books&quot;</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII: LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Farewell to the Mounted Police&mdash;Our blankets on the deck&mdash;Fern odours by
+untravelled ways&mdash;Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of
+daylight&mdash;Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man&mdash;A 23-inch
+trout&mdash;First white women at Fond du Lac&mdash;Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a
+Fond du Lac library&mdash;The hermit padre and the hermit thrush&mdash;Worn north
+trails of the trapper&mdash;Caribou by the hundred thousands&mdash;The phalarope
+and the suffragette</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII: FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH</b></a><br>
+
+<p>World's records beaten on the Athabasca&mdash;Down the Slave to Smith's
+Landing&mdash;Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned&mdash;The Mosquito
+Portage&mdash;Fort Smith, the new headquarters&mdash;Lady-slippers and
+night-hawks&mdash;Steamer built in the wilderness&mdash;Last stand of the wood
+bison&mdash;The grey wolf persists&mdash;Fur-trade and the silver-fox&mdash;Breeding
+pelicans.</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX: SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>&quot;Red lemol-lade&quot; kiddies&mdash;Tons of crystal salt&mdash;Great Slave Lake and its
+fertile shores&mdash;Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh
+Edward&mdash;Hay River and its annual mail&mdash;Ploughing with dogs&mdash;Bill
+balked&mdash;The Alexandra Falls&mdash;Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputations
+while you wait.</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X: PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Drowning of De-deed&mdash;Fort Simpson, the old headquarters&mdash;A mouldy
+museum&mdash;The shrew-mice that were not preserved in rum&mdash;The farthest
+north library&mdash;Gold-seekers and grub-staked brides&mdash;Bishop Bompas, the
+Apostle of the North&mdash;Owindia, the Weeping One&mdash;Fort Simpson in the
+first year of Victoria the Good.</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI: FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Tenny Gouley tells us things&mdash;Mackenzie River, past and present&mdash;The
+fringed gentian at Fort Wrigley&mdash;The fires Mackenzie saw&mdash;The weathered
+knob of Bear Rock&mdash;Great Bear Lake&mdash;Orangeman's Day at Norman&mdash;The
+Ramparts of the Mackenzie&mdash;Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle&mdash;Mignonette and Old World courtesy&mdash;We meet Hagar once
+more&mdash;Potatoes on the Circle&mdash;The Little Church of the Open Door</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XII"><b>CHAPTER XII: ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Arctic Red River&mdash;Wilfrid Laurier, the merger&mdash;Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko, the
+danseuse&mdash;Marriage as the Oo-vai-oo-aks see it&mdash;Orange-blossoms at
+Su-pi-di-do's&mdash;Trading tryst at Barter Island&mdash;Floating fathers&mdash;By-o
+Baby Bunting&mdash;Wild roses and tame Eskimo&mdash;Midnight football with walrus
+bladder and enthusiasm&mdash;Education that makes for manliness</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"><b>CHAPTER XIII: FORT MACPHERSON FOLK</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Sir John Franklin's lobsticks at Point Separation&mdash;We reach Fort
+Macpherson on the Peel&mdash;Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., eulogizes the
+Eskimo&mdash;An Eskimo wife must make boots that are waterproof&mdash;She ariseth
+also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her
+household&mdash;Cribbage-boards the link between Dick Swiveller and the
+Eskimo&mdash;Linked sweetness long drawn out&mdash;Chauncey Depew of the
+Kogmollycs</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"><b>CHAPTER XIV: MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The Midnight Sun&mdash;Our friend the heathen&mdash;&quot;We want to go to
+hell&quot;&mdash;Catching fish by prayer&mdash;The Eskimo and the Flood&mdash;Pink tea at
+the Pole&mdash;Always a balance in the Eskimo Bank&mdash;Marriage for better and
+not for worse&mdash;Christmas carols even here</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XV"><b>CHAPTER XV: MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Jurisprudence on ice&mdash;The generous Innuit&mdash;Emmie-ray, the Delineator
+pattern&mdash;Weak races are pressed south&mdash;Roxi, a re-incarnation of Sir
+Philip Sidney&mdash;Blubbery bon vivants&mdash;Eskimo knew the Elephant&mdash;We write
+the last chapter of the story of McClure, the navigator&mdash;Cannibalism at
+the Circle</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"><b>CHAPTER XVI: THE TALE OF A WHALE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Circumpolar Bowhead makes his last stand&mdash;Whales here and elsewhere&mdash;The
+Yankee peddler at Canada's back-door&mdash;Thirteen and a half million in
+whale values&mdash;Wind-swept Herschel, the Isle of Whales&mdash;One wife for a
+thousand years&mdash;Baleen, Spermaceti, and Ambergris&mdash;Save the Whale</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"><b>CHAPTER XVII: SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Lives lost for the sake of a white bead&mdash;The stars come back&mdash;The Keele
+party from the Dollarless Divide&mdash;&quot;Here and there a grayling&quot;&mdash;Across
+Great Slave Lake&mdash;The first white women at Fort Rae&mdash;Land of the
+musk-ox&mdash;Tales of 76 below&mdash;Two Thursdays in one week&mdash;Rabbits on ice</p>
+
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"><b>CHAPTER XVIII: TO MC MURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The nuptials of 'Norine&mdash;Ladies round gents and gents don't go&mdash;The
+fossil-gatherers&mdash;I give my name to a Cree kiddie&mdash;A solid mile of red
+raspberries&mdash;The typewriter an uncanny medicine&mdash;The Beetle Fleet leaves
+for Outside&mdash;Shipwrecked on a batture</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"><b>CHAPTER XIX: UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Ho! for the Peace&mdash;One break in 900 miles of navigation&mdash;A grey
+wolf&mdash;Bear-meat and the Se-weep-i-gons&mdash;Ninety-foot spruces&mdash;Tom Kerr
+and his bairns&mdash;The fish-seine that never fails&mdash;Our lobsticks by Red
+River&mdash;The Chutes of the Peace</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XX"><b>CHAPTER XX: VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>The farthest north flour-mill&mdash;The man who made Vermilion&mdash;Wheat at
+$1.25 a bushel&mdash;An Experimental Farm in latitude 58&deg; 30'&mdash;An unoccupied
+kingdom as large as Belgium&mdash;Where the steamer <i>Peace River</i> was
+built&mdash;The hospitable home of the Wilsons&mdash;Vermilion a Land of Promise
+Fulfilled&mdash;Culture and the Cloister&mdash;Thomas of Canterbury on the Stump</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"><b>CHAPTER XXI: FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Se-li-nah of the happy heart&mdash;My premier moose&mdash;The rare and resourceful
+boatmen of the North&mdash;Alexander Mackenzie's last camp</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"><b>CHAPTER XXII: PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Pleasant prairies of the Peace&mdash;We tramp a hundred miles&mdash;The Angelus at
+Lesser Slave&mdash;Poole coats and Norfolk shooting-jackets&mdash;Roast duck
+galore&mdash;Alec Kennedy of the Nile&mdash;Louise the Wetigo, she ate nineteen</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"><b>CHAPTER XXIII: LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Jim wins: Allie Brick can't run&mdash;100,000,000 acres of
+wheat-land&mdash;Jilly-Loo bird still lacks a rib&mdash;100 moose in one
+month&mdash;Peripatetic judges but no prisoners&mdash;The best-tattooed man in the
+Province of Alberta&mdash;The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps</p>
+
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV"><b>CHAPTER XXIV: HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT</b></a><br>
+
+<p>Edmonton again&mdash;Wyllie goes out on the Long Journey&mdash;Donaldson killed by
+a walrus&mdash;Two drowned in the Athabasca&mdash;Steel kings and iron
+horses&mdash;Wheat-plains the melting-pot of a New Nation</p>
+
+ <a href="#ROUTES"><b>ROUTES OF TRAVEL</b></a><br>
+
+
+
+<h3>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#img0001">A magnificent trophy</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0016">Map showing the Author's Route</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0018">Sir Wilfred Laurier</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0022">Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0026">Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0031">The Canadian Women's Press Club</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0038">A section of Edmonton</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0041">The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0043">Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0044">A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0049">Athabasca Landing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0052">Necessity knows no law at Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0054">The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0062">C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0069">A "sturgeon-head" on the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0070">"Farewell, Nistow!"</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0076">Grand Rapids, on the Athabasca River</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0079">Portage at Grand Rapids Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0080">Our transport at Grand Rapids Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0081">Cheese-shaped nodules, Grand Rapids Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0087">Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0091">Towing the wrecked barge ashore</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0096">The scow breaks her back and fills</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0101">Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray trader</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0102">The steamer <i>Grahame</i></a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0104">An oil derrick on the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0105">Tar banks on the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0108">Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0115">Three of a kind</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0120">Woman's work of the Far North</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0129">Lake Athabasca in winter</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0131">Bishop Grouard</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0133">The modern note-book</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0135">Tepee of a Caribou-eater Indian</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0137">A bit of Fond du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0139">Birch-barks at Fond du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0148">Fond du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0150">Father Beibler carrying water to a dying Indian</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0152">Smith's Landing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0157">A transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0158">Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0161">The world's last buffalo</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0168">Tracking a scow across mountain portage</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0172">The "red lemol-lade" boys</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0173">Salt beds</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0175">Unloading at Fort Resolution</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0178">Coming to "take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0182">On the Slave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0184">Dogs cultivating potatoes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0187">David Villeneuve</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0192">Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0197">A Slavi family at Fort Simpson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0198">A Slavi type from Fort Simpson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0202">Interior of St. David's Cathedral</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0208">Fort Simpson by the light of the Aurora</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0215">Indians at Fort Norman</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0217">Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0218">The ramparts of the Mackenzie</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0220">Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie mouth</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0228">A Kogmollye family</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0231">Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak family</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0246">Farthest North football</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0247">Two spectators at the game</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0249">An Eskimo exhibit</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0253">Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo togs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0255">Two wise ones</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0256">A Nunatalmute Eskimo family</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0259">Cribbage-boards of walrus tusks</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0261">Useful articles made by the Eskimo</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0264">Home of Mrs. Macdonald</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0268">Eskimo kayaks at the Arctic edge</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0272">A wise man of the Dog-Ribs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0273">A study in expression</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0296">We tell the tale of a whale</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0299">Two little ones at Herschel Island</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0310">Breeding grounds of the seal</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0319">The Keele party on the Gravel River</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0323">The first typewriter on Great Slave Lake</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0324">The bell at Fort Rae mission</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0325">The musk-ox</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0334">A meadow at McMurray</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0336">Starting up the Athabasca</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0337">On the Clearwater</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0342">Evening on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0344">Our lobsticks on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0346">The chutes of the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0347">Pulling out the <i>Mee-wah-sin</i> </a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0350">The flour mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0352">Articles made by Indians</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0353">The Hudson's Bay Store</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0357">Papillon, a Beaver brave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0359">Going to school in winter</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0361">My premier moose</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0363">Beaver camp, on Paddle River</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0366">The site of old Fort McLeod</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0370">Jean Baptiste, pilot on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0371">Fort Dunvegan on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0373">Fort St. John on the Peace</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0374">Where King was arrested</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0375">Alec Kennedy with his two sons</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0377">Cannibal Louise, her little girl and Miss Cameron</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0380">A Peace River Pioneer</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0383">Three generations</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0385">A family at the Lesser Slave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0386">A one-night stand</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0388">A rye field in Brandon, Manitoba</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0391">Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway </a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0392">William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway </a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0393">Donald D. Maun, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern Railway</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0394">William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0395">In the wheat fields</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0399">Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0400">Threshing grain</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0401">Doukhobors threshing flax</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img0403">Sir William Van Horne, first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<center>
+<a href="images/img0016.png" name="img0016">
+<img src="images/img0016t.png" width="487" height="642" alt="Map of the Author's Route" title="">
+<BR><B>Map of the Author's Route</B></a>
+</center>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_I"></a><h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;We are as mendicants who wait<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Along the roadside in the sun.</span><br>
+Tatters of yesterday and shreds<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of morrow clothe us every one.</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;And some are dotards, who believe<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And glory in the days of old;</span><br>
+While some are dreamers, harping still<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Upon an unknown age of gold.</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;O foolish ones, put by your care!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Where wants are many, joys are few;</span><br>
+And at the wilding springs of peace,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">God keeps an open house for you.</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;But there be others, happier few,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The vagabondish sons of God,</span><br>
+Who know the by-ways and the flowers,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And care not how the world may plod.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>Isn't it Riley who says, &quot;Ef you want something, an' jest dead set
+a-longin' fer it with both eyes wet, and tears won't bring it, why, you
+try sweat&quot;? Well, we had tried sweat and longing for two years, with
+planning and hoping and the saving of nickels, and now we are off!</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare makes his man say, &quot;I will run as far as God has any
+ground,&quot; and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on
+going till we strike the Arctic,&mdash;straight up through Canada. Most
+writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and
+travel west by the C.P.R., following the line of least resistance till
+they reach the Pacific. Then they go back to dear old England and tell
+the world all about Canada, their idea of the half-continent being
+Euclid's conception of a straight line, &quot;length without breadth.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0018"></a>
+<img src="images/img0018.jpg" width="272" height="372" alt="Sir Wilfred Laurier" title="">
+<BR><B>Sir Wilfred Laurier</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt
+of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary
+and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves
+after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to
+follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from
+Dan to Beersheba to say &quot;All is barren,&quot; but to come near to the people,
+our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than
+Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of
+Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting
+that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.</p>
+
+<p>We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of
+all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend
+of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward,&mdash;till
+you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our
+ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St.
+Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of
+the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong
+hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on
+the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.</p>
+
+<p>There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage
+was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered
+Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool.
+But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last
+unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out,
+pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a
+dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.</p>
+
+<p>Kipling speaks of &quot;a route unspoiled of Cook's,&quot; and we have found it.
+Going to the office of Thos. Cook &amp; Son, in Chicago, with a friend who
+had planned a Mediterranean tour, I gently said, &quot;I wonder if you can
+give me information about a trip I am anxious to take this summer.&quot; The
+young man smiled and his tone was that which we accord to an indulged
+child, &quot;I guess we can. Cook &amp; Son give information on <i>most</i> places.&quot;
+&quot;Very well,&quot; I said, &quot;I want to go from Chicago to the Arctic by the
+Mackenzie River, returning home by the Peace and the Lesser Slave. Can
+you tell me how long it will take, what it will cost, and how I make my
+connections?&quot; He was game; he didn't move an eyebrow, but went off to
+the secret recesses in the back office to consult &quot;the main guy,&quot; &quot;the
+chief squeeze,&quot; &quot;the head push,&quot; &quot;the big noise.&quot; Back they came
+together with a frank laugh, &quot;Well, Miss Cameron, I guess you've got us.
+Cook's have no schedule to the Arctic that way.&quot; They were able,
+however, to give accurate information as to how one should reach Hudson
+Bay, with modes of travel, dates, and approximate cost. But this journey
+for another day.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Chicago one sizzling Sunday in mid-May, we (my niece and I) stop
+for a day to revel in bird and blossoms at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota,
+then silently in the night cross the invisible parallel of 49&deg; where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver.</p>
+
+<p>With the Polar Ocean as ultimate goal, we cannot help thinking how
+during the last generation the Arctic Circle has been pushed steadily
+farther north. Forty years ago Minneapolis and St. Paul were struggling
+trading-posts, and all America north of them was the range of the
+buffalo and the Indian. Then Fort Garry (Winnipeg) became Farthest
+North. Before starting, I had dug out from the Public Library the record
+of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago,
+deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their
+minutes) that &quot;Our Northern tier of States is too far north to
+successfully grow wheat.&quot; For years Winnipeg was considered the northern
+limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of
+limitation was pushed farther back until it is
+Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared &quot;Farthest North.&quot; To-day
+we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due
+north of Edmonton!</p>
+
+<p>In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh
+beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all
+interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach
+Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These
+were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. &quot;But,&quot; the old chap
+says, &quot;the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the
+Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it
+stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal
+to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin'
+red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set
+on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and
+what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart,
+poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the
+old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at
+sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all
+wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife.&quot; This incident was
+not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known
+to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his
+way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the
+war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured
+clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing
+this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by
+the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0022"></a>
+<img src="images/img0022.jpg" width="259" height="329" alt="Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada" title="">
+<BR><B>Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>What Cook &amp; Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg
+furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for
+two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when
+the Second Charles ruled in England,&mdash;an age when men said not &quot;How
+cheap?&quot; but &quot;How good?&quot;, not &quot;How easy?&quot; but &quot;How well?&quot; The Hudson's
+Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the
+Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can
+travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except
+under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for
+you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and
+sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot.
+Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be
+transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats,
+guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort
+Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between
+Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull
+whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.</p>
+
+<p>For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the
+Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the
+benefit of employ&eacute;s, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here
+they are as we copied them down:</p>
+
+Let all things be done decently and in order.<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1 Cor. xiv, 40.</span><br>
+<br>
+Be punctual, be regular, be clean.<br>
+Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.<br>
+Be obliging and kind one to another.<br>
+Let no angry word be heard among you<br>
+Be not fond of change. (Sic.)<br>
+Be clothed with humility, not finery.<br>
+Take all things by the smooth handle.<br>
+Be civil to all, but familiar with few.<br>
+
+<p>As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American,&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let<br>
+go your overcoat. Thieves are around,&quot;<br>
+
+<p>the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our
+shoulders, &quot;Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a
+transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, &quot;What makes
+Winnipeg?&quot; Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it
+out. &quot;This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our
+nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches
+going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty
+stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the
+remittance man from England, sorr,&quot; with a quizzical look at the checked
+suit of his interlocutor, &quot;shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies
+up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!&quot; As Mulcahey winks
+the other eye, we drift out into this &quot;Buckle of the Wheat-Belt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her
+a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of
+her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an
+increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one
+hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the
+world's history.</p>
+
+<p>Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and
+bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has
+had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now
+counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the
+British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway
+tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million
+dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings
+in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801;
+and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without
+Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade
+filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a
+day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed
+a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western
+Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures&mdash;the lure of the
+land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is
+estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one
+thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth
+of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring
+the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in
+figures&mdash;the &quot;power of the man.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0026"></a>
+<img src="images/img0026.jpg" width="490" height="372" alt="Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt" title="">
+<BR><B>Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City
+of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation
+of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg
+sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages&mdash;Armenian, Arabic,
+Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu,
+Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that
+some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast
+the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would
+Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the <i>London
+Times</i>, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out
+from among the flotsam in the kelp.</p>
+
+<p>Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we
+cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred
+steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate
+that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the
+six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This
+will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold
+by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for
+breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the
+list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics
+of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that
+these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do.
+&quot;But they are all good pay,&quot; the implement-man says. Looking at the red
+ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history.
+The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out
+into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these
+ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of
+faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and
+formative!</p>
+
+<p>We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we
+reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A.
+Stewart says to us, &quot;Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has
+fallen by the way.&quot; We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a
+cot. &quot;Tell him that you are going into the land of fur,&quot; whispers the
+doctor, &quot;he has been a trapper all his life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and
+his snow-shoes pinned him fast. When dragged out he had suffered so with
+the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to
+the hospital. Hard luck? Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with
+mercy. Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice
+of life,&mdash;a doctor with a man's brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the
+heart of a little child. The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has
+one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of
+motion remaining in the other leg. His vocal cords are so affected that
+the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the
+mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man. Between patient and
+doctor, a third man entered the drama,&mdash;Mr. Grey, a convalescent.
+Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother
+studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel,
+to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.</p>
+
+<p>Who is this patient? A man without friends or influence, not attractive
+in appearance, more than distressing to listen to,&mdash;just one more worker
+thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life. The
+consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not
+even arrest the creeping death. Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner
+of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked.
+Dr. Stewart had two men's work to do. He worked all day and was busy
+well into the night. A doctor's natural tendency is to see in each man
+that he ministers to merely &quot;a case,&quot; a manifestation of some disease to
+be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages. But in the
+Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young
+men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper
+was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke
+by twilight. We are happiest when we create. So he said to Carlton, &quot;Did
+you ever write a story?&quot; The head shook answer. &quot;Well, why don't you
+try? You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody
+else knows. Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The outcome was disappointing. The uncouth sounds, translated by Grey,
+were bald, bare, and stiff. Soon the stiffness worked off. With
+half-shut eyes Carlton lived again in the woods. He lifted the dewy
+branch of a tree and surprised the mother deer making the toilet of her
+fawn, saw the beaver busied with his home of mud and wattles, heard the
+coyote scream across the prairie edge. Easily the thought flowed, and
+the stuff that Grey handed in was a live story that breathed. In that
+brave heart the joy of the creator stirred, and with it that feeling
+which makes all endeavour worth while&mdash;the thought that somebody cares.
+A close observer at this stage of the game may read, too, on the face of
+Grey the kindly look that comes when we forget ourselves long enough to
+take the trouble to reach out for another man's viewpoint.</p>
+
+<p>Carlton's short stories, submitted to a publisher, were pronounced
+good, were accepted, and brought a cash return. They struck a new note
+among the squabblings of the nature-fakers. Favourable comment came from
+those who read them, who, reading, knew naught of their three authors.
+Before this Carlton had never written a line for publication; but he had
+been a true observer. He had felt, and was able to project himself into
+the minds of those living things he had seen and hunted.</p>
+
+<p>I leave the hospital cot with a strange lump forming in my throat,
+although every one around me, and the patient most of all, is gay and
+blithe. I say to Carlton, &quot;I wish I could take your knowledge and your
+eyes with me into the North, there is so much I will miss because of my
+lack of knowledge.&quot; With Grey's kindly interpretation I get my answer,
+&quot;You must take your own mind, your own eyes; you must see for yourself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>During the last day in Winnipeg, while the Kid (like faithful
+Ariovistus) is looking after the impedimenta, I snatch half an hour to
+look in at the Royal Alexandra upon the reception which the Women's
+Canadian Club is tendering to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Rain-bespattered,
+short-skirted, and anchored with disreputable rubbers gluey with
+Winnipeg mud, I sit on the fringe of things, fairly intoxicated with the
+idea that we are off and this North trip no dream. Mrs. Sanford Evans
+presides with her usual <i>savoir faire</i> and ushers in the guest of the
+day, beautifully-gowned and gracious.</p>
+
+<p>Like a bolt from the blue came the summons from the president, and I,
+all muddy, am called to the seats of the mighty. I have never seen a
+more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg
+Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face
+them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of
+mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my
+unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success
+of my journey. Mrs. Humphry Ward calls attention to the lack of
+playgrounds in England. She wants to bring more fresh air and space to
+the crowded people of the Old World. I submit that my wish is the
+mathematical converse to hers. My great desire is to call attention to
+the great unoccupied lands of Canada, to induce people from the crowded
+centres of the Old World to use the fresh air of the New.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0031"></a>
+<img src="images/img0031.jpg" width="619" height="391" alt="The Canadian Women's Press Club" title="">
+<BR><B>The Canadian Women's Press Club</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>To those who bid us good-bye at the train, the Kid and I yell
+exultantly, &quot;All aboard for the Arctic Ocean and way ports!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A group of Galicians sitting by the curb, two mothers and seven small
+children, one a baby at the breast, make the last picture we see as the
+train pulls out. It was the end of their first day in Winnipeg. The
+fathers of the flock evidently were seeking work and had left their
+families gazing through the portals of the strange new land. In the
+half-sad, altogether-brave lines on the young mothers' faces and their
+tender looks bent on the little ones we read the motive responsible for
+all migrations&mdash;&quot;Better conditions for the babies.&quot; In the little
+fellows of seven or eight with their ill-fitting clothes and their
+dogged looks of determination one sees the makers of empire. Before a
+decade is past they will be active wheat-growers in their own right,
+making two grains grow where one grew before and so &quot;deserving better of
+mankind than the whole race of politicians put together.&quot; I think it was
+President Garfield who said, &quot;I always feel more respect for a boy than
+for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that
+ragged jacket?&quot; It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A
+young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg
+students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic
+world&mdash;the Rhodes scholarship.</p>
+
+<p>We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers
+from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral,
+has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of
+forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures
+its every thought in bushels and bullion.</p>
+
+<p>The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg
+just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of
+David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here
+and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted
+some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony
+performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding.
+One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, &quot;I wudna
+have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a
+properly-ordained meenister.&quot; And he was coming. Even now he was
+floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having
+reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks
+before.</p>
+
+<p>When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton
+phrase, &quot;they do not teem with conversational grace.&quot; Straight from
+Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the
+Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago.
+In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and
+in his simplicity thought himself &quot;the first that ever burst into that
+silent sea.&quot; When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled
+sound, he was in doubt how to place it.</p>
+
+&quot;Is it the clang of wild-geese?<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is it the Indian's yell,</span><br>
+That lends to the voice of the North-wind<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The tones of a far-off bell?&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>The Indian boatmen <i>said</i> nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's
+parrot.</p>
+
+&quot;The voyageur smiles as he listens<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To the sound that grows apace;</span><br>
+Well he knows the vesper ringing<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of the bells of St. Boniface.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in
+the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness</p>
+
+&quot;The bells of the Roman Mission,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That call from their turrets twain</span><br>
+To the boatmen on the river,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To the hunter on the plain.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>That friend was a fellow-townsman of the &quot;Quaker Poet.&quot; The story was
+told to Whittier and inspired the lines of <i>The Red River Voyageur</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a><h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;To the far-flung fenceless prairie<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,</span><br>
+To our neighbor's barn in the offing<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the line of the new-cut rail;</span><br>
+To the plough in her league-long furrow.&quot;<br>
+&mdash;<i>Rudyard Kipling</i>.
+
+<p>Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at
+Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it
+will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.</p>
+
+<p>From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and
+two railway lines are open to us,&mdash;the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
+Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the
+latter.</p>
+
+<p>Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand
+miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are
+pouring. &quot;The sleeping nation beyond,&quot; is what General Sherman in a
+moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We
+are on the heels of the greatest economic trek this world has ever seen.
+The historian of to-morrow will rank it with the world migrations.</p>
+
+<p>The flourishing centres of Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its
+Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police,
+Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw
+towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand
+of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as
+these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp
+conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement
+warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it
+takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat
+elevator, red against the setting sun.</p>
+
+<p>The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo
+bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a
+sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude
+coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is
+the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the
+crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and
+fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to
+the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the
+transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.</p>
+
+<p>Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy,
+buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a
+busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many
+railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R.
+irrigation works, the largest on this continent. The area included in
+the irrigation block is twice as big as the Island of Porto Rico and
+one-eighth the size of England and Wales; and the ultimate expenditure
+on the undertaking will reach the five million mark.</p>
+
+<p>Calgary is the centre of a country literally flowing with milk and honey
+and fat things. The oil-fields of Pincher Creek, with their rich promise
+of becoming a second Pennsylvania, are contiguous to the city. The
+winter wheat grown in Southern Alberta was awarded first prize and gold
+medal at the World's Fair in Oregon in 1905. The hackney carriage horses
+which took first prize at the last Montreal and New York horse-fairs
+were foaled and raised near Calgary. If we were to continue going due
+west from this point, all the scenic glories of the Rocky Mountains
+would be ours&mdash;seventy Switzerlands in one. But that journey must stand
+over for another day, with the journey to Prince Rupert, the ocean
+terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Turning sharply to the north, we travel two hundred miles, and draw into
+where Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, sits smiling on the banks of her
+silver Saskatchewan. As he sees us digging out our tents and dunnage,
+the porter asks, &quot;Then yer not comin' back?&quot; &quot;No.&quot; &quot;You <i>are</i> goin' to
+the North Pole, then, the place you wuz hollerin' fer!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With the exception of Victoria, Edmonton has the most charming location
+of all cities of Western Canada. High Hope stalks her streets. There is
+a spirit of initiative and assuredness in this virile town, a culture
+and thoughtfulness in her people, expectancy in the very air. It is the
+city of contrasts; the ox-cart dodges the automobile; in the track of
+French heel treads the moccasin; the silk hat salutes the Stetson.</p>
+
+<p>Edmonton is the end of steel. Three lines converge here: the Canadian
+Northern, the Canadian Pacific, and the Grand Trunk Pacific. The
+Canadian Northern arrived first, coming in four years ago. Now that
+Edmonton has arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that
+there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis,
+anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in
+commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before
+Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian
+Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals
+and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that
+sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into
+Edmonton, as little was known of the valley of the Saskatchewan as is
+known now of the valley of the Peace. Without exception, Canadian men of
+letters go to other countries for recognition, but not so all our men of
+deeds. Mackenzie and Mann, &quot;the Brains of a Trans-Continental,&quot; stayed
+in Canada and put their genius to work here. The Canadian Northern is
+the product of Canadian minds and Canadian money.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0038"></a>
+<img src="images/img0038.jpg" width="383" height="140" alt="A Section of Edmonton" title="">
+<img src="images/img0039.jpg" width="383" height="140" alt="A Section of Edmonton" title="">
+<BR><B>A Section of Edmonton</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We walk Edmonton streets for ten days and see neither an old man nor an
+old woman. The government and the business interests are in the hands of
+young people who have adopted modern methods of doing things; single tax
+is the basis of taxation; the city owns its public utilities, including
+an interurban street railroad, electric lighting plant, water-works, and
+the automatic telephone. Mr. C.W. Cross, the Attorney-General of
+Alberta, is the youngest man in Canada to hold that high office. During
+the first session of the first legislature of this baby province less
+than three years ago, an enabling act was passed for a university.
+Nowhere else have I been sensible of such a feeling of united
+public-spiritedness as obtains here.</p>
+
+<p>Down in the river valley are hundreds of people living under canvas, not
+because they are poor but because building contractors cannot keep pace
+with the demand for homes. As we pass these tents, we are rude enough to
+look in. Most of them are furnished with telephones and the city water;
+here a bride bends over a chafing dish; another glance discloses an
+oil-painting that was once shown in the Royal Academy. From the next
+tent float the strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and, as we stop
+to listen, a gentleman and his wife step out. An auto picks them up and
+off they whirl to Jasper Avenue. The Lord o' the Tents of Shem
+disappears into his bank and Milady drives on to the Government house to
+read before the Literary Club a paper on Browning's <i>Saul</i>. To the
+tenderfoot from the South it is all delightfully disconcerting&mdash;oxen and
+autos and Browning on the Saskatchewan!</p>
+
+<p>The Sunday before we leave Edmonton I find another set of tents, put up
+by the Immigration Department, where East-End Londoners are housed
+pending their going out upon the land. In the first call I make I
+unearth a baby who rejoices in the name of Hester Beatrice Cran.
+&quot;H.B.C.,&quot; I remark, &quot;aren't you rather infringing on a right, taking
+that trade-mark?&quot; Quick came the retort, &quot;Ho! If she gets as good a 'old
+on the land as the 'Udson's Bay Company 'as, she'll do!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another lady in the next tent proudly marshalled her olive branches.
+&quot;D'isy and the baiby were born in the Heast Hend. They're Henglish;
+please God they'll make good Canaidians. They're tellin' me, miss,
+there'll be five 'undred more of us on the 'igh seas comin' out to
+Hedmonton from the Heast Hend, all poor people like ourselves. I often
+wonder w'y they don't bring out a few dukes to give the country a touch
+of 'igh life&mdash;it's very plain 'ere.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>By the first day of June we have our kit complete and are ready to
+leave. We have tried to cut everything down to the last ounce, but still
+the stuff makes a rather formidable array. What have we? Tent,
+tent-poles, typewriter, two cameras, two small steamer-trunks, bedding
+(a thin mattress with waterproof bottom and waterproof extension-flaps
+and within this our two blankets), a flour-bag or &quot;Hudson's Bay
+suit-case&quot; (containing tent-pegs, hatchet, and tin wash-basin), two
+raincoats, a tiny bag with brush and comb and soap&mdash;and last, but yet
+first, the kodak films wrapped in oilcloth and packed in biscuit-tins.
+The bits of impedimenta look unfamiliar as we take our first inventory,
+but we are to come to know them soon by their feel in the dark, to
+estimate to an ounce the weight of each on many a lonely portage.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0041"></a>
+<img src="images/img0041.jpg" width="381" height="142" alt="The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan" title="">
+<BR><B>The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At seven in the morning the stage pulls up for us, and it rains&mdash;no
+gentle sizzle-sozzle, but a sod-soaker, yea a gully-washer! The
+accusing newness of those raincoats is to come off at once. Expansive
+Kennedy looks askance at the tenderfoots who climb over his wheel. His
+Majesty's Royal Mail Stage sifts through the town picking up the other
+victims. We are two big stage-loads, our baggage marked for every point
+between Edmonton and the Arctic Ocean. Every passenger but ourselves
+looks forward to indefinite periods of expatriation in the silent
+places. We alone are going for fun. Our one care is to keep those
+precious cameras dry. This is the beginning of a camera nightmare which
+lasts six months until we again reach Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>And the fellow-passengers? Law is represented, and medicine, and the
+all-powerful H.B. Co. With us is Mr. Angus Brabant going in on his
+initial official trip in charge of H.B. interests in the whole Mackenzie
+River District, and with him two cadets of The Company. On the seat
+behind us sit a Frenchman reading a French novel, a man from Dakota, and
+a third passenger complaining of a camera &quot;which cost fifty pounds
+sterling&quot; that somehow has fallen by the way. Sergeant Anderson,
+R.N.W.M.P., with his wife and two babies are in the other stage.</p>
+
+<p>Kennedy, the driver, is a character. Driving in and out and covering on
+this one trail twelve thousand miles every year, he is fairly soaked
+with stories of the North and Northmen. The other stage is driven by
+Kennedy's son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was
+just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man. Dwarfed in mind
+and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp.</p>
+
+<p>The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his
+camera claims our attention. &quot;I thought I would be able to get out and
+run behind and pick flowers.&quot; Turning and introducing ourselves, we find
+the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat
+with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic
+Circle.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0043"></a>
+<img src="images/img0043.jpg" width="371" height="267" alt="Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta" title="">
+<BR><B>Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The girlish figure of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in
+gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the
+little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward
+look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of &quot;seven
+times nine,&quot; &quot;the mountains of Asia,&quot; &quot;the Tudor sovereigns with dates
+of accession,&quot; and other things appertaining to &quot;that imperial palace
+whence I came.&quot; All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty
+and food scarce, a backward thought to this teacher making muddy tracks
+toward the well of English undefiled, brings pleased content.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0044"></a>
+<img src="images/img0044.jpg" width="371" height="267" alt="A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge" title="">
+<BR><B>A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At noon it clears, and as we &quot;make tea&quot; at Sturgeon Creek (the Namao
+Sepee of the Indians), the first of the &quot;stopping-places&quot; or
+Waldorf-Astorias of the wilderness, the Doctor has his will and gathers
+violets, moccasin flowers, and the purple <i>dodecatheon</i>. As we pass Lily
+Lake he remarks, &quot;This reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk's place at
+Arundel; it is just like this.&quot; South Dakoty returns, &quot;I don't know
+him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Here and there we pass clusters of Galician huts. Instead of following
+the line of least resistance in the fertile plains to the south, these
+people, the Mark Tapleys of the prairies, choose cheap land up here for
+the pleasure of conquering it and &quot;coming out strong.&quot; They are a frugal
+people, with a fondness for work, a wholesome horror of debt, and the
+religious instinct strongly insistent. Off on a hillside near each
+little settlement a naked cross extends its arms. These are their
+open-air churches, and in all weathers, men, women, and children gather
+at the foot of the cross to worship the God of their fathers. By and by,
+when the soil has yielded to their labours, with their own hands will
+they build a church and without debt it will be dedicated. The idea of
+raising an imposing church and presenting God with the mortgage does not
+appeal to the Galician.</p>
+
+<p>The clean sheets at &quot;Eggie's,&quot; the second stopping-place, are
+attractive, and we sleep the sleep of the just. We acknowledge with
+inward shame that two years of city life have given us the soft muscles
+of the chee-chaco; we'll have to harden up a bit if we are to reach that
+far-away ocean.</p>
+
+<p>Next day, midway between Edmonton and Athabasca Landing, we water our
+horses at the Tautinau. We are standing at the Height of Land, the
+watershed between the Saskatchewan and the Athabasca. This little ridge
+where the harebells grow divides the drops of rain of the noon-day
+shower. Some of these drops, by way of the Saskatchewan, Lake Winnipeg,
+and Hudson Bay, will reach the Atlantic. Others, falling into the
+Athabasca, will form part of that yellow-tinged flood which, by way of
+Great Slave Lake and the mighty Mackenzie, carries its tribute to the
+Frozen Ocean. These last are the drops we follow.</p>
+
+<p>To save the horses we walk the hills, and I try to match giant steps
+with Sergeant Anderson. Kennedy, Junior, joins us and has a knotty point
+to settle regarding &quot;the gentleman wot murdered the man.&quot; It is hard to
+induce a Mounted Policeman to talk. However, to be striding Athabasca
+Trail with the hero of the Hayward-King murder-trial is too good an
+opportunity to lose, and, reluctantly rendered, bit by bit the story
+comes out.</p>
+
+<p>Most people looking at a map of Northwest Canada would think it a safe
+wilderness for a live man or a dead man to disappear in with no
+questions asked. In reality, it is about the worst place in America in
+which to commit a crime and hope to go unpunished.</p>
+
+<p>In September, 1904, the Indians reported to the Mounted Police that they
+had seen two white men in the early summer, and that afterwards one man
+walked alone, and was now at Lesser Slave. An observant Cree boy added,
+&quot;The dog won't follow that other white fellow any more.&quot; Sergeant
+Anderson, going to their last camp, turned over the ashes and found
+three hard lumps of flesh and a small piece of skull bone. Convinced
+that murder had been done, he arrested the suspected man and sent him to
+Fort Saskatchewan for trial. No one knew the identity of either the dead
+man or the living. In front of the old camp-fire was a little slough or
+lake, and this seemed a promising place to look for evidence. Sergeant
+Anderson hired Indian women to wade in the ooze, feeling with their toes
+for any hard substance. In this way were secured a sovereign-case and a
+stick-pin of unusual make. The lake was systematically drained and
+yielded a shoe with a broken-eyed needle sticking in it. Sifting the
+ashes of the camp-fire and examining them with a microscope, Anderson
+discovered the eye of the broken needle and thus established a
+connection between the camp with its burnt flesh and the exhibits from
+the lake. The maker of the stick-pin in London, England, was cabled to
+by the Canadian Government, and a Mr. Hayward summoned to come from
+there to identify the trinkets of his murdered brother. A cheque drawn
+by the dead Hayward in favour of King came to the surface in a British
+Columbia bank. Link by link the chain of evidence grew.</p>
+
+<p>It took eleven months for Sergeant Anderson to get his case in shape.
+Then he convoyed forty Indian witnesses two hundred and fifty miles from
+Lesser Slave to Edmonton to tell what they knew about the crime
+committed in the silent places. The evidence was placed before the jury,
+and the Indians returned to their homes. A legal technicality cropped up
+and the trial had to be repeated. Once more the forty Indians travelled
+from Lesser Slave to repeat their story. The result was that Charles
+King of Utah was found guilty of the murder of Edward Hayward and paid
+the death penalty.</p>
+
+<p>This trial cost the Canadian Government over $30,000,&mdash;all to avenge the
+death of one of the wandering units to be found in every corner of the
+frontier, one unknown prospector. Was it worth while? Did it pay? Yes,
+it paid. It is by such object-lessons that to Indian and white alike is
+forced home the truth that God's law, &quot;Thou shalt not kill,&quot; is also the
+law of Britain and of Canada.</p>
+
+<p>We are still on foot, when a cry from the Kid hurries us to the
+hilltop. Reaching the crest, we catch our breaths. Down below lies the
+little village of &quot;The Landing.&quot; That sparkling flood beyond proves the
+Athabasca to be a live, northward-trending river, a river capable of
+carrying us with it, and no mere wiggly line on a map.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a><h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>ATHABASCA LANDING</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;<br>
+Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods;<br>
+I wait for the men who will win me&mdash;and I will not be won in a day;<br>
+And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,<br>
+But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Robert Service</i><br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0049"></a>
+<img src="images/img0049.jpg" width="492" height="286" alt="Athabasca Landing" title="">
+<BR><B>Athabasca Landing</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Athabasca Landing, a funnel through which percolates the whole trade
+between the wheat-belt and the Arctic, is the true gateway of the North.
+Seeing our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union
+Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its
+edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an
+incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading
+itself with prodigality over the swift river.</p>
+
+<p>The Athabasca, after dipping to the south, here takes a sudden northward
+bend. Its source is in the crest of the continent far back in the
+Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river
+being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great
+tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to
+embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five
+miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps
+an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.</p>
+
+<p>We are in latitude 55&deg; North, and between us and the Arctic lies an
+unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and
+the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging
+like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south
+of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has
+stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a
+country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown
+and dubbed &quot;barren&quot; because unknown, will support its teeming millions.
+Chimerical? Why so?</p>
+
+<p>Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of
+55&deg; westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the
+Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map
+of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to
+follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year
+1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain,
+grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a
+half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one
+and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining
+in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are
+about to enter does not enjoy.</p>
+
+<p>Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by
+all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of
+moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing
+in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the
+little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large
+establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman
+Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted
+Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a
+blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of
+Cree-Scots half-breeds.</p>
+
+<p>Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a
+discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all
+sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the
+place,&mdash;tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike
+dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may
+be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the
+silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the
+language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, &quot;What means a
+camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a
+needle's eye.&quot; The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and
+coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its
+coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that
+stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed
+by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only &quot;for medicinal
+purposes.&quot; By an easy transferring of epithets, the term &quot;permit&quot; has
+come to signify the revivifying juice itself.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0052"></a>
+<img src="images/img0052.jpg" width="377" height="260" alt="Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the
+North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a
+rule they are not. There is no discussion of American banks and equally
+no mention of the wheat crop. The one conjecture round the bar and in
+the home is, &quot;When will the rabbits run this year?&quot; The rabbits in the
+North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark
+aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him.
+Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year
+means a scarcity of all kinds of fur. As surely as wheat stands for
+bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of
+the North.</p>
+
+<p>It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company
+making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in
+supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in
+barter during the previous winter. The big open scows, or
+&quot;sturgeon-heads,&quot; which are to form our convoy have been built, the
+freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen
+drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the
+word which is the keynote of the Cree character,&mdash;&quot;Kee-am,&quot; freely
+translated, &quot;Never mind,&quot; &quot;Don't get excited,&quot; &quot;There's plenty of time,&quot;
+&quot;It's all right,&quot; &quot;It will all come out in the wash.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When the present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office
+he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a
+time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was
+shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing,
+old Duncan Trembl&eacute;, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked
+admiringly at the printed slip and said, &quot;Aye, aye; the Commissioner he
+makes laws, but the river he boss.&quot; It is only when ice is out and
+current serves that the brigade moves forward. Old Duncan knows seven
+languages,&mdash;English, French, Cree, Chipewyan, Beaver, Chinook,
+Montagnais,&mdash;he speaks seven languages, thinks in Cree, and
+prevaricates in them all.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0054"></a>
+<img src="images/img0054.png" width="315" height="480" alt="The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians" title="">
+<img src="images/img0055.png" width="315" height="480" alt="The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians" title="">
+<BR><B>The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At the foot of the hill we visit the English parsonage, with its
+old-time sun-dial at the garden-gate. Within, we find what must surely
+be the farthest north printing-press. Here two devoted women have spent
+years of their lives printing in Cree on a hand-press syllabic hymns and
+portions of the Gospel for the enlightenment of the Indians. We wander
+into the school where a young teacher is explaining to his uneasy
+disciples the intricacies of Present Worth and Compound Interest. Idly
+we wonder to what use these bare-footed half-Cree urchins will put their
+exact banking knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere around us the wild flowers are a great joy; we hail with the
+gladness of released children the posies that sweetened childhood
+meadows&mdash;the dwarf cornel (Cornel Canadensis), dandelions, strawberry
+blossoms, wild roses, the pale wood-violet on its long stem, and amid
+these familiars the saskatoon or service-berry bushes, with blueberry
+vines, and viburnums of many kinds. On the street the natty uniforms of
+the Mounted Police are in evidence, and baseball has penetrated as far
+north as this. In the post office we read,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is decided to hold sports on the first day of July. The Committee
+promises a splendid programme,&mdash;horse-races, foot-races, football match,
+baseball game. There will also be prizes for the best piece of Indian
+fancy-work. Dancing will be in full swing in the evening. All welcome.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Opposite the hotel is a reading-room built by a Methodist parson who
+also made the furniture with his own hands; magazines, books,
+writing-material, games are available to all. This practical work of one
+man who accepted the responsibility of being his brother's keeper
+appealed to us. In a store near the hotel we see a Cree boatman
+purchasing a farewell present for his sweetheart. As he turns over the
+fancy articles, we have bad form enough to observe his choice. He
+selects a fine-tooth comb, for which he pays fifty cents, or as he calls
+it, &quot;two skins,&quot; and asks, as he tucks it into his jerkin, if he can
+change it &quot;if she doesn't like it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In the evening it rains, and the room assigned us becomes a living
+illustration of the new word we have just learned,&mdash;&quot;muskeg,&quot; a swamp.
+Putting the precious cameras on top of the bureau, we let the rest of
+the things swim at their pleasure. Starting with the rest of the
+unattached community of Athabasca Landing to go down to the pool-room,
+we catch sight of Dr. Sussex and the Cree priest, who have found a
+little oasis of their own around a big stove in the upper hall and, with
+chairs tilted back, are enjoying some portable hospitality from below.
+The doctor arises to escort us through the flood, and when I rally him
+about his liquid refreshment, he says, &quot;Oh, I had lemonade.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I see. And the priest?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He had&mdash;what he liked.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>If local colour and local smell is what we have come north for, we find
+it here. Mr. Brabant comes up with &quot;I wonder if that bunch of nuns is
+going to get here in time to take scows with us,&quot; and we pass into the
+billiard-room and watch the game. The players gliding round in moccasins
+are all half-breeds. The exclamations are for the most part in Cree or
+bad French, and as I crowd in looking for some local terms all that I
+hear intelligible is, &quot;That is damn close, I think me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For thirty-six hours on end it rains. That roof was full of surprises;
+you never knew where it would spring a fresh leak. One room is a little
+better than the rest, and we all gather there and make the best of
+it,&mdash;smoking, writing, telling yarns. A bumping noise from across the
+hall and the cry of a child startles us. It proves to be Sergeant
+Anderson's baby whose cradle has started afloat, and there is a general
+rush to rescue Moses from his bulrushes. Everybody is in good humour.</p>
+
+<p>As we calm the baby, South Dakota says &quot;It reminds me of the Englishman
+and his musical bath.&quot; We demand the story. &quot;Well, a rich American took
+a great liking to an Englishman he had been travelling with, and sent
+him for a birthday present a Yankee invention to set up in his
+country-house&mdash;a musical bath. As you turned on the spigot, the thing
+played a tune while you were washing, and sort of relieved the tee-deum.
+The two gents met next Christmas in New York, and the Yankee he sez,
+'And how did you like the bath?' 'Oh, thank you very much, it was kind
+of you indeed, but I found it a little irksome standing all the time,
+you know.' 'Standing, what the blazes do you mean?' asked the Yankee.
+'Well,' says the Britisher, 'the tune you furnished, you know, with the
+bawth, was <i>God Save the King</i>, and as soon as it began, you know, I had
+to stand, and it's rather tiresome taking your bawth standing, you
+know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Sergeant Joyce tells how at a Mounted Police dinner at Fort Saskatchewan
+a parson, who was a guest, in proposing a toast, facetiously advised his
+entertainers to have nothing to do with either a doctor or a lawyer. It
+was interesting to watch the parson's face when there arose to reply a
+lawyer and a doctor, each a constable in the rank and file.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Leslie Wood of Athabasca Landing adds her quota to the Tales of a
+Wayside Inn. We could have listened to her for a week and regretted
+neither the rain nor the waiting scows. As a girl she remembers being
+shocked at seeing men hold tin cups to the throats of newly-slaughtered
+buffalo, drinking with gusto the warm blood.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are the two greatest things on earth?&quot; Mrs. Wood, as a young girl,
+asked the dusky disciples of her Sunday School class. &quot;The Queen and The
+Company,&quot; was the ready response. &quot;And of these, which is the greater?&quot;
+Little Marten-Tail rubbed one moccasin over the other, and the answer
+came thoughtfully in Cree, &quot;The Company. The Queen sometimes dies, but
+The Company never dies.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Company,&quot; of which the little girl spoke, &quot;The Governor and Company
+of Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay,&quot; deriving its charter in 1670
+from the Second Charles of England, is the oldest chartered concern in
+the world, with a present-day sphere of influence as large as Great
+Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined. From lone Labrador to the
+Pacific littoral and from Winnipeg to the Frozen Ocean are scattered the
+two hundred and fifty fur-trading forts of this concern in charge of its
+two thousand strong silent servants. Last year it paid to its
+stockholders a profit of forty-five per cent on the invested capital,
+and for two hundred and thirty-nine consecutive years it has been
+declaring dividends. The motto of the Company, <i>Pro Pelle Cutein</i>, is
+prominently displayed at Athabasca Landing. Literally translated, the
+phrase means &quot;Skin for skin&quot;; but why the promoters should have chosen
+as war-cry the words which Satan used when fighting with the Lord for
+the soul of Job, is not so apparent.</p>
+
+<p>As we watch the trading goods being carried in the rain from warehouse
+to scows, we think how, weaving its cross-Atlantic way through the
+centuries and joining the periwigged days of the Stuarts to this day,
+the one man-made thing that has persisted is this commerce-shuttle of
+the H.B. Co.</p>
+
+<p>In the days when The Company had its birth, the blind Milton was
+dictating his message and the liberated Bunyan preached the spoken word,
+the iniquitous Cabal Ministry was forming in England, and Panama was
+sacked by Morgan the buccaneer. New York merchants of Manhattan met
+every Friday at noon on the bridge over the Broad Street Canal for
+barter, South Carolina was settled on the Ashley River, Virginia enacted
+that &quot;all servants not being Christians, imported into this country by
+shipping shall be slaves,&quot; and her Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was
+inspired to exclaim piously, &quot;I hope we shall have neither free schools
+nor printing these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience
+and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. God
+keep us from both!&quot; It was not until two years later that Addison was
+born, and that Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi, even as
+we now are essaying the Athabasca.</p>
+
+<p>Unique in commercial annals is the Royal Charter which gave, with power
+of life and death, to the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, less than
+twenty in number, &quot;forever hereafter&quot; possession and jurisdiction over a
+country as large as Europe. Liberty here for utter despotism, the widest
+of excesses. We marvel that from the first Prince Rupert of the Rhine to
+the latest Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Governors of the
+Ancient Company have, with Duncan-like demeanour, borne themselves so
+meek in their great office.</p>
+
+<p>It has been fashionable to paint the H.B. Co. as an agrarian oligarchy.
+Organized for the purpose of &quot;making fur&quot; before the time of the Habeas
+Corpus, two decades ahead of the Bank of England, sixty-two years before
+Benjamin Franklin began publishing &quot;Poor Richard's Almanac,&quot; and a
+century in advance of Watt's steam-engine, it is true that The Company,
+throughout the years, devoted itself to peltries and not to platting
+town sites. This was its business. From the beginning it has
+consistently kept faith with the Indians; the word of The Company has,
+for reward or for punishment, ever been worth its full face value. It
+was not an H.B. Scot who exclaimed feelingly, &quot;Honesty <i>is</i> the best
+policy, I've tried baith.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of devotion to The Company is as strong today as it ever
+was. When the present Commissioner took office he penetrated the North
+on a tour of inspection. At Athabasca Landing, since it was not known
+just when the Head would arrive, the local official charged all his
+clerks and minions to be ready at the sound of a whistle to salute and
+fall into line for inspection. The call to arms came on Sunday morning
+during divine service. Every attach&eacute; of The Company with one exception
+obeyed the signal. Young Tom Helly, the paid organist, stuck to his
+post; and next day he was called on the carpet. &quot;It was a special
+service; I was in the middle of the anthem, sir, and didn't like to
+leave the House of God.&quot; &quot;Couldn't you show some respect?&quot; roared the
+local officer. Man was near in Athabasca Landing and God far away. Down
+in the big office at Winnipeg is a Doomsday Book where the life-record
+of every servant of The Company is kept, for no man who has ever served
+The Company is lost sight of. When there is a good fur-winter, every
+employ&eacute; of The Company is handed an envelope which contains a
+bonus-cheque,&mdash;ten per cent of his yearly salary.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0062"></a>
+<img src="images/img0062.jpg" width="177" height="270" alt="C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co." title="">
+<BR><B>C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company and the head of one of
+Canada's big department stores were dining together at a Toronto Club.
+&quot;After six o'clock I don't want to see or hear of an employ&eacute;&mdash;he doesn't
+exist for me until eight o'clock next morning,&quot; said the head of the
+department store. &quot;Well, I'm more curious than you,&quot; smiled the
+Commissioner of the H.B. Co., &quot;I want to be reasonably assured of what
+every man-Jack of my people is doing all the time. I want to know what
+he reads, and if he treats his wife well, and how his last baby is
+getting along&mdash;you see, he's a working-partner of mine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There came out of Northern British Columbia last year the Indian wife
+and half-breed daughters of an H.B. Co. Factor. They were bound for
+Montreal and it was their first trip &quot;outside.&quot; The Commissioner at
+Winnipeg contradicts the old saw, and surely has &quot;a soul above a
+beaver-skin&quot;; like Mulvaney, too, he &quot;has bowels.&quot; Quickly went forward
+a letter to a tactful woman in the border-town through which the
+visiting ladies must pass&mdash;&quot;Meet them, and see that they get the proper
+things to wear in society circles in Montreal. I don't want them to feel
+ill at ease when they get there.&quot; Stories like these give us glimpses of
+the kind of paternalism exercised by the Ancient Company, the one trust
+that has never ground the faces of the poor, and in whose people to-day
+appears the &quot;constant service of the Old World.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The big books of The Company a year or two ago in unmistakable
+round-hand declared that one Running Rabbit, lawful widow of Blueskin,
+was entitled to draw from the coffers clear-side bacon and a modicum of
+flour. But one quarterly paysheet, returned to Winnipeg from Fort
+Churchill, showed that Running Rabbit in addition to her food allowance
+had been handed out forty cents' worth of cotton. Stern enquiry, backed
+by red-tape and The Company's seal as big as a saucer, was sent up to
+the Churchill Factor. Why had the allowance of Mrs. Blueskin (n&eacute;e
+Running Rabbit) been exceeded? By &quot;return mail&quot; nine months later the
+Factor reported,</p>
+
+&quot;The widow's gone,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Her tent's forsaken,</span><br>
+No more she comes<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">For flour and bacon.</span><br>
+N.B. The cotton was used for her shroud.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The Ancient Company was penny-wise, but in spite of the copybook line,
+not pound-foolish, as its dividend paysheets conclusively prove.</p>
+
+<p>There is no desire to show forth these silent ones of the North as
+infallible men and immaculate. They make many mistakes; they were and
+are delightfully human, and we couldn't picture one of them with a
+saintly aureole. But in the past, as in the present, they were large
+men; they honoured their word, and you couldn't buy them. Men of action,
+whether inside fort walls, bartering in the tepee of the Indian, or off
+on silent trails alone,&mdash;it has been given to each of them to live life
+at firsthand. In every undertaking the determining factor of success is
+men, and not money or monopoly. And because the North still breeds men
+of the H.B. type, the eye of The Great Company is not dimmed, its force
+not abated.</p>
+
+<p>We spoke with no fewer than three men at The Landing who came into the
+North in the year of the Klondike rush, that is, just ten years ago.
+Into the human warp and woof of the Great Lone Land of Northern Canada
+the Klondike gold-rush intruded a new strand. The news of the strike on
+Yukon fields flashed round the world on wires invisible and visible,
+passed by word of mouth from chum to chum, and by moccasin telegraph was
+carried to remotest corners of the continent. Gold-fever is a disease
+without diagnosis or doctor&mdash;infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if
+its germ once stirs in a man's blood, till the day of his death he is
+not immune from an attack. The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent
+swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous
+horde,&mdash;gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet
+firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two
+continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.</p>
+
+<p>Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from 'Frisco, Seattle, and
+Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have
+some records. But of that vast army who from the east and from the south
+travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has
+ever been made. Singly they went, in groups, and by partnerships of two
+and three. There was no route marked out by which they were to reach the
+glittering streams of which they dreamed; the general direction of north
+and west was all that guided them. Athabasca Landing was the portal
+through which they passed, and by every northward stream they
+travelled,&mdash;down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca
+to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore. By
+raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways
+who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to
+you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police
+Station where Sergeant Anderson rescued a dozen tenderfoots from
+drowning.</p>
+
+<p>To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the
+whites was a revelation. Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had
+been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed
+Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the
+outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that
+only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern
+Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first
+lessons from the Klondike miners.</p>
+
+<p>And what of the men who followed the gleam? Some reached Dawson. These
+were few. Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still. In the old books
+of the H.B. Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is &quot;a band of Indians
+<i>cast up</i> from the east,&quot; &quot;the Express from the North <i>cast up</i> at a
+late hour last night.&quot; On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from
+that point, hundreds of gold-miners are &quot;cast up&quot; on every interior
+shore. Acting as attach&eacute;s to Hudson's Bay posts, engaging as free
+traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic
+seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at
+least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us. Round
+the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still
+prays for her absent son. A silence like this once entered upon is hard
+to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about him the
+garment of the recluse. Outcropping from the strata in striking
+individuality, they belong to a different race to the plodding people of
+the Hudson's Bay posts, and are interesting men wherever you meet them.
+Keen of vision, slow of speech, and with that dreamy look which only
+those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet
+places,&mdash;they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and
+dropped here and there over the white map of the North.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a><h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Set me in the urge and tide-drift<br>
+Of the streaming hosts a-wing!<br>
+Breast of scarlet, throat of yellow,<br>
+Raucous challenge, wooings mellow&mdash;<br>
+Every migrant is my fellow,<br>
+Making northward with the Spring.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Bliss Carman</i>.<br>
+
+<p>If you have to do with Indian or half-breed boatmen in the North you
+plan to begin your journey in the evening, even though you hope to run
+only a few miles before nightfall. This ensures a good start next
+morning, whereas it would be humanly impossible to tear men away from
+the flesh-pots (beer pots) of Athabasca Landing early in any day. It
+took these chaps all the afternoon to say good-bye, for each one in the
+village had to be shaken hands with, every dog apostrophized by name.</p>
+
+<p>The Athabasca Transport of which we form joyous part makes a formidable
+flotilla: seven specially-built scows or &quot;sturgeon-heads.&quot; Each runs
+forty to fifty feet with a twelve-foot beam and carries ten tons. The
+oars are twenty feet long. It takes a strong man to handle the
+forty-foot steering-sweep which is mounted with an iron pivot on the
+stern.</p>
+
+<p>Our particular shallop is no different from the others, except that
+there is a slightly raised platform in the stern-sheets, evidently a
+dedication to the new Northern Manager of the H.B. Co. We share the
+pleasant company of a fourth passenger, Mrs. Harding, on her way home to
+Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. The second sturgeon-head carries
+seven members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, jolly laughing
+chaps, for are not they, too, like us, off duty? Inspector Pelletier and
+three men are to go with our Fur Transport as far as Resolution and then
+diverge to the east, essaying a cross-continent cut from there to salt
+water on Hudson Bay. For this purpose they ship two splendidly made
+Peterborough canoes. The other three members of the force are young
+chaps assigned to Smith's Landing on the Slave River, sent there to
+protect the wood bison of that region, the world's last wild buffalo.
+The third craft we observe with due respect as &quot;the cook boat.&quot; The
+remaining four scows carry cargo only,&mdash;the trade term being &quot;pieces,&quot;
+each piece from eighty to a hundred pounds, a convenient weight for
+carrying on the portages.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0069"></a>
+<img src="images/img0069.jpg" width="366" height="265" alt="A &quot;Sturgeon-head&quot; at Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>A &quot;Sturgeon-head&quot; at Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0070"></a>
+<img src="images/img0070.jpg" width="368" height="206" alt="&quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot;" title="">
+<BR><B>&quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot;</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>June 6th at a quarter of seven saw the whole populace of Athabasca
+Landing on the river bank&mdash;dogs, babies, the officials of the Hudson's
+Bay, parson, priest, police, and even the barkeep,&mdash;and with the yelping
+of dogs and &quot;Farewell, Nistow!&quot; we are off. We are embarked on a
+2500-mile journey, the longest water route on the continent, down which
+floats each year the food, clothing, and frugal supplies of a country as
+big as Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The river is running five miles an hour and there is no need of the
+oars. The steersman is our admiration, as with that clumsy stern-sweep
+he dodges rocks, runs riffles, and makes bends. The scow is made of
+green wood, and its resilience stands it in good stead as, like a snake,
+it writhes through tight channels or over ugly bits of water. Everybody
+is in good humour; we are dreamers dreaming greatly. Why should we not
+be happy? Mrs. Harding is homeward-bound, Mr. Brabant on a new rung of
+the fur ladder of preferment, Inspector Pelletier and his associates
+starting on a quest of their own seeking. Sitting low among the &quot;pieces&quot;
+of the police boat, with only his head visible in the sunset glow, Dr.
+Sussex builds air-castles of that eleemosynary hospital of his on the
+Arctic Circle. The cook is whistling from the cook-boat. Five years ago
+he graduated from a business college, but the preparation of bannock and
+sow-belly appeals to the blood more insistently than trial balances and
+the petty cash book. As for ourselves, the Kid's smile is almost audible
+as she runs a loving hand over the oilskin cover of the camera. A
+favourite expression of mine in the latitudes below when the world
+smiled was, &quot;Oh, I'm glad I'm alive and white!&quot; On this exclamation I
+start now, but stop at the word &quot;white.&quot; North of Athabasca Landing
+white gives place to a tint more tawny.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred yards out, the Policemen are boyish enough to launch those
+shiny Peterboroughs just to try them, and in and out among the big
+sturgeon-heads, debonair dolphins, they dart. Then comes the rain, and
+one by one the clumsy boats turn toward shore. There are some things
+that even the enquiring mind cannot run to ground, things that just
+happen out of the blue. For fifteen successive springs I have tried to
+discover the first boy who brought marbles to school when marble-season
+came in, and I have never yet been able to put my finger on that elusive
+history-maker. So on this voyage, the fleet is started and stopped,
+landings are made, camping-places decided upon, and no ear can detect
+the sound of command.</p>
+
+<p>The scows tie up, and without undressing we sleep on board, pulling a
+tarpaulin over us and letting the rain rain. At 5:30 next morning we
+hear the familiar &quot;Nistow! Nistow!&quot; of the awakened camp. This word
+literally means &quot;brother-in-law,&quot; but it is the vocative used by the
+Cree in speaking to anybody he feels kindly toward. The cook makes a
+double entry with bacon and bannock, and there is exulting joy in our
+soul. Who would napkins bear, or finger-bowls? We had put them far
+behind, with the fardels.</p>
+
+<p>It is the season of lengthening days and fading nights. At seven o'clock
+we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first
+one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being
+shouted from boat to boat. Then, in one voice from three boats,
+&quot;Mooswa!&quot; and far beyond white man's vision the boatmen sight a moose.
+There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious
+Peterboroughs which were to make history on the map, and in the delay
+the moose wandered into pleasant pastures. The boatmen were very much
+disgruntled, as the moose is treasure-trove, the chief fresh meat that
+his world offers the Indian. From here to the Arctic are no domestic
+animals, the taste of beef or mutton or pork or chicken is unknown,
+bread gives place to bannock (with its consequent indigestion
+&quot;bannockburn&quot;), and coffee is a beverage discredited. Tobacco to smoke,
+strong, black, sweetened tea to drink from a copper kettle,&mdash;this is
+luxury's lap.</p>
+
+<p>The bowsman points to a rude cross on the right bank where a small
+runway makes in, &quot;Gon-sta-wa-bit&quot; (man who was drowned), he volunteers.
+Yesterday a Mounted Policeman buried there the body of an Indian man,
+his wife and his baby, who fell through the ice in a dog-sled this
+spring,&mdash;three in one grave, Lamartine's trinity, the Father, the
+Mother, and the Child.</p>
+
+<p>It is Sunday, and we have music from a li'l fiddle made by a squaw at
+Lac Ste. Anne. Lac la Biche River we pass, and Calling River, and at
+five in the evening are at Swift Current, Peachy Pruden's place, and
+then Red Mud. Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all
+night. Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the
+missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I
+draw up a canvas sheet. But it is too wonderful a night to sleep. Lying
+flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full
+of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up
+and pluck them. Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is
+the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the
+shadow of the cut-banks. At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in
+his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these
+human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or
+two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from
+high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant
+blood&mdash;the &quot;unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go.&quot; It is
+the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. In
+imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that
+long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back raucous encouragement to
+his long, sky-clinging V.</p>
+
+<p>Floating as we float, it is no longer a marvel to us that this North
+holds so many scientific men and finished scholars&mdash;colonial Esaus
+serving as cooks, dog-drivers, packers, trackers, oil-borers. The not
+knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new
+places and untrod ways,&mdash;who would exchange all this for the easy ways
+of fatted civilization!</p>
+
+<p>At five in the morning there is a drawing-in of the fleet to Pelican
+Portage. Before two hours have passed the grasshopper has become a
+burden, and it is 102&deg; in the shade, and no shade to be had. We are now
+a hundred miles from Athabasca Landing. On the left bank we come across
+a magnificent gas-well with a gush of flame twenty or thirty feet in
+height.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that eleven years ago, seeking for petroleum, the Dominion
+Government had a shaft sunk here; their boring apparatus was heavy, the
+plunger with its attachment weighing nearly a ton. At eight hundred feet
+the operator broke into an ocean of gas, and the pressure blew him with
+plunger and appliances into the air as a ball comes from a cannon-bore.
+The flow of gas was so heavy that it clogged his drills with maltha and
+sand, and from then to now the gas has been escaping. To-day the sound
+of the escape ricochets up and down the palisaded channel so that we
+cannot hear each other speak. There is gas enough here, if we could pipe
+it and bring it under control, to supply with free illumination every
+city of prairie Canada. It has destroyed all vegetation for a radius of
+twenty yards; but, oddly enough, outside this range of demarcation the
+growth is more luxuriant and comes earlier and stays later than that of
+the surrounding country. One redheaded Klondiker, ignorant of gas and
+its ways, ten years ago struck a match to this escaping stream, was
+blown into the bushes beyond, and came out minus hair, eye-brows and red
+beard&mdash;the quickest and closest shave he ever had. The shells of birds'
+eggs, tea-leaves from many a cheering copper-kettle, tufts of
+rabbit-hair, and cracked shin-bones of the moose, with here a greasy
+nine of diamonds, show, this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the
+gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or
+broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no
+thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a
+patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has
+consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills
+and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have
+eased the mind of poor Lo, around whose dying bunk we hear the relatives
+scrapping over his residuary estate of rusty rifle, much-mended
+fishing-net, and three gaunt dogs.</p>
+
+<p>We pass House River, and the devout cross themselves and murmur a
+prayer. The point is marked by a group of graves covered with canvas.
+Here years ago a family of four, travelling alone, contracted
+diphtheria, and died before help could reach them. There is another
+legend of which the boatmen unwillingly speak, the story of the
+<i>Wetigo</i>, or Indian turned cannibal, who murdered a priest on this
+lonely point, and ate the body of his victim. The taste for human flesh,
+Philip Atkinson assures us, grows with the using, and this lunatic of
+long ago went back to the camps, secured an Indian girl as bride,
+carried her to this point, took her life, and ate of her flesh. It is a
+gruesome story.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0076"></a>
+<img src="images/img0076.jpg" width="332" height="369" alt="Grand Rapids on the Athabasca River" title="">
+<BR><B>Grand Rapids on the Athabasca River</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Now begin the rapids, ninety miles of which we are to run. This rough
+water on the Athabasca is one of the only two impediments to navigation
+on the long course between Athabasca Landing and the Polar Ocean. These
+first rapids, frankly, are a disappointment. The water is high, higher
+than it has been for ten years, so the boiling over the boulders is not
+very noticeable. The Pelican Rapid and the Stony we shoot without
+turning a hair; the Joli Fou is a bit more insistent, but, as the cook
+says, &quot;nothing to write home about.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We drift in a drowsy dream of delight, and in the evening arrive at the
+head of Grand Rapids. If we had looked slightingly on the rough water
+passed, what we now see would satisfy the greediest. We tie up and get a
+good view of what lies ahead, and get also our first real introduction
+to the mosquito. In mid-stream he had not bothered us much, but after
+supper it rained a little, the day had been warm, and with cymbals,
+banners, and brass-bands, he comes in cohorts to greet us. The scows
+have their noses poked into the bank, the men have built smudge fires in
+front, but we decide that the best way to escape the mosquito is to go
+to bed. We lie down in the stern-sheets with our clothes on, make
+night-caps of our Stetson hats, pull the veils down over our necks, and
+try to sleep, but it is no avail. Each one of these mosquitoes is a
+Presbyterian mosquito and it has been ordained that this night he is to
+taste of white blood. It rains incessantly, and that hot hole in which
+we lie is one brown cloud of mosquitoes. The men on the bank have
+finally given it up as a bad job, and they set round the fires smoking
+and slapping different parts of their persons, swearing volubly in
+English. For the Cree language is devoid of invective. In the morning we
+are a sorry crowd, conversation is monosyllabic and very much to the
+point. It is the first serious trial to individual good-humour. When
+each one of your four million pores is an irritation-channel of
+mosquito-virus it would be a relief to growl at somebody about
+something. But the sun and smiles come out at the same time, and, having
+bled together, we cement bonds of friendship. What did Henry the Fifth
+say on the eve of Agincourt,&mdash;&quot;For he to-day who sheds his blood with me
+shall be my brother&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>Who would worry about mosquitoes with that splendid spectacular of the
+Grand Rapids at our feet? The great flood (Kitchee Abowstik) is divided
+into two channels by an island probably half a mile in length, with its
+long axis parallel to the flow of the river, and this island solves the
+question of progress. The main channel to the left is impassable; it is
+certain death that way. Between the island and the right shore is a
+passage which on its island side, with nice manipulation, is practicable
+for empty boats. Then the problem before us is to run the rough water at
+the near end of the island, tie up there, unload, transfer the pieces by
+hand-car over the island to its other end, let the empty scows down
+carefully through the channel by ropes, and reload at the other end.</p>
+
+<p>Between the bank where we are and the island ahead is a stretch of
+roaring water dangerous enough looking. We have learned ere this,
+however, to sit tight and watch for events. The careless Indians have
+straightened into keen-eyed, responsible voyageurs, each muscle taut,
+every sense alert. Our boat goes first, one half-breed with huge pole
+braces himself as bowsman, the most able man takes the stern sweep, the
+others stand at the oars. Fifteen minutes of good head-work brings us to
+the island and we step out with relief. The other boats follow and
+anchor, and we have opportunity at close range to inspect these worst
+rapids of the Athabascan chain. The current on the west side of the
+dividing island looks innocent, and we understand how the greenhorn
+would choose this passage-way, to his destruction.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0079"></a>
+<img src="images/img0079.jpg" width="278" height="384" alt="Portage at Grand Rapids Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Portage at Grand Rapids Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The transportation of pieces occupied four days, every moment of which
+we enjoyed. Grand Rapids Island is prodigal in wild flowers,&mdash;vetches,
+woodbine, purple and pink columbines, wild roses, several varieties of
+false Solomon's seal, our persisting friend dwarf cornel, and,
+treasure-trove, our first anemone,&mdash;that beautiful buttercup springing
+from its silvered sheath&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;And where a tear has dropt a wind-flower blows.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>I measured a grass-stem and found it two feet three inches high, rising
+amid last year's prostrate growth.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0080"></a>
+<img src="images/img0080.jpg" width="371" height="260" alt="Our transport at Grand Rapids Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Our transport at Grand Rapids Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At Grand Rapids Island we overtook two scows which had preceded us from
+The Landing and whose crews had waited here to assist in the transport.
+It gave us opportunity to observe these sixty representative half-breeds
+from Lac la Biche. Tall, strong, happy-go-lucky, with no sordid strain
+in their make-up, they are fellows that one cannot help feeling sympathy
+for. A natural link between the East and the West, the South of Canada
+and the North, they have bridged over the animosity and awkwardness
+with which the Red race elsewhere has approached the White.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0081"></a>
+<img src="images/img0081.jpg" width="368" height="211" alt="Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>In a glade our camp is made, inside our tents we arrange the
+mosquito-bar (a tent within a tent looking something like a good-sized
+dog-kennel), and here we lie in our blankets. The hum of the foiled
+mosquito is unction to our souls. It is a relief, too, to remove the
+day's clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.</p>
+
+<p>The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,&mdash;soft,
+yellowish, homogeneous. In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of
+ninety feet. The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four
+or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped
+nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones. The
+river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift
+current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as
+spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite
+the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet
+thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil
+trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great
+wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this
+strange page of history in stone.</p>
+
+<p>Timber along the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we
+see is largely second growth,&mdash;Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and
+aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender,
+delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery
+branches seem to float in air.</p>
+
+<p>Across the roaring water swallows are nesting in the clayey cliffs:&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;This guest of summer,<br>
+The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,<br>
+By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath<br>
+Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,<br>
+Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird<br>
+Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:<br>
+Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,<br>
+The air is delicate.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>We learn that half-breeds share the Scottish superstition that it is
+unlucky to disturb bank-swallows.</p>
+
+<p>Others of the migrant host travel in upper air more quickly than we on
+water, and have left us far behind,&mdash;swans, the Canada goose, great
+flocks of brant, waveys by the millions, followed by their cousins of
+the duck tribe,&mdash;spoon-bill, canvas-back, mallard, pin-tail, ring-neck,
+wood duck, and merganser. The geese will not stop until they have passed
+the Arctic Circle. Why people use the word &quot;goose&quot; as synonym for
+stupidity is beyond the ken of the ordinary observer. The text-books
+tell us tritely that the goose lives to be a hundred years. If she does,
+she may exclaim with the Churchmen, &quot;Yet are my years but labour and
+sorrow.&quot; The little chaps who have their birthday parties among
+sub-Arctic reeds are surrounded with enemies from the first day they
+crack their baby shells. Lynx and raccoon prey upon them by land, eagles
+and owls swoop upon them as they swim; and as with one eye they scan the
+sky above them, a greedy pike is apt to snap their web-feet from under
+them and draw them to a watery grave.</p>
+
+<p>The cadets of the Hudson's Bay Company exchange courtesies with the
+Mounted Police, each considering himself a distinct cut above the other.
+One Mounted Policeman, whose duty it had been to escort the crazed
+Russian Doukhobortsi on one of their &quot;altogether&quot; pilgrimages, is hailed
+across the circle, &quot;Here, lend us your knife, you nursemaid to the
+Douks.&quot; &quot;Who spoke?&quot; yawned the Policeman. &quot;Was it that fur-pup of the
+Hudson's Bay?&quot; &quot;Yes,&quot; retorted the first, &quot;and I'm glad I'm it; you
+couldn't pay me to wear a red coat and say 'Sir' to a damned little
+Frenchman, even if you are going to blaze a trail to Hudson Bay.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Some one asks Sergeant Joyce to tell his Bible story. He says, &quot;Oh,
+about Coal-Oil Johnnie! It was the cub's first year in the service, and
+he got off with some civilians and was drunk for a week. When he was in
+the Guard Room awaiting court-martial he had lots of time 'to sit in
+clink, admirin' 'ow the world was made.' Likewise he was very dry. There
+was nothing for him to amuse himself with but a paper of pins. He took
+the pillow of his cot and used the whole bunch of pins in working on it
+the one word 'Hagar,' in letters six inches high. The inspecting officer
+came in and the pin sign caught his eye. He spelled it out letter by
+letter, 'H-a-g-a-r,&mdash;what was the matter with him?' Johnnie retorted,
+'The him was a her, and she died of thirst in the wilderness.' The
+inspecting officer says to Johnnie, 'Well, that would never happen to
+you.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A peculiar drumming wafts from the shore-line. &quot;Pa-pas-ku,&quot; says one of
+the Cree lads, pulling his pipe from his mouth and listening. Young
+Hudson's Bay to my enquiring look returns, &quot;The Canadian ruffed grouse,&quot;
+which Sussex elucidated, &quot;<i>Bonasa umbellus logata</i>,&quot; at which we all
+feel very much relieved.</p>
+
+<p>The Kid was pressing specimens, and, holding up a branch, the Mounted
+Policeman next her said, &quot;Young jackpine, I think.&quot; &quot;It belongs to the
+Conifer family,&quot; corrects the Doctor. &quot;Oh!&quot; says the Mounted Policeman,
+with a sniff, &quot;then we'll give it back to 'em the next time one of the
+Conifer boys comes round.&quot; The man of the river and the woods hates a
+Latin name, and any stray classic knowledge you have is best hidden
+under a napkin. The descriptive terms men use here are crisp and to the
+point. The vicious habit of giving birds bad names is one that grows,
+and you never know when the scientific have come to a finality. For
+instance, little Robin Red-Breast <i>(&quot;the pious bird with scarlet
+breast</i>&quot; whose nest with four eggs the Kid discovered to-day), has
+successively lived through three tags, &quot;<i>Turdus migratorius</i>,&quot;
+&quot;<i>Planesticus migratorius</i>,&quot; and &quot;<i>Turdus canadensis</i>.&quot; If he had not
+been an especially plucky little beggar he would have died under the
+libels long ago. For my own part I cannot conceive how a man with good
+red blood in his veins could look a chirky little robin in the eye and
+call him to his face a &quot;<i>Planesticus migratorius</i>,&quot; when as chubby
+youngster he had known the bird and loved him as Robin Red-Breast. One
+is inclined to ask with suspicion, &quot;Is naming a lost art?&quot; Any new
+flower discovered these days, every clever invention in the realm of
+machinery, is forthwith saddled with an impossible name. If it had not
+been easy to clip the term &quot;automobile&quot; down to the working stub &quot;auto,&quot;
+the machine would never have run our streets. Again, the decimal system
+is conceded to be far ahead of the asinine &quot;five and one-half yards make
+one rod, pole or perch&quot;; the only reason why the commonsense thing does
+not supersede the foolish one is that the sensible measurement has the
+fool tag on it. Who could imagine ever going into a store and asking for
+seven decimetres and nine centimetres of picture-moulding, or dropping
+into the corner grocery to buy a hectolitre of green onions? When man
+dug gold and iron and tin out of the earth he made things with them. Now
+when we discover a new mineral we dub it &quot;molybdenum&quot; and let it rust in
+innocuous ease. When man loses the art of nervous speech, his power of
+action goes with it. And as we ruminate, the <i>Bonasa umbellus togata</i>
+drums on.</p>
+
+<p>When we pass the parallel of 55&deg;N. we come into a very wealth of new
+words, a vocabulary that has found its way into no dictionary but which
+is accepted of all men. The steep bank opposite us is a &quot;cut bank,&quot; an
+island or sandbar in a river is a &quot;batture.&quot; A narrow channel is called
+a &quot;she-ny,&quot; evidently a corruption of the French <i>chenal</i>. When it leads
+nowhere and you have to back down to get out, you have encountered a
+&quot;blind she-ny.&quot; The land we have come from is known as &quot;Outside&quot; or &quot;<i>Le
+Grand Pays</i>.&quot; Anywhere other than where we sit is &quot;that side,&quot; evidently
+originating from the viewpoint of a man to whom all the world lay either
+on this side or that side of the river that stretched before him. When
+you obtain credit from a Hudson's Bay store, you &quot;get debt.&quot; A Factor's
+unwillingness to advance you goods on credit would be expressed thus,
+&quot;The Company will give me no debt this winter.&quot; From here northward the
+terms &quot;dollars&quot; and &quot;cents&quot; are unheard. An article is valued at &quot;three
+skins&quot; or &quot;eight skins&quot; or &quot;five skins,&quot; harking back to the time when a
+beaver-skin was the unit of money. The rate of exchange to-day is from
+four skins to two skins for a dollar. Trapping animals is &quot;making fur.&quot;
+&quot;I made no fur last winter and The Company would give me no debt,&quot; is a
+painful picture of hard times. Whenever an Indian has a scanty larder,
+he is &quot;starving,&quot; and you may be &quot;starving&quot; many moons without dying or
+thinking of dying. &quot;Babiche&quot; in the North is the tie that binds, and
+&quot;sinew&quot; is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or
+caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of
+the spinal column of the same animals.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0087"></a>
+<img src="images/img0087.jpg" width="315" height="380" alt="Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police" title="">
+<BR><B>Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>There is but one thing on this planet longer than the equator, and that
+is the arm of British justice, and the Mounted Police, these chaps
+sprawling at our feet, are the men who enforce it. The history of other
+lands shows a determined fight for the frontier, inch by inch
+advancement where an older civilization pushes back the native,&mdash;there
+are wars and feuds and bloody raids. Not so here. When the homesteader
+comes down the river we are threading and, in a flood, colonization
+follows him, he will find British law established and his home ready.
+The most compelling factor making for dignity and decency in this
+border-country is the little band of red-coated riders, scarcely a
+thousand in number. Spurring singly across the plains that we have
+traversed since leaving Winnipeg, they turn up on lone riverway or
+lakeside in the North just when most wanted.</p>
+
+<p>Varied indeed is this man's duty,&mdash;&quot;nursemaid to the Doukhobor&quot; was a
+thrust literally true. His, too, was the task on the plains of seeing
+that the Mormon doesn't marry overmuch. He brands stray cattle,
+interrogates each new arrival in a prairie-waggon, dips every doubtful
+head of stock, prevents forest-fires, keeps weather records, escorts a
+lunatic to an asylum eight hundred miles away, herds wood bison on the
+Slave, makes a cross-continent dash from Great Slave Lake to Hudson Bay,
+preserves the balance of power between American whaler and Eskimo on the
+Arctic edge!</p>
+
+<p>At one time the roll-call of one troup of Mounted Police included in its
+rank and file three men who had held commissions in the British service,
+an ex-midshipman, a son of a Colonial Governor, a grandson of a
+Major-General, a medical student from Dublin, two troopers of the Life
+Guards, an Oxford M.A., and half a dozen ubiquitous Scots. Recently an
+ex-despatch-bearer from De Wet joined the force at Regina, and although
+the cold shoulder was turned on him for a day or two, he soon made good.
+One of the young fellows stretched before us, now going to Fort Smith to
+round up wood bison, was born in Tasmania, ran away from school at
+fourteen, sheared sheep and hunted the wallaby, stoked a steamer from
+Australia to England and from England to Africa, and in the early days
+of bicycles was a professional racer.</p>
+
+<p>Constable Walker, lying lazily on his back blowing blue spirals into
+the air, has in the long winter night made more than once, with dogs,
+that perilous journey from the Yukon to the Mackenzie mouth (one
+thousand miles over an unknown trail), carrying to the shut-in whalers
+their winter mail. On one of these overland journeys he cut off the tips
+of his four toes. His guide fainted, but Walker took babiche and,
+without a needle, sewed up the wound. On this trip he was fifty-seven
+days on the trail, during five days of which the thermometer hovered
+between sixty-two and sixty-eight degrees below.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a><h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">De win' she blow, blow, blow,</span><br>
+An' de crew of de wood scow '<i>Julie Plante</i>'<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Got scar't an' run below&mdash;</span><br>
+For de win' she blow lak hurricane<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bimeby she blow some more,</span><br>
+An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wan arpent from de shore.&quot;</span><br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Dr. Drummond</i>.<br>
+
+<p>This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The
+daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten
+underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to
+thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes
+behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive laundry. At
+dusk we had seen an empty scow floating down river, adrift from
+Athabasca Landing. In the middle of Grand Rapids she broke amidships,
+but held together until in the darkness she floated beyond our ken.</p>
+
+<p>Trouble of our own awaits us. With no one noting, an adventurous scow,
+with all her precious cargo, has pulled loose from her moorings. By the
+time the Cree watchman discovers that the &quot;<i>Go-Quick-Her</i>&quot; has taken the
+bit in her teeth, the runaway with tail-sweep set has turned the next
+corner of the Athabasca. Great excitement! Billy Loutit and Emile
+Fosseneuve borrow the Police canoe and go in chase. It is such a rough
+bit of water that we hold our breaths, for a false stroke means death to
+both; but that false stroke does not come. Billy Loutit knows this river
+as we know the borders and shrubs in our garden-bed.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0091"></a>
+<img src="images/img0091.jpg" width="366" height="231" alt="Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore" title="">
+<BR><B>Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>This accident causes everyone to look grave. The Edmonton value of the
+cargo is over two thousand dollars, but it is a loss that cannot be
+measured in dollars and cents. These wrecked goods, gaily sailing down
+the Athabasca, cannot be duplicated at some convenient grocery around
+the corner.</p>
+
+<p>We have learned that any untoward happening means a half day's delay.
+Philip Atkinson calls me to one side to suggest that it would be a
+&quot;clear waste&quot; to leave behind the eggs of &quot;that duck's nest I showed you
+the day we came.&quot; Atkinson is a half-breed with a Hercules-build who
+looks forty-five and owns up to sixty. He and I chatted over the mallard
+eggs and my collection of wild flowers, he respecting the preservative
+art and I in full awe of that art gastronomic of his which gulps the
+Mallards-in-embryo, sans fourchette, sans salt, sans ceremony.</p>
+
+<p>They are an interesting study, these half-breeds; it means much to each
+on which side of the English Channel his father had birth. When a
+Frenchman marries an Indian woman he reverts to her scale of
+civilization; when a Scot takes a native to wife he draws her up to his.
+Our crew live at Lac la Biche and were engaged last winter for their
+season's work at from twenty to forty dollars a month, with board and
+moccasins. They walked a hundred miles to Athabasca Landing to connect
+with their summer's job, and the absolute certainty of regular meals
+just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and
+four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual
+happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic
+term &quot;the law of heredity&quot; works out with these people, cut off from the
+lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the
+pre-civilization Indian.</p>
+
+<p>Philip, duck-stuffed but untroubled by &quot;that full feeling after eating,&quot;
+lights his pipe and looks back through the years. &quot;My father belonged to
+The Company, my mother was an Ojibway from the Lake of the Woods
+country. My father went back to the Old Country when I was seven,
+leaving me to an uncle to be educated, and I don't know 'B' from a
+bull's foot. He put me to work on the woodpile from morning till night.
+When my father came back after twelve years and found me ignorant, he
+cried like a baby. I have no education, but,&quot; with a contemplative
+puff, &quot;I have friends wherever I go.&quot; Philip is good to look at and he
+is a linguist, speaking Cree, French, and excellent English with a
+delightful Scotch accent. He is an ardent admirer of the H.B. Company.
+&quot;They always kept their word with a man, and when they had done with
+him, returned him without cost to his old home.&quot; Philip and his two sons
+were the first to shoot the Grand Rapids, and he tells us that this
+stretch of the Athabasca River has been used only twenty years. Before
+that time people from the North reached Winnipeg by the Clearwater.
+Philip is a Loyalist. During the half-breed rebellion of 1885 he carried
+dispatches to Middleton and Otter, going seventy-five miles one day on
+foot. He had his horse, &quot;a draught-horse as black as a crow,&quot; taken from
+him twice, got through the lines and stole another, and tells proudly
+how for his deed of valor he was presented with an Assomption belt.</p>
+
+<p>At last we are off, keeping sharp look-out for the lost scow. Buffalo
+River, where we pull up for the night, is a recognized camping-place.
+The men know where to put their hands on old-time tent-poles, the boys
+dig out shin-bones of the moose,&mdash;the relics of some former
+feast,&mdash;which they gnaw as a puppy mumbles an old bone.</p>
+
+<p>Another manifestation of gas is here. It bubbles up on the shore and
+through the water at the boat's bow, and as we strike a match the whole
+surface flames like the brandy on a Christmas plum-pudding. On the
+opposite side of the river are &quot;lobsticks,&quot; a new word to us and a new
+thing. To stand as a living totem-pole, the Indians select on a striking
+promontory a tall spruce and from a section of the trunk lop all the
+branches except two, which are left as wings. If the lobstick is to
+stand a monument to a certain man or party, the names of those to be
+honored are written in Cree on an attached slab. We were to notice
+lobsticks from point to point along the rest of our journey, some of
+them indicating good hunting-grounds or fishing-places back from the
+shore, but most of them memorials of happenings on the river.</p>
+
+<p>The Little Buffalo carries to the Athabasca its noisy current between
+two high escarpments, and on the shelf leading back from the banks of
+the main stream is a far-reaching plateau of splendidly-fertile land. In
+the scow next us the two young Crees who are preparing the food for our
+evening &quot;meat-su&quot; carry on a religious controversy as they slice the
+sow-belly. We gather that one has been taken into the Protestant fold
+and that the other follows the priests. Duncan Trembl&eacute; comes down and
+cuffs them both soundly, putting an end to the argument with, &quot;It's all
+the same as the other, just like the Hudson's Bay Company and the free
+trader. Each one tells you his goods is the best and the other is
+<i>nee-moy-yuh mee-wah-sin</i> (no good). It's that way with the God-goods of
+the white men. Each church tells you that his is the best, but they all
+come down to us in the same scow, both the priest and the missionary.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next morning we are all keyed-up for the rapids, and about six miles
+down we encounter the Brul&eacute;, the first one, and take it square in
+mid-channel. We ship a little water, but pass through it all too soon,
+for the compelling grandeur of the Brul&eacute; grips one. The river here is
+held between vertical walls of the reddest of red sandstone against
+which the lush greenery makes a striking contrast. Twenty miles below is
+the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but
+because the boiler of the steamer <i>Wrigley</i> was lost here and still
+remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as
+clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The
+tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes
+the Long Rapid <i>(Kawkinwalk Abowstick</i>), which we run close to its right
+bank.</p>
+
+<p>From the distance sounds the ominous roar of the Big Cascade. At quarter
+past four we reach the head of the swirling fall. The underlying cause
+of the Big Cascade is a limestone ledge which cuts the channel
+diagonally and makes ugly-looking water. We plan to run the rapid one
+boat at a time. The crews are doubled. Our steersman is alert,
+expectant, and as agile as a cat, his black hair switching in the wind.
+Sitting in the centre of the scow, as we do, the sensation is very
+different to that which one experiences in running rapids in a canoe.
+Then it is all swiftness and dexterity, for your craft is light, and, in
+expert hands, easily dirigible with one clever turn of the wrist. With a
+ten-ton scow the conditions change and you feel correspondingly more
+helpless.</p>
+
+<p>The great rapid stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer.
+With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to
+him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up
+for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a
+water-fence. For all we own in the world we wouldn't be anywhere but
+just where we sit. If it is going to be our last minute, well, Kismet!
+let it come. At least it will not be a tame way of going out. For the
+life of me I cannot forbear a cry of exultation. Then there is the
+feeling below one's feet which you experienced when you were a kiddie
+lying flat on your stomach coasting down a side-hill and your little red
+sled struck a stone. We, too, have struck something, but do not stop to
+ask what the obstruction is.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0096"></a>
+<img src="images/img0096.jpg" width="369" height="227" alt="The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills" title="">
+<BR><B>The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to
+photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good
+vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just
+time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr.
+Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as
+we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it
+was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.</p>
+
+<p>The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Trembl&eacute;, the pilot, dances in the
+sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the
+top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the
+men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way
+through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The
+Inspector says, &quot;Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste.&quot; The
+native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis,
+&quot;After you, Inspector.&quot; Then Pelletier says, sharply, &quot;Jump, I tell you,
+jump; there's no time for&mdash;Gaston-and-Alphonse business here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly
+things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows
+discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged
+goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has
+been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on
+the bank,&mdash;five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three
+minutes!</p>
+
+<p>A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward
+McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an
+hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden
+alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening
+swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along
+the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before
+we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the
+enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks
+into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded
+island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in;
+so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back
+forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and
+Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful
+site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of
+Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.</p>
+
+<p>Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would
+expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their
+world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of
+the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition
+of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr.
+Brabant says, &quot;Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for
+you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?&quot; &quot;Never mind,&quot;
+says Bob, &quot;I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the
+water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation.
+Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her &quot;special
+orders&quot; are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North
+not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of
+the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for
+hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes.
+Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of
+the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting,
+and, turning it over, says bravely, &quot;I think it will dry.&quot; Mathematical
+and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic
+edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are
+miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and
+Hudson's Bay blankets!</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the
+Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding
+to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put
+up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little
+pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of
+effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted
+together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly
+Sand-boys &quot;all in one delicious gravy.&quot; The Doctor is dazed, and offers
+to white and brown alike a tin box with &quot;Have a pastile, do.&quot; He wanders
+among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they
+accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially
+appreciates,&mdash;something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the
+Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on
+each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. &quot;Here are some
+authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and
+I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian
+Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I
+shall never be able to tell which it is.&quot; One by one the Doctor digs out
+from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,&mdash;a presentation &quot;Life of the
+Countess of Munster,&quot; also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved
+holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be &quot;as old as the
+Conqueror.&quot; There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which
+carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows
+the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under
+a side of bacon, is a print of &quot;my great-grandfather who discovered a
+cure for scurvy.&quot; A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in
+Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead
+along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0101"></a>
+<img src="images/img0101.jpg" width="400" height="244" alt="Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader" title="">
+<BR><B>Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader</b>
+</center>
+
+<p>Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad
+one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort
+McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and
+a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition
+to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a
+five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years
+with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their
+migrations and tribal feasts. We question, &quot;Are you not lonely,
+especially in the winter?&quot; But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as
+heroic. &quot;Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians
+are always coming and going, and they are full of interest.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees
+when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness
+consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is
+divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the
+black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox
+would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but
+varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral
+alpacas, all of us,&mdash;something between a sheep and a goat. But no less
+are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of
+his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the
+self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home.
+The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind
+Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow
+from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that
+she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and
+depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an
+assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due
+to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss
+Gordon translates. &quot;I am delighted that ladies have come such a long
+distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all
+white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to
+old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water,
+the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children,&quot; and
+the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. &quot;Be
+glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it.&quot; It is the
+advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the
+Winnipeg Hospital.</p>
+
+<p>We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair
+of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle&mdash;merely for effect,
+for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In
+one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church
+to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the
+hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured
+hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that
+twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store
+to go across and dress this wound.</p>
+
+<p>When a schoolboy takes to his bosom a <i>fidus Achates</i>, the first thing
+he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces
+us to her find,&mdash;nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of
+a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.</p>
+
+<p>During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as
+they had &quot;made little fur,&quot; entertaining them as courteously as you
+would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink
+thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden,
+bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman
+passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a
+Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just
+about three days.</p>
+
+<p>A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,&mdash;the reading of the
+rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a
+peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the
+latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern
+contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full
+fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the
+future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort
+McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the
+mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said,
+&quot;Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn
+medicine so that I could help these poor creatures.&quot; Her tone of
+unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the
+scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden,
+radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of
+pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for&mdash;a
+Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any
+one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of
+the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has &quot;another
+guess coming.&quot; The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a
+stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the
+potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally
+an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the
+wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of
+growing things.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0102"></a>
+<img src="images/img0102.jpg" width="364" height="197" alt="The Steamer Grahame" title="">
+<BR><B>The Steamer <i>Grahame</i></B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay
+Company's steamer <i>Grahame</i> meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going
+passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort
+McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the
+easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers
+are navigated against stream by &quot;tacking,&quot; that is, towing the boats,
+weary mile after mile, &quot;by the power o' man,&quot; the half-breed boatmen
+scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden
+craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written
+word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out
+to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The <i>Grahame</i>
+has its advantages,&mdash;clean beds, white men's meals served in real
+dishes, and best of all, a bath!</p>
+
+<p>On the <i>Grahame</i> we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus
+far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it.
+Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of
+Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have
+ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to
+rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole
+chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a
+resonant voice. He can recite the whole of &quot;Paradise Lost&quot; as
+faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr.
+Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to
+shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see
+only the surface and have to guess the depths.</p>
+
+<p>As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56&deg;
+40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, &quot;where we
+are at.&quot; In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far
+north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and
+the lone Pribilof, &quot;where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and
+the seals they breed for themselves.&quot; Crossing the junction of the
+Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of
+Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789
+traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its
+confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters
+of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat
+contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in
+latitude 58&deg; 36' North.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0104"></a>
+<img src="images/img0104.jpg" width="310" height="278" alt="An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that
+upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of
+fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank,
+out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein,
+building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much
+time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those
+ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and
+determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant
+derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may
+reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of
+striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while &quot;punching&quot; one of
+his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of
+limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine,
+poplar, and spruce.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0105"></a>
+<img src="images/img0105.jpg" width="308" height="404" alt="Tar Banks on the Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Tar Banks on the Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is
+exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for
+blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these
+banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while
+extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the
+river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are
+medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.</p>
+
+<p>Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at
+every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a
+twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically
+may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is
+a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of
+over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a
+section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and
+twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed
+through the sands.</p>
+
+<p>Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two
+miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles
+up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable
+odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said,
+&quot;Smells are surer than sounds or sights.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down
+this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the
+coming of the railroad can bring to light.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a><h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,<br>
+Their humble joys and destiny obscure.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Gray's Elegy</i>.<br>
+
+<p>At seven in the morning of Sunday, June 21st, we enter Lake Athabasca,
+and catch our first glimpse of Fort Chipewyan. An acceptance of the
+invitation, &quot;Come, shake your leg,&quot; has kept the men busy half the night
+over a hot sequence of Red River jigs among &quot;pieces&quot; on the lower deck,
+and we have this superb sweep almost to ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>The great lake-scape is blue and green and grey and opaline as the sun
+strikes it and the surface breaks to a south wind. Ours is the one craft
+on this inland sea, but overhead a whole navy of clouds man&#339;uvres, the
+ships of the ghostly argosy doubling themselves in the lake. As we draw
+in, the village takes shape. What haunts us as we look at the white
+houses, that crescent beach of pinkest sand? We have it! It is a print,
+an old woodcut of &quot;Russian America&quot; that we used to pore over in the
+days when one wore &quot;pinnies&quot; of flour-sacking, and &quot;hankies&quot; were made
+from meal-bags.</p>
+
+<p>At one end of the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay
+Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the
+other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples
+and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of
+Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little Church of England, and higher
+up and farther back the Barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
+The white-washed homes of the employ&eacute;s of The Company, little
+match-boxes dazzling in the sun, stretch from one end of the beach to
+the other. In among the half-breed populace stalk policeman and priest,
+red jacket keeping the dark-skinned people straight in this world and
+black robe laying out conditions for the world to come. So is Chipewyan
+fate chequered with the <i>rouge et noir</i> of compulsion and expediency.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0108"></a>
+<img src="images/img0108.jpg" width="364" height="263" alt="Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Fort Chipewyan is the oldest post in the North, and every boulder of red
+gneissic rock, if we could interrogate it, has a story to tell. Peter
+Pond, of the North-West Company, in 1778 built a post on the Athabasca
+River thirty miles to the south of the lake. The far-seeing Alexander
+Mackenzie, in the interests of the same company, sent his cousin
+Roderick ten years later to build Fort Chipewyan on the lake, and for
+over a century this was the entrep&ocirc;t and emporium of the whole North.
+The Hudson's Bay Company meanwhile were maintaining a post, Fort
+Wedderburne, not far away on Potato Island, and upon the amalgamation of
+the Companies in 1821 they took possession of the present Fort
+Chipewyan.</p>
+
+<p>This metropolis is one hundred and twenty years old. Chipewyan was doing
+business at the same old stand before Toronto was the capital of Upper
+Canada, while Ottawa was still unheard of, and when of Chicago not even
+the Fort Dearborn nucleus had been built. 1788! We wonder if the old ox
+that conveys our &quot;cassette&quot; and &quot;pieces&quot; up to the big gateway of The
+Company's quadrangle was a drawer of wood and drinker of water at that
+date. He looks as if he might have been. George III was reigning in
+England when Fort Chipewyan was built, Arkwright was making his spinning
+jenny, and Watts experimenting with the steam-engine. Sir Joshua
+Reynolds painted his pictures, Burns, a young man of twenty-nine, was
+busy with his ballads. In London a little baby saw the light of day,
+whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron. Three British boys might
+have been seen with arms thrown over each other's shoulders, &quot;dreaming
+greatly&quot;&mdash;Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and
+Wordsworth just eighteen. Across the Channel the French Revolution was
+at its height. Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Down on the
+Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had
+gone through the birth-throes of nationhood. It is a far call.</p>
+
+<p>Scraping the yellow lichens off the old sun-dial, we adjust our
+bearings. We are 111&deg; West of Greenwich and in latitude 58&deg; 45' North.
+Our parallel carried eastward would strike the Orkneyan skerries and
+pass through Stromness. All untouched by the development of that busy
+continent to the south which has grown up within its lifetime, Chipewyan
+is a little pearl of the periwigged days of the early Georges. From its
+red sands, tamarack swamps, and mossy muskeg one almost expects to see
+arise the forms of those great of old who outfitted here, making
+Chipewyan the base of their northward explorations. The ghostly company
+is a goodly one&mdash;Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Simpson, and Sir
+John Franklin (their honorary prefixes coming to them in the after days
+as reward of their labors), Back and Richardson and Rae, and in later
+days that young stripling curate who was afterwards to be known
+throughout the world of letters as Bishop Bompas, the &quot;Apostle of the
+North.&quot; Then there is the great unnamed horde who rested tired limbs at
+Chipewyan on their northward journeys, each on his own
+mission&mdash;fur-traders and hunters of big game, devoted nuns and silent
+priests, the infrequent scientist, and the hundreds of Klondikers, their
+hearts hot with the greed for gold. These all through the century have
+enjoyed as we now enjoy the spontaneous hospitality of this little bit
+of Britain which floats the Union Jack from its fort walls, and whose
+people, brown and white, when the belated news of the passing of
+Victoria the Great reached this her northern outpost, gathered on the
+beach and bewailed aloud their personal loss. We seem to hear again the
+far-flung cry &quot;The Queen is dead! The Queen is dead!&quot; from the
+half-breed runners coming in that Christmas Day across the winter ice.</p>
+
+<p>Mackenzie made Chipewyan his headquarters for eight years. It was from
+here he started on his voyage to the Arctic Sea in 1789, and three years
+later on that other history-making journey to the far Pacific. Sir John
+Franklin outfitted here for his two land-journeys&mdash;in July, 1820, with
+Dr. Richardson, and again in 1825. Chipewyan is a mine of interest. We
+almost begrudge time given to the dainty meals of our hostess, Mrs.
+William Johnson, and the hours spent between her lavender-scented
+sheets.</p>
+
+<p>In the loft above the office of the H.B. Company, in among old
+flintlock rifles and discarded ox-yokes, we browse through the daily
+records of The Company, old journals written by the Factors at the close
+of their day's work through the years and here preserved for our
+inquisitive eyes. Sitting on the floor, making extracts from these
+tomes, one has the half-guilty feeling of being caught poking into a
+tomb.</p>
+
+<p>On this page the ink is thin and one can see the old writer thawing out
+his frozen ink-pot of stone at the end of a tired day and sitting down
+to write his simple tale. Here are finger-marks where the blood of a
+buffalo gives a marginal note. The journalist had been called away from
+his writing to weigh and pay for some fresh meat. Drops from a tallow
+candle show the light of other days. A pressed mosquito of the vintage
+of 1790 is very suggestive. We picture the trivial round and common task
+of the man who writes, see him exchanging fathoms of tobacco for
+beaver-pelts in those long, cold winters, and eagerly hunger with him
+for the signs presaging the going-out of the ice and the coming-in of
+Spring. We follow out the short Summer with him and revel in its
+perpetual daylight. With him we make the fall fishery and shoot our
+winter's supply of waveys and southward-flying cranes. We wonder, as he
+wondered, what news the next packet will bring from the old folks in the
+Orkneys or the Hebrides. We study, as he studied, the problem of
+governing his servants, placating the Indians, and making enough fur to
+satisfy that inexorable Board of Directors back in London whose motto is
+&quot;Skin for skin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It has been a grim enough life as the author of this journal records it.
+He is far from those who direct his fate, and recognition and reward are
+slow in coming. Companionship and the gentle arts of &quot;outside&quot; are
+denied him. He must make his own world and rear within it his dusky
+brood, that they in honourable service may follow his round of &quot;work
+done squarely and unwasted days.&quot; What made the charm of this life to
+these men? It is hard to see. The master of the post was also master of
+the situation, and an autocrat in his community, a little Fur King, a
+Captain of Industry. A thing was law because he said it. And isn't it
+Caesar himself who declares, &quot;Better be first in a little Iberian
+village than second in Rome?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We get a delightful picture in an entry under the date of Wednesday,
+23rd May, 1827, when Sir John Franklin was on his way back to England at
+the end of his second journey.</p>
+
+&quot;To-day William McGillivary and Katherine Stewart, daughter<br>
+of Alexander Stewart, Chief Factor, were joined in holy wedlock<br>
+by Captain John Franklin, R.N., Commander of the Land Arctic<br>
+Expedition.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Great is the force of example, for five days later appears the entry</p>
+
+&quot;This evening the ceremonial of marriage took place between<br>
+Robert McVicar, Esq., and Christy McBeath. Captain Franklin<br>
+acted on the occasion as clergyman. The ceremony o'er, the<br>
+evening was agreeably spent in a family assembly.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Looking at these records, we are reminded of a not-very-well-known story
+of international courtesy which connects itself with the third and
+ill-fated journey of Franklin. Old Sir John, then in his sixtieth year,
+had sailed from England in an attempt at the Northwest Passage. Years
+passed and no word came from the explorer, and in 1852 the ice-desert
+was still mute.</p>
+
+<p>In this year, Sir Edward Belcher in the <i>Resolute</i> headed one of the
+many Arctic Relief Expeditions, subsequently abandoning his boat in the
+ice off Melville Island. Next year the American whaler <i>Henry George</i>
+met the deserted <i>Resolute</i> in sound condition about forty miles from
+Cape Mercy; she must have drifted through Barrow Strait, Lancaster
+Sound, and Baffin Bay. She was recovered, the Government of the United
+States bought her and with international compliments presented her in
+perfect condition to Queen Victoria in 1856. The old ship was broken up
+about thirty years ago, and from the soundest of her timbers a solid
+desk was made by direction of Queen Victoria, who presented it to the
+then President of the United States. This is the desk which stands in
+President Taft's reception room to-day, and on it the papers of eight
+administrations have been written.</p>
+
+<p>There is living as well as buried history in Chipewyan. A stroll from
+one end of its lacustrine street to the other is lush with interest. We
+call upon Colin Fraser, whose father was piper to Sir George Simpson.
+Colin treats us to a skirl of the very pipes which announced the
+approach of Simpson whenever that little Northern autocrat, during his
+triumphal progress through a bailiwick as big as Europe, made his way
+into a new fort.</p>
+
+<p>With the echo of the &quot;<i>Gay Gordons</i>&quot; in our ears we pass into the
+largest convent in the North country, managed by the Grey Nuns of
+Montreal. Sister Brunelle came into the North in 1866. Forty-two years
+in a convent-school of the Northland! It makes one gasp.</p>
+
+<p>These Indian schools, assisted by the Canadian Government, catch the
+little Indians in the camps and hold their prey on school-benches from
+the age of four to fourteen. One boy is dumb, another a hunchback. In a
+corner we came upon a poor old derelict of the camps, a Cree woman,
+paralysed and mentally deranged, who within these quiet walls has found
+harbour. The kiddies are taught one clay in French and the next day in
+English; but when they hide behind their spellers to talk about the
+white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan. What do they learn?
+Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes,
+grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in
+Southern schools. When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their
+skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep
+(young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish
+meals for a twelve-month to come. If fish be brain food, then should
+this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards,
+capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarships <i>ad lib</i>.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0115"></a>
+<img src="images/img0115.jpg" width="308" height="308" alt="Three of a Kind" title="">
+<BR><B>Three of a Kind</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was
+from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their prot&eacute;g&eacute;s, that the
+sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
+in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This
+wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.</p>
+
+<p>We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and
+immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot,
+with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty
+bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a
+recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these
+good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six
+o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light
+is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. &quot;What in the world do you
+do after six?&quot; I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not
+content to rest in idle laps. &quot;Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to
+give us light.&quot; Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through
+the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft
+a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their
+candles like Alfred of old.</p>
+
+<p>Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a
+stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations. At the Church
+of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from
+the leg of an injured Indian. Afterward we learn that the peripatetic
+patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in
+the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome.
+Poor chap, he died in the process! But while he lived he stimulated
+trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale. If
+there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have
+comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably
+fore-ordained.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting family lives next to the English Mission&mdash;the Loutits.
+The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company,
+and &quot;for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a
+rabbit-track.&quot; There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old
+journals reach. The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree
+and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day's generation is a family of
+striking young people&mdash;the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work
+and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding
+the strong men's records of the North.</p>
+
+<p>George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from
+Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids. His
+brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran
+with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in
+three days&mdash;a distance of two hundred miles at least. Once, when the
+river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow
+to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling
+upward in the night. The rivermen tell of George Loutit's quarreling
+with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his
+adversary out of the window. When he heard him slump, George immediately
+thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for
+Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away. He arrived there in time for
+noon luncheon next day.</p>
+
+<p>At the H.B. Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge. A
+French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is
+peltries and not souls that Pierre is after. His forebears were Irish
+McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of
+French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such
+entries as these:&mdash;&quot;Wyllie at the forge,&quot; &quot;Wyllie making nails,&quot; &quot;Wyllie
+straightening the fowling-pieces,&quot; &quot;Wyllie making sled-runners,&quot; &quot;This
+day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian.&quot; We step into the old man's
+smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a &quot;Good
+mornin',&quot; in richest Doric. The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation
+of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan. He was born
+in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World. Coming out
+to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he
+threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without
+seeing a city in America. Torontonians think the hub of the universe is
+their capital on Lake Ontario. A smart young man from Toronto filtered
+in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, &quot;Came from the
+Old Country, didn't you? What did you think of Toronto?&quot; &quot;Naething, I
+didna see the place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a
+two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone. In the
+forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of
+his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north,
+Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west. To him
+these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into
+luxuriousness with all its weakening influence. &quot;It was much better in
+the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil. Nowadays, when we
+have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are
+coming out!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>No one feels like smiling a smile of superiority in talking with old Mr.
+Wyllie. He has taught himself the gentle arts of gunsmithing and
+blacksmithing. The tools that we see all around us are marvels of
+mechanical skill and would be the joy of a modern Arts and Crafts
+Exhibition. His sledges and augurs, planes and chisels have been made by
+the old man out of pig iron which came as ballast in the holds of those
+old sailing ships which beat their way into Fort Churchill through
+Hudson Strait. The hand-made tools are set into convenient handles of
+moose-horn and bone. Clever indeed is the workmanship that Wyllie has
+done with them. The last triumph from this unique forge was the welding
+of the broken shaft of the little tug <i>Primrose</i>. The steamer <i>Grahame</i>
+was built at Chipewyan of whipsawn lumber, and much of her steel and
+ironwork was wrought on Wyllie's forge.</p>
+
+<p>Wyllie left the Scottish Isles when a mere lad, but they are still
+&quot;Home&quot; to him and he tells us that this autumn he is going back on a
+visit. It was a prototype of Wyllie's</p>
+
+&quot;From the lone sheiling and the misty island,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,</span><br>
+But still the heart, the heart is Highland,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And we in <i>dreams</i> behold the Hebrides,&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>who prayed &quot;O, Lord, we beseech Thee, send down Thy covenanted blessin'
+on the Muckle Hebrides, the Lesser Hebrides, and the adjacent islands
+of Great Britain and Ireland.&quot; Talking with the old gentleman, you are
+conscious of the innate moral strength rather than the mechanical skill
+of the craftsman. Instinctively you feel the splendid power of his
+presence and come out from his forge murmuring, &quot;Thank God I have seen a
+<i>man</i> this day.&quot; Wyllie belongs to the age of the old journals, to the
+days that bred Joe Gargerys and old Adams in whom appeared &quot;the constant
+service of the antique world.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0120"></a>
+<img src="images/img0120.jpg" width="575" height="355" alt="Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North." title="">
+<BR><B>Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North.</B>
+</center>
+
+<blockquote><tt>
+EXPLANATION OF PLATE<br>
+<br>
+A and C&mdash;<i>Muski-moots</i>, or bags used by the duck-hunter for his game.
+Made by Dog-Rib women, of <i>babiche</i>, or rawhide of the moose or caribou.<br>
+<br>
+B&mdash;Velvet leggings richly embroidered in violet-coloured bead-work, made
+by Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald, a full-blooded Loucheaux woman.<br>
+<br>
+D&mdash;Wall-pocket of white deerskin embroidered in silk. Made by a
+Rabbit-Skin woman at Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.<br>
+<br>
+E&mdash;Wall-pocket ornamented with porcupine-quill work, made by a
+Yellow-Knife Indian woman at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.<br>
+<br>
+F&mdash;<i>Fire-bag</i>, or tobacco-pouch, made of two claws of the black bear.
+The work of a Beaver Indian woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.<br>
+<br>
+G&mdash;<i>Fire-bag</i> of velvet ornamented with silk-work, made by Chipewyan
+woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.<br>
+<br>
+H&mdash;Velvet watch-bag embroidered in silk, made by Slavi Indian woman at
+Fort Providence, at the head of Mackenzie River.<br>
+<br>
+I&mdash;Watch-pocket of smoked moose-skin, embroidered in silk-work, made by
+a Cree girl at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca.<br>
+<br>
+J&mdash;Armlets ornamented in porcupine quills, made by a half-breed woman on
+the Liard River (a feeder of the Mackenzie).<br>
+<br>
+K&mdash;Three hat bands&mdash;the first two ornamented with porcupine quills, and
+the last in silk embroidery&mdash;made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac,
+Lake Athabasca.<br>
+<br>
+L&mdash;Beautiful belt of porcupine work, made by a half-breed woman at Fort
+Nelson on the Liard (a feeder of the Mackenzie).<br>
+<br>
+M&mdash;Armlets of porcupine-quill work, made by half-breed girl at Fort
+Chipewyan.<br>
+</tt></blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. and Mrs. William Johnson, with generous courtesy, have made us
+their guests while we stay, and their refined home is a clear delight.
+Mr. Johnson is as clever a man as Mr. Wyllie, but in other lines.
+Without ever having seen an electric light, he learned by study and
+research more about electricity than nine men out of ten know who go
+through Electrical Training Schools. With the knowledge thus gained he
+constructed and put into working use an electric-light plant at Fort
+Simpson on the Mackenzie. Far up here on the map, too, the &quot;Judge,&quot; as
+he is lovingly called, taught himself all about watches, and he is now
+Father Time for the whole Mackenzie District, regulating and mending
+every timepiece in the country. The corrected watches are carried to
+their owners by the next obliging person who passes the post, where the
+owner is notching off the days on a piece of stick while he waits. A
+watch, the works of which were extracted from three old ones and
+assembled within one case by this Burbank of Watchdom, found its way
+down to Chicago. The jeweller into whose hands it fell declared that
+among all his workmen there was not one who could have duplicated the
+job.</p>
+
+<p>Chipewyan is a bird paradise; the whole woods are vocal to-day. In the
+autumn, wonderful hunts are made of the southward-flying cranes, geese,
+and waveys, thousands of these great birds being killed and salted and
+put in ice chambers for winter use. If the mosquitoes were not so bad we
+would spend hours in the woods here with &quot;God's jocund little fowls.&quot;
+These sweet songsters seem to have left far behind them to the south all
+suspicion of bigger bipeds. We hear the note of the ruby-crowned kinglet
+(<i>regulus calendula</i>) which some one says sounds like &quot;Chappie, chappie,
+jackfish.&quot; The American red-start comes to our very feet, the yellow
+warbler, the Tennessee warbler, the red-eyed vireo, and the magnolia
+warbler, which last, a young Cree tells us, is
+&quot;High-Chief-of-all-the-small-birds.&quot; Rusty blackbirds are here with
+slate-coloured junco, and we see a pair of purple finches. We are
+fortunate in getting a picture of the nest of the Gambel sparrow and two
+of the nesting white-throated, sparrow. They are ferreted out for us by
+the sharp eyes of a girl who says her Cree name is
+&quot;A-wandering-bolt-of-night-lightning!&quot; At our feet blossom cinquefoil,
+immortelles, the dainty flowers of the bed-straw.</p>
+
+<p>It has been a full day, and by the way the &quot;permits&quot; are opening up in
+the settlement when we come back, promises to be a full night. These men
+have waited a whole year for a drink, and now the lids can't come off
+quick enough. &quot;Come, hurry up, Flynn, we're all as dry as wooden gods,
+we're so dry that we're brittle&mdash;we'd break if you hit us.&quot; &quot;Well, I'm
+hurrying; I'm as much in a rush as any of you; I'm so warped the hoops
+are falling off.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It doesn't take long to polish off the permits proper (or improper). By
+morning all this liquor, imported for &quot;medicinal purposes,&quot; is gone.
+Whoever in Chipewyan is thoughtless enough to get ill during the next
+twelve months must fall back on the medicine-chest of the English
+Mission or of the Grey Nuns. Anything strong will do for the creation of
+joyousness during the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days of the
+year&mdash;Jamaica ginger, lavender-water, flavouring extracts.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning the bon vivants of Chipewyan are down to essences of lemon,
+vanilla, and ginger, which have been specially imported as stimulating
+beverages. We ask if they are any good. &quot;Good? I should say so, and one
+bottle just makes a drink. Can I offer&quot; (politely) &quot;to exhilarate you
+ladies with vanilla?&quot; The most jovial of the celebrants tells of his
+early imbibition of red ink. &quot;I used to get a gallon of red ink with my
+outfit every year, and it gives you the good feel, but when this new
+Commissioner comes in he writes, 'I don't see how you can use a gallon
+of red ink at your post in one year,' and I writes back, 'What we don't
+use we abuse,' and next year he writes to me, 'It's the abuse we
+complain of,' and, with regretful reminiscence, &quot;I got no more red ink.&quot;
+The substitution of red tape for the carmine fluid that inebriates is an
+innovation not appreciated.</p>
+
+<p>The old records fascinate us. We spend every spare moment before the
+coming of the treaty party in transcribing choice bits from them. There
+were drinks and drinkers in these old days.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, Friday 1st. January</i>. All hands came as is customary to wish us
+the compliments of the season, and they were treated with cakes each, a
+pipe, and two feet tobacco. In the evening they have the use of the hall
+to dance, and are regaled with a beverage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, April 30. Poitras</i>, a Chipewyan half-breed, arrived, and
+delivered 81 made beavers in prime furs, though he says he has been
+sickly all winter. I therefore presented him with a complete clothing
+and a Feather.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, May 16th</i>. One of our Indians having been in company with
+Indians from Isle a la Crosse got married to one of their young women,
+consequently has followed the father-in-law and taken his hunt away from
+us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1830, August 13th</i>. One Indian, <i>The Rat</i>, passed us on the Portage,
+he was treated with a dram for 'Old Acquaintance' sake.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On New Year's Eve the old chronicler drops into verse. In tall thin
+letters in faded ink we read,</p>
+
+&quot;If New Year's Eve the wind blow south,<br>
+It betokeneth warmth and growth;<br>
+If west, much milk, and fish in the sea;<br>
+If north, much storms and cold will be;<br>
+If east, the trees will bear much fruit;<br>
+If northeast, flee it man and beast.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1831, January 1</i>. The thermometer this morning was 29 below cypher.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>1831, May 22</i>. They bring intelligence that <i>Mousi-toosese-capo</i> is at
+their tent, having lately joined them, without his family of two women
+and two children, who perished during the winter. From his frequent
+prevarication when questioned by the other Crees, they suspect he has
+murdered and eaten them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1831, May 30th.</i> The fellow has got too large a family for a Fort
+Hunter, he cannot feed them with unlimited Indulgence and supply us at
+the same time.&quot; [Would Mr. Roosevelt second this?]</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1831, June 19th</i>. Two Chipewyans came from the Long Point informing us
+that <i>Big Head's</i> son is dead, that <i>Big Head</i> has thrown away his
+property in consequence of the loss of his boy, and that he told them to
+beg a shirt and tobacco. The shirt, of course, I did not send, the
+scoundrel is not worthy of it. I merely sent him six inches of tobacco
+with reluctance. That cursed family is a perfect pest to the place, and
+it is my humble opinion that the hand of Providence sends them the
+present calamity for their ill deeds.&quot;[!]</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1834, November 27th.</i> A party of the Isle &agrave; la Crosse Indians with old
+<i>Nulooh</i> and <i>Gauche</i> cast up. They have not come in this direction for
+the sake of running about, some of their relations is dead, and in their
+own words they are travelling on strange lands to kill grief, not an
+unusual custom among the Northern Indians.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1865, October 23rd</i>. We were surprised yesterday at the arrival of a
+Protestant missionary, a Mr. Bompas from England; he came in a canoe
+from the Portage with Sylvestre and <i>Vadnoit</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1866, January 1st</i>. The whole Establishment breakfasted in the Hall
+and in the evening a Ball came off with great eclat. Two marriages also
+to-day, Francis Villebrun to Marie Cyre, and Baptiste St. Cyre, Jr., to
+Justine McKay&mdash;so that all things considered the New Year was ushered
+in with a tremendous row! Verily, times are improving in the North.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1866, January 2nd</i>. The men are rather seedy to-day after their
+tremendous kick-up of yesterday.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1840, January 25th.</i> The object of sending <i>Lafleur</i> to the Little
+Island is that he may procure a kind of willow that the Canadians call
+'Courmier,' the bark of which scraped and boiled in water has healing
+qualities which they think will be of great service for Hassel's
+complaint. Confidence in anything is half the cure.&quot;[!]</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1840, February 1st</i>. Hassel is still without much appearance for the
+better, and at his earnest request was bled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1841, December 31st</i>. The men from the Fishery made their appearance
+as usual at this time, and as usual, too, the best we had (which
+by-the-by is not great as will be seen by this journal) was served out
+to them. The other men had the time to themselves to prepare for the
+holiday of to-morrow, for the <i>Jour de Tan</i> is the greatest day of the
+Canadians in these distant Northern posts. To finish things properly
+there is still wanting the famous aqua vitae, which we are sorry to
+state is not in our means to furnish. Adieu the year one thousand eight
+hundred and forty-one!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1842, February 13th</i>. The Rev. Mr. Evans proposing to take his
+departure to-morrow for Isle a la Crosse edified us with a farewell
+service, several of the women and children were baptized, and Flett and
+Hassel were married to their wives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From the records we compile this Chipewyan calendar:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>March 17th, House-flies. April 8th, Grey goose seen. April 11th,
+Catkins. April 12th, Barking crows. April 19th, Blackbirds and
+mosquitoes. April 21st, Plover, two hawks, and a butterfly. April 22nd,
+Gulls, white waveys, robins. April 28th, White cranes. April 30th,
+Frogs, most of snow gone. May 2nd, Dark butterfly, four purple crocuses.
+May 4th, Frogs noisy, bumble bees. May 5th, Nearly clear of ice. May
+8th, Water from Peace River flowing into lake. An Eagle. May 10th, Sand
+martins. Ice drifting in channel in front of fort. May 20th, Swans
+passing north. May 21st, Trees bursting into leaf. July 11th,
+Strawberries and raspberries. August 18th, Cranes passing south. October
+11th, Small birds passing south. October 12th, First ptarmigan seen
+about the fort. October 24th, Lake in front closed up this morning.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Afar from stir of streets,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The city's dust and din,</span><br>
+What healing silence meets<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And greets us gliding in!</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;The noisy strife<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And bitter carpings cease.</span><br>
+Here is the lap of life,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Here are the lips of peace.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>C.G.D. Roberts</i>.</p>
+
+<p>For fresh woods and pastures new this Friday, June 26th! Our little
+&quot;bunch&quot; breaks up. Mr. Brabant and Mrs. Harding, of the Hudson's Bay
+Company contingent, go on in the <i>Grahame</i> to Smith's Landing, and with
+them the two detachments of the R.N.W.M.P. As we shake hands with the
+police party, we wonder what Fate has in store for each of us. Breaking
+off at Fort Resolution, Great Slave Lake, and trending eastward by canoe
+over unchartered ways, will they reach salt water on Hudson Bay as they
+hope?</p>
+
+<p>For our two selves, great good fortune is ours. The Canadian Government
+Indian Treaty party, consisting of Mr. Conroy in command, Mr. Laird as
+secretary, Dr. Donald, and Mr. Mooney in charge of the commissariat,
+with Constable Gairdner, R.N.W.M.P., as Escort, has just come down the
+Peace. To-day they pay treaty in Chipewyan, and this afternoon start
+for far Fond du Lac, at the eastern extremity of Lake Athabasca. The
+little H.B. tug <i>Primrose</i> will tow them and their outfit in a York-boat
+and a scow, and the captain has been persuaded to allow us, too, to take
+our blankets and come along, sleeping on the deck. The <i>Primrose</i> from
+stem to stern is not big enough to swing a cat in, but who wants to
+swing a cat? It is blue Lake Athabasca that we long to see; no white
+woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity and we would go if
+we had to work our passage at the sweeps of the scow.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0129"></a>
+<img src="images/img0129.jpg" width="310" height="310" alt="Lake Athabasca in Winter" title="">
+<BR><B>Lake Athabasca in Winter</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Athabasca Lake (whose name means &quot;In Muskeg Abounding&quot;), is two hundred
+miles long, with thirty-five miles at its greatest width. It lies in a
+general easterly and westerly direction. No survey has been made of the
+lake; its height above ocean level is seven hundred feet, and it covers
+perhaps three thousand square miles. Its chief feeder is the Athabasca
+River, down which we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by
+the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake
+Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts
+of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse
+wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation
+being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for
+six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable
+blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace and Athabasca Rivers
+open their icy mouths about May-day, parts ot the lake are not free for
+travel until mid-May. The lake freezes fast at Fort Chipewyan some time
+in November. Lying on the deck of the tug, we look down and take
+inventory of our odd tow. Just behind comes the scow. It holds wood for
+the engine, a long sled, a canoe, a &quot;skift,&quot; all this year's trading
+supplies for Fond du Lac, and half a dozen chained husky dogs. Trailing
+the scow is a York-boat carrying the treaty party and Mr. Harris.</p>
+
+<p>It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun
+is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock
+Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at
+the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well
+stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little
+deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the
+typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us
+from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for
+slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican
+Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them
+until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many,
+many hundreds of miles.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0131"></a>
+<img src="images/img0131.jpg" width="287" height="401" alt="Bishop Grouard" title="">
+<BR><B>Bishop Grouard</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On
+board the <i>Primrose</i> the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the
+wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch
+with him. &quot;I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to
+have neither chart nor compass.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, &quot;we just go by
+the power o' man,&quot; and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches
+us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in
+the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered
+adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.</p>
+
+<p>By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day.
+At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the
+scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five
+dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on
+the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In
+front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended
+midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of
+baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so
+far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of
+reindeer moss (<i>cladonia rangiferina</i>?), the <i>tripe de roche</i> of the
+North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its
+gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the
+odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian
+lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and
+acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and
+tonic.</p>
+
+<p>No orders are given when we land, and we study countenances and actions
+to guess the time-limit of our tether. For twenty-four hours we have
+wondered if there were trout in Lake Athabasca and if they would rise to
+the fly. With a borrowed rod we take a canoe and off the shadow of a
+cottonwood point try a cast at random. The gut carries three flies&mdash;a
+brown hackle, a coachman, with a Jock Scott at the tail&mdash;a rainbow
+aggregation. To the coachman we get a rise and it takes three of us to
+land him. There are no scales; so his weight must forever be unrecorded,
+but as we lay him out he measures just a trifle over twenty-three
+inches, as beautiful a lake trout as ever sent thrill up and down a
+sympathetic spine. Bye-and-bye this road we travel is going to be
+listed on the sporting routes of the world, and tired souls from the
+Seven Seas with rod and gun will here find Nepenthe.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0133"></a>
+<img src="images/img0133.jpg" width="364" height="245" alt="The Modern Note-book" title="">
+<BR><B>The Modern Note-book</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Clutching our catch, we step gingerly along an outstretched oar and
+climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and
+suggest turf rather than surf. &quot;Kick her up, Mac!&quot; &quot;Give her a kick
+ahead!&quot; &quot;Who-o-oa!&quot; On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac,
+clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All
+unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet us,&mdash;bent
+old crones, strong men, and black-eyed babies. For is not the coming of
+the treaty party the one event of the Fond du Lac year?</p>
+
+<p>Half way along the traverse of the lake we had crossed the
+inter-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern
+limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's
+Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak
+English,&mdash;Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler
+who would fain shepherd their souls.</p>
+
+<p>These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only
+at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the
+<i>moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers</i> (July) they will press back
+east and north to the land of the caribou. September,
+<i>the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns</i>, will find them camping
+on the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the
+<i>hour-frost-moon,</i> or the <i>ice-moon,</i> they will be laying lines of
+traps.</p>
+
+<p>We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians
+by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in
+its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned
+the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of
+Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present
+has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction,
+by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection
+had been loud and eloquent.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0135"></a>
+<img src="images/img0135.jpg" width="364" height="296" alt="Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian" title="">
+<BR><B>Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman
+whom he addresses as &quot;Josette.&quot; Their three girls are being educated in
+the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the
+grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with
+thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the
+latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter
+nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of
+the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with
+the great world of thought outside. &quot;Stone walls do not a prison make
+nor iron bars a cage.&quot; Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under
+birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of
+ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and
+Labrador tea <i>(Ledum latifolium</i>), we reach the H.B. garden where the
+potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little
+graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The
+inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father
+Beihler, who comes across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years
+the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in
+the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit
+hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was
+out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself
+wept. White women are a <i>rara avis</i>. Father Beihler wants to know how
+old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing
+wisely to the Kid, he assures me, &quot;They are not an-gell (angel) at that
+age,&quot; and says, &quot;I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a <i>woman
+chercher</i>.&quot; The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him,
+and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we
+have in common,&mdash;the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond
+du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so
+far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned
+warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0137"></a>
+<img src="images/img0137.jpg" width="368" height="216" alt="A Bit of Fond du Lac" title="">
+<BR><B>A Bit of Fond du Lac</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the
+trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The
+father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money
+to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served
+The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in
+England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here
+Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the
+tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.</p>
+
+<p>To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more
+interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form
+silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the
+Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and
+makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a
+contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass,
+become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string
+tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who
+used to &quot;make fur&quot; in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the
+extinct product of a past race that never existed.</p>
+
+<p>The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce
+of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the animal's skull
+to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and
+musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on
+sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in
+the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the
+animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her
+side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp
+she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.</p>
+
+<p>The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and
+they are perhaps the least unspoiled of &quot;civilisation,&quot; as their range
+is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie.
+To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled
+down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on
+the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have
+not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and
+sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the
+germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in
+the graves by the wayside.
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0139"></a>
+<img src="images/img0139.jpg" width="363" height="295" alt="Birch-barks at Fond du Lac" title="">
+<BR><B>Birch-barks at Fond du Lac</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two
+canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs
+following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary
+weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence
+the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind
+of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for
+moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are <i>cached</i>, and the trail strikes into
+the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and
+eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge
+wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his
+journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting
+incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps
+flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie
+Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.</p>
+
+<p>Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart
+of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral
+fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are
+lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his
+traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line
+of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an
+accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of
+the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small
+hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights
+come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far
+trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent streams, the
+Chipewyan trudges from trap to trap; if he finds fifty dollars worth of
+fur along the whole line he is content. It is not this lonely man who
+gets the high price, madame, for your marten stole or opera-cloak of
+ermine.</p>
+
+<p>On the trail the hunter may go hungry for two days and no word of
+complaint, just a tightening of the lips and L'Assumption belt, and a
+firm set to the jaw; but when a moose is killed life is one long supper.
+A jolly priest whispers of this confession from a son of the Church, a
+recent brand from the burning, &quot;O Father, I know that Christianity is
+true, the great, the strong religion. When I was a heathen Chipewyan and
+trapped with my mother's tribe I ate ten rabbits a day. But now I am a
+Christian, a good Catholic, seven rabbits are enough for me&mdash;I will eat
+no more!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In the early days the H.B. Company allowed its men <i>en voyage</i> five
+pounds of meat a day, and each kiddie three pounds. In British Columbia
+and the Yukon the ration was one salmon; up here on the Athabasca one
+wild goose or three big whitefish; on the Arctic foreshore two fish and
+three pounds of reindeer meat. This was the scheduled fare, but the
+grimness of the joke appears in the fact that each man had to run his
+breakfast to earth before he ate it.</p>
+
+<p>Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when
+the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt. The
+whole thing is a Louisiana lottery. The very next trap may hold a
+silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and
+a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr.
+Harris. As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the
+starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so
+long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond
+du Lac. In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating
+caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake. Caribou skins are in
+prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh
+or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk.
+About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance
+from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs
+with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother
+Church. Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear,
+and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty
+money and annual reunion in July.</p>
+
+<p>Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou
+(<i>rangifer articus</i>), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the
+bands of the dead and gone buffalo. Caribou go north in spring and south
+in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou
+form the advance line. They drop their young far out toward the seacoast
+in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow.
+The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make
+the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July. From this time they
+stay together till the rutting season is over late in October. Then the
+great herds of caribou,&mdash;&quot;la foule,&quot;&mdash;gather on the edge of the woods
+and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food
+afforded by the country of the larger pine trees. A month later the
+females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the
+uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the
+end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.</p>
+
+<p>This is the general rule. Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca
+Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the
+Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and
+westward branches of the caribou family. But the trend of this mighty
+migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and
+the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and
+divert them from their line of march. Individuals and scattered bands,
+indeed, have been known not to migrate at all. Fifteen years ago in the
+last days of July, in latitude 62&deg; 15' North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a
+herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand
+individuals. In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near
+Fort Rae on the ice. It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in
+the words of an eye-witness, &quot;daylight could not be seen through the
+column.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A priest, on the winter trail between Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a
+few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail
+crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till
+they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass
+through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat
+bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, &quot;At
+Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't
+think they will ever die out.&quot; Rae was the old meat-station for the Far
+North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three
+thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a
+caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without
+any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the
+wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.</p>
+
+<p>When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink
+teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will
+cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would
+be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish
+(<i>coregonus clupeiformis</i>) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to
+spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern
+waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are
+always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying
+with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the
+Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good
+fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some
+of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their
+chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The
+whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it
+is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live
+for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual
+mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is
+the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes
+daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our
+sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of <i>de
+gustibus</i>, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon
+the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping
+the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one
+would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear
+dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after
+all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had
+overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they
+broached cargo. &quot;Do you like these?&quot; &quot;Yes.&quot; &quot;You're a liar!&quot; On the
+Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his
+first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of
+Kennedy. He coveted one of the &quot;plums&quot; from our lunch-basket, and was
+much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. &quot;What are them?&quot;
+&quot;Olives,&quot; we elucidated; &quot;they come from Southern Europe by steamer.&quot;
+&quot;Do they?&quot; (slightingly). &quot;The one I et must have come steerage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern
+delicacies,&mdash;beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys,
+caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of
+these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest
+here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery,
+whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and
+freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish
+hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh
+firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the
+fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly
+gamy. This is the &quot;Fall Fishery.&quot; Winter fishing is done through holes
+in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The
+handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.</p>
+
+<p>As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the
+United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in
+Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an
+Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada
+from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was
+$1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its
+Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or
+ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game
+off his own bat.</p>
+
+<p>Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look,
+seeking in vain any trace of &quot;the wild Red Man.&quot; The <i>raison d'&ecirc;tre</i> of
+these annual &quot;treaty-payment parties&quot; is merely the acknowledgment on
+one side and the recognition on the other that the Northern Indian is a
+British subject protected by and amenable to British law. In addition to
+the present of five dollars per head each year, the Canadian Government
+sends in by the Indian Agent presents of fishing twine and ammunition,
+with eleemosynary bacon for the indigent and old. The chiefs strut
+around in official coats enriched with yellow braid, wearing medals as
+big as dinner-plates.</p>
+
+<p>From Edmonton northward to Fort Chipewyan the Indians are all Crees. At
+Fort Chipewyan the northern limit of the Crees impinges on the southern
+limit of the Chipewyan, but here at Fond du Lac the Indians are all true
+Chipewyans. The Chipewyan wife is the New Red Woman. We see in her the
+essential head of the household. No fur is sold to the trader, no yard
+or pound of goods bought, without her expressed consent. Indeed, the
+traders refuse to make a bargain of any kind with a Chipewyan man
+without the active approbation of the wife. When a Chipewyan family
+moves camp, it is Mrs. Chipewyan who directs the line of march. How did
+she happen to break away from the bonds that limit and restrain most Red
+brides? This is the question that has troubled ethnologists since the
+North was first invaded by the, scientific. We think we have found the
+answer. Along the shores of Fond du Lac we descry a long-legged wader,
+the phalarope. This is the militant suffragette of all bird-dom. Madame
+Phalarope lays her own eggs (this depository act could scarcely be done
+by proxy), but in this culminates and terminates all her
+responsibilities connubial and maternal,&mdash;&quot;this, no more.&quot; Father
+Phalarope builds the house, the one hen-pecked husband of all feathered
+families who does. He alone incubates the eggs, and when the little
+Phalaropes are ushered into the vale, it is Papa who tucks their bibs
+under their chins and teaches them to peep their morning grace and to
+eat nicely. Mamma, meanwhile, contrary to all laws of the game, wears
+the brilliant plumage. When evening shadows fall where rolls the
+Athabasca, she struts long-leggedly with other female phalaropes, and
+together they discuss the upward struggles toward freedom of their
+unfeathered prototypes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<h3>FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;On we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as swinging heel and toe,</span><br>
+We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to anywhere,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The tragic road to Anywhere but one dear year ago.&quot;</span><br>
+&mdash;<i>Service</i>.<br>
+
+<p>Everybody is to say farewell to Fond du Lac to-day, June 29th, so there
+is a hurried finishing up of loose ends. A loud yowl as of a lost soul
+letting go of life starts the lake echoes! No hand is staining itself in
+brother's blood. The treaty doctor, who visits these people, to use
+their own word, &quot;as a bird on the wing,&quot; has just succeeded in
+extracting a tooth for a Chipewyan bride, Mis&egrave;re Bonnet Rouge. Mis&egrave;re
+looks ashamed of her howl when the operation is over, and lisping,
+&quot;Merci very,&quot; bears off in expansive triumph the detached molar.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0148"></a>
+<img src="images/img0148.jpg" width="361" height="214" alt="Fond du Lac" title="">
+<BR><B>Fond du Lac</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Down at the lake edge, belly prone, men and women lap the water as dogs
+do, while the festive small boy from the Government bags of poor-house
+bacon is slyly licking the oozing fat. Of the taste of red-cheeked
+apples and chewing-gum he is guiltless; popcorn, bananas, and the
+succulent peanut are alike alien. This <i>pee-mee</i> or oil of bacon is
+delicious morsel enough for his red palate. We trade a brier pipe with
+young McDonald, a full-blood, for his beautiful hat-band of porcupine
+quills, and in the French of the North he confides to us, &quot;I have two
+boys. The mother can have the younger one to help her in the house, and
+the priest can teach him to be a white man if he likes; but the other
+one goes with me, no school for him. I will make him a hunter like
+myself.&quot; Last year McDonald went into the woods on New Year's Day and
+didn't return until June, when he came back with three hundred caribou.</p>
+
+<p>Father Beibler is carrying a cup of water up to a tepee where an old
+Indian lies dying, to whom he is giving extreme unction. The slanting
+sun strikes the tin cup and the big crucifix of the good Father, and so
+we leave Fond du Lac.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0150"></a>
+<img src="images/img0150.jpg" width="260" height="420" alt="Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian" title="">
+<BR><B>Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The man who tells the story crosses himself piously and immediately
+begins a bit of rag-time of the vintage of '08. We ask him where he
+heard the tune. &quot;O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the
+Mission.&quot; Canned culture even here! It is light enough to read on the
+deck at quarter past eleven. We chunk along through a lake of amethyst
+and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep. On the
+scow astern, sprawled on the season's output of fur, the men smoke and
+argue. In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast
+about their dogs, and discuss food. Two kindred souls may hark back to
+boyhood days and quote a page of Virgil or demonstrate on a bit of
+birchbark the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, but you overheard no
+discussion of elections or ward-politics, no chatter of the marketplace.
+That is all &quot;long ago and far away.&quot; To-night it is &quot;You know there are
+fellows in here who can run like hell. The world's record is beaten
+every winter.&quot; &quot;The world's record in lying, do you mean?&quot; &quot;No,
+running&mdash;a man can run one hundred miles a day in this country.&quot; &quot;Well,
+what makes a day?&quot; &quot;Twelve hours,&mdash;that is what I learned at school.&quot;
+&quot;No: there's twenty-four hours in a day.&quot; &quot;Well, a day, <i>I</i> take it, is
+as far as you can go without stoppin'&mdash;it never gets dark, so how is a
+man to know what's a day?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a
+whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada's national
+holiday. For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley,
+radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten
+inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter. Wild
+gooseberries are big enough to make delectable &quot;gooseberry fool.&quot; Who
+hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?</p>
+
+<p>Early in the morning we start north in the <i>Primrose</i>, cross Athabasca
+Lake, and enter the Rocher River. Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the
+Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant
+stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer
+day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living. Poplars
+and willows alternate with white spruce (<i>Picea canadensis</i>) fully one
+hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter. It is an ideal
+run,&mdash;this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith's Landing, and
+we make it in twelve hours.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0152"></a>
+<img src="images/img0152.jpg" width="368" height="267" alt="Smith's Landing" title="">
+<BR><B>Smith's Landing</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>&quot;How did Smith's Landing get its name?&quot; I ask the <i>Primrose</i> Captain.
+&quot;Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay,&quot; from the tightly-bitten black pipe
+leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At
+Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation
+in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort
+McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith
+the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total
+drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce
+of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this
+turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The &quot;free
+trader&quot; still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the
+H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.</p>
+
+<p>We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging
+swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had
+been in the North for years and was &quot;going out,&quot; the other had come from
+Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the
+beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the
+&quot;Rapid of the Drowned,&quot; and canoe and men went down. An old Indian
+woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, &quot;One arm lifted out of the
+river, the paddle pointing to the sky&mdash;a cry came over the water, and
+that was all.&quot; Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France
+where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the
+unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that
+remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who
+wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny
+which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves
+dotards dozing in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>At Smith's Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones,
+among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North
+and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a
+winter's study. Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates,
+R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass
+tacks. With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and
+making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a
+barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as
+coadjutor. Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head
+of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck,
+an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since.
+Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a
+prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to
+take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the
+Mosquito Portage and we do not.</p>
+
+<p>We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca
+mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's
+Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the
+mosquito. He tells us that they are &quot;of the order <i>Diptera</i>,&quot; &quot;sub-order
+<i>Nemocera</i>,&quot; and chiefly &quot;of the family <i>Culicidae</i>,&quot; and he also goes
+so far as to tell us that they &quot;annoy man.&quot; As we bump along in the
+muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert
+that &quot;the life of the adult insect is very short&quot; and that it is the
+female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that &quot;the
+natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant.&quot;
+We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on &quot;Mosquito&quot; out of some convent
+dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac. He is like the parson
+introduced by his friend of the cloth. &quot;Brother Jones will now give an
+address on Satan. I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the
+reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes
+to you <i>full of his subject.&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full
+of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a
+pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their
+digestion on an unnatural commissariat. And if the female mosquitoes do
+all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on
+Smith's portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into
+her own. We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a
+Slave River priest had said to us, &quot;These have not delicate
+sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper
+appreciation of <i>material things</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Opposition is the life of trade. For every vantage-point as big as a
+match-head on our face and hands the &quot;bull-dog&quot; contests with the
+mosquito. An interesting study is the &quot;bull-dog.&quot; He looks like a cross
+between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we
+went along to examine the different parts of his person under a
+microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm. The head of the
+insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he
+makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman
+enough to keep his tools always well sharpened. The Doctor was not
+&quot;long&quot; on the &quot;bull-dog.&quot; He told us that his Sunday name was
+&quot;<i>Tabanus</i>,&quot; and that was about all he could impart. The rest we could
+learn for ourselves by direct contact.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I have very little rancour against the &quot;bull-dog.&quot; He looks
+worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel
+him. Four-legged brutes find it different. On the Bloody Portage we
+overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying
+to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites.
+Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from
+Fort Smith. Moose in the North, maddened by the &quot;bull-dogs,&quot; often jump
+over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when <i>they</i>
+were possessed of devils.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, &quot;The
+deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs,&quot; ruminates audibly,
+&quot;Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs! How interesting! Jolly
+resourceful beggars, these Colonials.&quot; A literary scientist sending out
+copy from the North wrote, &quot;My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and
+bull-dogs,&quot; which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, &quot;My two
+greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bringing in our daily treasure-trove of flowers we can scarcely realise
+that at Fort Smith we are in latitude 60&deg; North, the northern boundary
+of the Province of Alberta and in the same latitude as St. Petersburg.
+One day we gathered careopsis, pretty painted-cups, the dandelion in
+seed, shinleaf (<i>Pyrola elliptica</i>), our old friend yarrow, and
+golden-rod. Another day brought to the blotting-pads great bunches of
+goldenrod, a pink anemone, harebells of a more delicate blue than we had
+ever seen before, the flower of the wolf-berry, fireweed, and
+ladies'-tresses. The third day we identified the bear-berry or
+kinnikinic-tobacco (<i>Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)</i> with its astringent
+leaves, and that dear friend of lower latitudes and far-away days, the
+pink lady-slipper. The last time we had seen it was in a school-room in
+far-off Vancouver Island where in early April the children had brought
+it in, drooping in their hot little fists. This same evening, watching a
+night-hawk careering in mid-air by the rapids of the Slave and enjoying
+its easy grace in twisting and doubling as with hoarse cry it fell and
+rose again, we were fortunate in literally running to ground its nest.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0157"></a>
+<img src="images/img0157.jpg" width="368" height="241" alt="A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing" title="">
+<BR><B>A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0158"></a>
+<img src="images/img0158.jpg" width="264" height="389" alt="Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company" title="">
+<BR><B>Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Fort Smith, as places go in this country, is an infant in age, having
+been established only thirty-four years. Resting on the edge of the high
+bank of the Slave, it enjoys an eternal outlook on those wonderful
+rapids. The river here is a mile wide. The sweep and eddy-wash of ages
+have cut out a deep bay, on the inner shore of which stand the buildings
+of The Company, the little Roman Church, the houses of the priests. Back
+of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of
+the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the
+hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being
+more &quot;dead&quot; than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great
+things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort
+Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality
+will soon send unction into the dry bones of the valley.</p>
+
+<p>At the foot of the high hill looms a monument to the initiative and
+commercial enterprise of the H.B. Company,&mdash;a modern steamship in the
+waters of a wilderness-country. Ours is to be the honor of making in her
+the initial journey to the Mackenzie mouth. It is impossible coming from
+the South to navigate the Slave River rapids by steam. Any boat
+ambitious to ply on the waters lying northward between Fort Smith and
+the Arctic must be either taken in in sections or built on the ground.
+With enterprise and pluck, the Hudson's Bay Company has just completed
+the construction at Fort Smith of the steamship, <i>The Mackenzie River</i>.
+Its great boilers and engines made in far factories of the south came in
+over the Athabasca trail on sleighs in winter. Down that whole distance
+of ninety miles of Athabascan rapids they floated on scows as we
+floated, and while human ingenuity is bringing north the iron bowels,
+skilful hands out of native timber are framing the staunch body to
+receive them.</p>
+
+<p>The builders of the big boat have had disasters which would have daunted
+any but the dogged Company of Fur-Traders. Two land-slides threatened to
+slice off and carry into the river the partially-made boat, a fire
+burned up the blacksmith shop and with it all the imported doors,
+window-sashes and interior finishings, so that she sails to-morrow with
+carpenters still at work. While the hull of this carefully modelled
+vessel is necessarily of light construction, with special steel to
+enable her to navigate safely the waters of the Mackenzie River,
+longitudinal strength has been adequately provided in the form of five
+lattice girders and by numerous hog-posts and ties, and the diagonal
+bracing of the bulkheads will provide ample transverse strength. The bow
+also has been made especially strong to resist the impact of ice, snags,
+etc. The hull is one hundred and twenty-five feet in length, twenty-six
+feet broad at the water-line, and five and one-third feet deep to the
+structural deck. The strength and safety of the hull are increased by
+five water-tight compartments. Propulsion is effected by a pair of
+modern stern paddle-wheel engines capable of being worked up to over two
+hundred and fifty horse power, giving her a speed of ten miles an hour.
+She has stateroom accommodation for twenty-two passengers, draws three
+and a half feet of water aft, and eats up half a cord of wood an hour.
+She will carry to the northern posts their trading-goods for the year.</p>
+
+<p>Within a day's ride of Fort Smith grazes a herd of four to five hundred
+wood bison, the last unconfined herd of buffalo in the world. Doubtless
+the wood buffalo were originally buffalo of the plains. Their wandering
+northward from the scoured and hunted prairies has not only saved them
+from extinction but has developed in them resistance and robust
+vitality. These bison appear darker and larger than their pictured
+cousins of the past. Probably the inner hair of these is finer and of
+thicker texture, a difference which the change of habitat to more
+northern latitudes would easily account for. The bison have two
+enemies: the grey wolf and the Indian, one an enemy <i>in esse</i>, the other
+<i>in posse</i>. The Government of Canada has prohibited the killing of the
+buffalo, and my opinion is that this law, as all other Canadian laws, is
+obeyed in the North. I questioned every one I talked with who lives on
+the rim of the buffalo-habitat, and the concensus of testimony of
+priests, H.B. men, settlers, traders, and Mounted Police, is that the
+Indians do not molest these animals. The arch-enemy of the wood buffalo
+is the timber wolf.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0161"></a>
+<img src="images/img0161.jpg" width="371" height="115" alt="The World's Last Buffalo" title="">
+<BR><B>The World's Last Buffalo</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to
+laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable
+mosquito-infested muskeg. An untoward frost is more to be feared by
+these great brutes than the attacks of any insect. Thirty-eight years
+ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a
+subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do
+not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated.
+In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North
+country. In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River
+and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay
+Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them
+for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort
+hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.</p>
+
+<p>In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past
+were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's
+first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake
+&quot;observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the
+river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind.&quot;
+In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance
+into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on
+the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated
+by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which
+occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.</p>
+
+<p>One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd
+of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has
+shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the
+buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now
+ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well
+as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning,
+conclusively prove.</p>
+
+<p>Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his
+magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of
+Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the
+flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he
+assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
+pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout
+to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the
+timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the
+native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's
+belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole
+season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but
+if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although
+always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith
+while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, &quot;There, it
+had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more.&quot; Shortly
+afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was
+held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a
+litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in
+both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.
+It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama
+as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison
+host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of
+the wolf. Archbishop Tach&eacute; tells of the persevering fortitude of a big
+wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle &acirc; la Crosse. Thirty days
+afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with
+trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through
+the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those
+weary miles.</p>
+
+<p>With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and
+a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are
+extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the
+stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise.
+There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no
+means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find
+their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap.
+Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as
+manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in
+1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the
+same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than
+doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to
+France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173
+worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.</p>
+
+<p>More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox
+and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver,
+seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw
+furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother
+Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred
+thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that
+number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured
+article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur
+clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole
+or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by
+snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half
+round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and
+pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who
+declared, &quot;I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow
+proud,&quot; would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this
+age.</p>
+
+<p>In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the
+fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are
+carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the
+scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the
+undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the
+nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big
+enough to market, it is &quot;heads I win, tails you lose.&quot; The United
+States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild
+animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on
+coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.</p>
+
+<p>What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the
+harmless fur-bearers. Several causes make against the extermination of
+these in Canada. The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the
+animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures.
+Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and
+putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of
+active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The
+fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of
+personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur
+popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its
+original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.</p>
+
+<p>What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in
+showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of
+the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function,
+and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a
+wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to
+the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little
+minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the
+last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end
+no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The
+exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This
+truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of
+reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove
+to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.</p>
+
+<p>The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away
+with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables
+inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape
+the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For
+lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk
+rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the
+horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with
+cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and
+incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and
+Northern travellers drink boiled tea <i>au natural</i>. Cows are the eternal
+feminine and will not be explained by logic.</p>
+
+<p>But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most
+valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is
+the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the
+bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies.
+&quot;How old is Ann?&quot; pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves
+patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes
+and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip
+or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits
+often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a
+cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his
+shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to
+the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox
+for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at
+Isle &acirc; la Crosse in latitude 55&deg; 30', about twenty years ago, an
+experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary&mdash;Burbanks
+got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were
+mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and
+black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was
+son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!</p>
+
+<p>We are told that Messrs. McDougall &amp; Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the
+distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt
+ever paid on the London market,&mdash;$1700, that it was one of the most
+beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to
+the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state,
+&quot;Of the American silver-fox (<i>Canis vulpes argentatus</i>) black skins have
+a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and
+by the nobles.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0168"></a>
+<img src="images/img0168.jpg" width="313" height="381" alt="Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage" title="">
+<BR><B>Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter
+he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the
+London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased
+finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one
+cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds
+with keen discriminating sight, &quot;Black's not so black nor white so very
+white.&quot; Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, &quot;The silver-fox is but a
+phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a
+difference&mdash;!&quot; Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we
+must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms,
+and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises
+greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative,
+the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat,
+Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.</p>
+
+<p>I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by
+the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the
+Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the
+river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game.
+He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without
+moving an eye-brow.</p>
+
+<p>At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican
+<i>(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)</i> which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave
+finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of
+continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came
+across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in
+the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island
+in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we
+were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found
+something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The
+plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are
+slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid
+matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so
+far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the
+illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without
+shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight
+sepulture and was not &quot;darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our
+bayonets turning.&quot; There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with
+conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and
+his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist
+robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on
+Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and
+neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified
+silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River
+pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest
+attempt to &quot;open to her young her tender breast.&quot; It is rank libel for
+Byron to state</p>
+
+&quot;Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream<br>
+To still her famished nestling's scream.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>And, when Keats states so sententiously in <i>Endymion</i>, &quot;We are nurtured
+like a pelican brood,&quot; he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a><h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,</span><br>
+Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the weird magic of old Indian tales.&quot;</span><br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Archibald Lampman</i>.<br>
+
+<p>A double cabin is assigned us on <i>The Mackenzie River</i> and the nightmare
+that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films
+vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water.
+Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg,
+still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction
+stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues
+into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the
+bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of
+sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the
+fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged
+race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated,
+and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having
+no popcorn, fizz, or Coney-Island red-hots to distribute, we did the
+next best thing,&mdash;became barkers and gave the calls that go with
+festivities. So now, as the boat swings out from the soft bank, it is a
+gay company of urchins who wave their caps and yell, &quot;R-r-r-red
+lemol-lade, everybody drinks it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There is only one Fort Smith! Established for three decades, it has as
+yet seen no wells dug. The people still climb that steep bank, carrying
+in pendant buckets from wooden shoulder-yokes water for the daily
+drinking and ablutions. At four o'clock in the afternoon, should you
+visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily
+procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,&mdash;the Aquarius sign of
+the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, &quot;Why should they
+bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats
+from Scotland to tote their water up the banks.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0172"></a>
+<img src="images/img0172.jpg" width="371" height="279" alt="The &quot;Red Lemol-lade&quot; Boys" title="">
+<BR><B>The &quot;Red Lemol-lade&quot; Boys</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At noon we reach the Salt River, twenty-two miles up, which is one of
+the most marvellous salt deposits in the world. The Salt River winds in
+crescent curves through a valley wooded with aspen and spruce, and the
+Salt Plains six miles in extent stretch at the base of hills six or
+seven hundred feet high. The salt lies all over the ground in beautiful
+cubes,&mdash;pure crystal salt. It is anybody's salt plain; you can come here
+when you will and scoop up all you want. These plains have supplied the
+North country with salt since first white men penetrated the country. At
+the mouth of the Salt River are the shacks of the present
+representatives of the Beaulieus,&mdash;a family which has acted as guides
+for all the great men who ever trended northward. They have been
+interesting characters always, and as we look in upon them to-day
+neither Beaulieu nor salt has lost his savour.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0173"></a>
+<img src="images/img0173.jpg" width="368" height="168" alt="Salt Beds" title="">
+<BR><B>Salt Beds</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Slave River from where it leaves Fort Smith to its embouchure in
+Great Slave Lake is about two hundred miles long, with an average width
+of half a mile, except where it expands in its course to enclose
+islands. The big boat behaves beautifully in the water, and on we slip
+with no excitement until about five o'clock, when a moose and her calf
+are espied, well out of range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the
+sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The
+captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at
+the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of
+Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach Fort Resolution.</p>
+
+<p>To Samuel Hearne, the Mungo Park of Canada, belongs the double honour of
+tracing the Coppermine River and discovering Great Slave Lake. Just one
+hundred and thirty-seven years ago on Christmas Eve, Hearne got his
+first glimpse of this magnificent inland sea which is cut through the
+centre by the parallel of 62&deg;, and which lies east and west between the
+meridians of 109&deg; and 117&deg;. No survey of Great Slave Lake has been made,
+but it is estimated to have a superficial area of 10,500 square
+miles&mdash;just one-third the size of troubled Ireland, and as great as
+Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.</p>
+
+<p>Great Slave Lake, lying wholly within the forested region, is three
+hundred miles long, and its width at one point exceeds sixty miles. At
+every place on its banks where the fur-traders have their stations
+ordinary farm-crops are grown. Barley sown at Fort Resolution in mid-May
+reaches maturity in a hundred days; potatoes planted at the same time
+are dug in mid-September. The gardens of Fort Rae on the North Arm of
+the Lake produce beets, peas, cabbages, onions, carrots, and turnips. As
+Fort Rae is built on a rocky island with a bleak exposure, this would
+seem to promise in some future day generous harvests for the more
+favoured lands on the south and west.</p>
+
+<p>The names given by the old fur-traders to their posts make the
+traveller think that in these North lands he, a second Christian, is
+essaying a new Pilgrim's Progress. At the south entry to the Lake we are
+at Resolution; when we cross it we arrive at Providence; away off at the
+eastern extremity is Reliance; Confidence takes us to Great Bear Lake;
+and Good Hope stretches far ahead down the lower reaches of the
+Mackenzie. Fort Resolution on the south side of Great Slave Lake, a
+little west of the mouth of the Slave, lies back of an island-sheltered
+entrance.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0175"></a>
+<img src="images/img0175.jpg" width="364" height="247" alt="Unloading at Fort Resolution" title="">
+<BR><B>Unloading at Fort Resolution</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The striking feature as we enter is an immense Roman Catholic Mission
+school in process of construction, to supplement the existing church and
+school of that faith. There is neither station of the Mounted Police nor
+Church of England here; their places are taken by two independent
+fur-trading concerns operating in opposition to the Ancient Company.</p>
+
+<p>We had been told that the children down North had the kiddies at Fort
+Smith and Chipewyan &quot;all skinned&quot; for politeness, and we find it even
+so. The good nuns are trying to make reputable citizens of the young
+scions of the Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife nations and are succeeding
+admirably as far as surface indications go. We approach a group of
+smiling boys arrayed in their Sunday clothes, awaiting a visit of the
+Bishop. With one accord come off their Glengarry bonnets, smoking caps,
+and Christie stiffs, and a row of brown hands is extended to greet us.
+Very trim the laddies look in their convent-made cadet-uniforms, as,
+standing at &quot;'Shun!&quot; they answered our every question with, &quot;Yes,
+missus,&quot; &quot;No, missus.&quot; When we ask their names, without tittering or
+looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens. Here
+they have once more their white brothers &quot;skinned&quot;; no civilised man,
+woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal
+name in an audible tone without feeling a fool. I have seen grizzled
+judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses,
+squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed
+them &quot;Archer Martin&quot; or &quot;Peter Secord&quot; or whatever it might be.</p>
+
+<p>It is certainly Old Worldish. We speak with Father Laity who, all
+unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail
+and reads his breviary. He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age
+that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war. The Father
+came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of
+the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow. The
+Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel.
+The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and
+shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole
+family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the
+pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this
+tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come
+across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. Afterward
+we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien
+Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to
+live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him
+by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means &quot;<i>A
+man born</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the
+five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of
+His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh. The Yellow-Knives were so named
+by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons
+of native copper. Each head of a family is issued an
+identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to
+year. A father &quot;draws treaty&quot; for his olive-skinned branches until each
+marries and erects a tepee for himself. Government Agent Conroy, big
+bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and
+gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book.
+Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun. There
+are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation. The <i>Fiddler Anns,
+Waggon-box Julias</i>, and <i>Mrs. Turkeylegs</i> of the Plains country are
+absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither
+waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0178"></a>
+<img src="images/img0178.jpg" width="363" height="274" alt="Coming to &quot;Take Treaty&quot; on Great Slave Lake" title="">
+<BR><B>Coming to &quot;Take Treaty&quot; on Great Slave Lake</B>
+</center>
+
+<p><i>Mary Catholic</i> comes along hand-in-hand with <i>Samuel the Worm</i>. Full of
+animal spirits is a group of four&mdash;<i>Antoine Gullsmouth,
+Tongue-of-the-Jackfish, Baptiste Wolftail,</i> and <i>The Cat's Son</i>. A
+little chap who announces himself as <i>T'tum</i> turns out to be <i>Petite
+Homme</i>, the squat mate of <i>The Beloved</i>. It would be interesting to know
+just how each of the next couple acquired his name, for neither
+<i>Trois-Pouces</i> and <i>Owl-Plucked-Out-His-Eye</i> bears evidence of abnormal
+conditions. On a whole the names are more striking than our John Smiths;
+Richard Roes, and Tom Browns, as for instance the next three&mdash;<i>Le P&egrave;re
+des Carriboux, Geroux the Eldest, Alixi To-rong-jo.
+The-man-who-stands-still</i> is evidently a stand-patter, while one wonders
+if it would be right to call <i>The-Man-Who-Walks-With-The-Red-Hair,</i> a
+Crimson Rambler.</p>
+
+<p><i>Carry-the-Kettle</i> appears with <i>Star Blanket</i> and <i>The Mosquito,</i> and
+the next man in line, who has the tongs from a bon-bon box stuck in the
+band of his hat, rejoices in the name of <i>Strike-Him-on-the-Back,</i> which
+somehow suggests the match-box in the hotel hall-way. As the dignified
+father, <i>Having-Passed-Many-Birthdays,</i> claims five dollars each for his
+four daughters, <i>Smiling Martin, My-Wigwam-is-White,</i> and the twins
+<i>Make-Daylight-Appear</i> and <i>Red-Sky-of-the-Morning,</i> we acknowledge that
+here again, in the art of naming, the Yellow-Knife has his white brother
+&quot;skinned.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Birth, dowry, divorce, death, each must be noted on the treaty ticket,
+with a corresponding adjustment of the number of dollar-bills to be
+drawn from the coffer. If a man between treaty-paying and treaty-paying
+marries a widow with a family, he draws five dollars each for the new
+people he has annexed. If there is an exchange of wives (a
+not-infrequent thing), the babies have to be newly parcelled out.
+Through all the family intricacies Mr. Conroy follows the interpreter
+with infinite patience and bonhomie. To the listener it sounds startling
+as the interpreter, presenting two tickets says, &quot;He married these three
+people&mdash;this fellow.&quot; &quot;O, he give dat baby away to Charles.&quot; When we
+hear in a dazed way that &quot;<i>Mary Catholic's</i> son married his dead woman's
+sister who was the widow of <i>Anton Larucom</i> and the mother of two boys,&quot;
+we take a long breath and murmur, &quot;If the angle ACB is not equal to the
+angle ABC, then how can the angle DEF be equal to the angle DFE?&quot; A
+young couple, looking neither of them more than sixteen or seventeen,
+return with a shake of the head five of the fifteen dollars proffered
+them, and the interpreter explains, &quot;Their little boy died&mdash;there's only
+two of them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gregory Daniels in a Scottish voice, which cannot quite hide its
+triumphant ring, pushes back his five dollars and demands forty-five. &quot;I
+got a wife and siven since last year, she's a Cree wumman.&quot; Another
+half-breed asks anxiously if he would be allowed to send for a &quot;permit&quot;
+like a white man if he refused to take treaty.</p>
+
+<p>One man with long black hair and a cheese-cutter cap creates
+consternation at the tent-door by claiming treaty for two wives and
+seventeen children. Mr. Conroy, scenting an attempt to stuff the
+ballot-box, produces seventeen matches, lays them at my feet on the
+tent-floor and asks <i>The-Lean-Man</i> to name them. He starts in all right.
+We hear, &quot;<i>Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish, Birdtail, Little Bone,
+Sweet Grass, Ermine Skin</i>,&quot; and then in a monotone he begins over again,
+&quot;<i>Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish</i>,&quot; and finally gives it up, eagerly
+asking the interpreter to wait &quot;a-little-sun.&quot; The drama of paying and
+recording has gone on for half an hour and we have quite forgotten
+<i>The-Lean-Man</i>, when back he comes with <i>Mrs. Lean-Man, Sr.</i>, and <i>Mrs.
+Lean-Man, Jr</i>. Each spouse leads her own progeny. Seeing is believing,
+and off <i>Lean-Man</i> goes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to
+see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at
+a box of stogies, and the clerk says, &quot;He can afford to blow in his wad
+on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter.&quot;
+They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put
+his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year
+because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he
+wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly
+the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two
+young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton
+with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed
+figures at ten shies for a quarter. &quot;Every time you hit 'em, you get a
+see-gar!&quot; They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it
+took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break
+the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, &quot;Them
+chaps pinked them dolls every time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a
+glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy's head. It is
+the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or &quot;De-deed.&quot; The
+lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kisses her
+gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The
+whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother
+at the open door.</p>
+
+<p>Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves
+down for an hour's rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light
+effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting
+sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued
+night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness.
+Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high
+point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts.
+The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over
+all a measureless silence. At three o'clock in the morning we haul into
+the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at
+the landing.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0182"></a>
+<img src="images/img0182.jpg" width="366" height="376" alt="On the Slave" title="">
+<BR><B>On the Slave</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole
+North&mdash;although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay
+River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls
+and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission,
+learning how to play the white man's game&mdash;jolly and clean little bodies
+they are. It looks like Christmas time. Parcels are being done up, there
+is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black
+eyes. Would you like to see the letters that <i>The Teaser, The Twin,
+Johnny Little Hunter</i>, and <i>Mary Blue Quill</i> are sending out to their
+parents? For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented
+soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are
+writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father's and
+mother's name. The soap has been bought with the children's pennies
+earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights.
+The parcels will be passed from one trapper's jerkin to another, and
+when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or
+lodge of the deerskin, <i>Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-Foam</i> and <i>Mr.
+Kee-noo-shay-o</i>, or <i>The Fish</i>, will know their boys and girls &quot;still
+remember.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten
+years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his
+quest here, and lived happily ever after. Their children are the most
+fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint
+at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and
+sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness,
+letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover
+the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in
+evergreen boughs for their summer bedding&mdash;a delightful Ostermoor
+mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in
+summer, and in the winter they haul hay. The hay causes our enquiry, and
+we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by
+some glacial drift of the long ago. And thereby hangs a tale. Charlie,
+an attach&eacute; of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day. As
+man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked,
+&quot;Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?&quot; &quot;Bill balked,&quot; was the laconic
+reply. Tuesday's question would bring the same response, &quot;Bill balked.&quot;
+And &quot;Bill balked,&quot; on Wednesday. Thursday it is&mdash;&quot;Bill didn't balk&quot;; and
+so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter
+days.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0184"></a>
+<img src="images/img0184.jpg" width="370" height="125" alt="Dogs Cultivating Potatoes" title="">
+<BR><B>Dogs Cultivating Potatoes</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60&deg; Fahrenheit, and the
+monthly mean for January, 18&deg; below zero. Vegetables of their own
+growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food
+supply of this thrifty Mission, one season's harvest giving them a
+thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of
+beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten
+thousand whitefish.</p>
+
+<p>Hay River has never been explored. It is supposed to head near the
+source of the Nelson and to flow northeast for three hundred miles
+before emptying, as we see it, into Great Slave Lake. This river marks
+the limit of those grassy plains which extend at intervals all the way
+from Mexico northward. Bishop Bompas, years ago, descended a long
+stretch of the river, discovering not far back from where we stand a
+majestic cataract, which he named the &quot;Alexandra Falls&quot; after the then
+Princess of Wales. He describes it as a perpendicular fall one hundred
+feet high, five hundred feet wide, and of surpassing beauty. &quot;The amber
+colour of the falling water gives the appearance of golden tresses
+twined with pearls.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Crossing Great Slave Lake, we think of Chant-la, Chief of the Slavis at
+Hay River. Bishop Reeves was anxious to convert him to the Christian
+faith, but had great difficulty in giving Chant-la a proper conception
+of the Trinity. The old man would not say he believed or understood what
+was inexplicable to him. Setting out once on a long journey, the cleric
+adjured the Chief to struggle with the problem during his absence. The
+Bishop returning, Chant-la came out in his canoe to meet him, eagerly
+reporting that all now was clear. &quot;It is like Great Slave Lake,&quot; said
+the old man. &quot;It is all water now, just like the Father. When winter
+comes it will be frozen over, but Great Slave Lake just the same; that
+is like the Son. In the spring when the ice breaks and the rain makes
+the snow into slush, it is still Great Slave Lake; and that is like the
+Holy Ghost.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Beyond Great Slave Lake, forty-five miles down the Mackenzie, we reach
+Fort Providence, as strongly French in its atmosphere as Hay River is
+British. Our coming is a gala day. The hamlet flies three flags, the
+free trader sports his own initials &quot;H.N.,&quot; the Hudson's Bay Company
+loyally runs the Union Jack to the masthead, over the convent floats the
+tri-colour of France. Fort Providence is hot. We walk to the convent and
+are hospitably received by the nuns. They call their Red flock together
+for us to inspect and show us marvellous handwork of silk embroidery on
+white deerskin. The daintiest of dainty slippers calls forth the
+question, &quot;Where are you going to find the Cinderella for these?&quot; A
+blank look is my answer, for no one in Providence Convent has ever heard
+of Cinderella! But then, convents are not supposed to be the
+repositories of man-knowledge (although a half-breed, on our passage
+across the lake, did whisper a romantic story of a Klondiker who
+assailed this very fortress and tried to carry off the prettiest nun of
+the north). The garden of the Sisters is a bower of all the
+old-fashioned flowers&mdash;hollyhocks, wall-flower, Canterbury bells, and
+sweet-William&mdash;and down in the corner a young girl of the Dog-Ribs
+discovers to us a nest of fledgling chipping sparrows.</p>
+
+<p>As we landed from the boat, Tenny Gouley dressed in his Sunday best had
+beamed, &quot;Nice day&mdash;go veesit.&quot; And &quot;veesit&quot; we did. Mrs. Herron, of the
+H.B. Company, has spent many years at Old Fort Rae, and her thoughts
+hark back to one severe winter spent there. She turns to the wife of our
+good Captain with, &quot;Hard living, Mrs. Mills, dry suckers.&quot; It is a short
+speech, but fraught with meaning. I honestly think a dry sucker (well
+sanded) the least succulent of all the impossible fish-dishes of the
+North. There are many young Herrons all as neat as new pins, the
+last&mdash;no, the latest, enshrined in a moss-bag. Tradition tells that
+once, when they were fewer in number, the father took the flock out to
+Winnipeg to school. The children cried so at the parting that Mr. Herron
+turned and brought them all back with him to the Mackenzie!</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0187"></a>
+<img src="images/img0187.jpg" width="370" height="260" alt="David Villeneuve" title="">
+<BR><B>David Villeneuve</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The most interesting man in all Fort Providence is David Villeneuve, one
+of the Company's Old Guard. He was anxious to be &quot;tooken&quot; with his wife
+and grandchild, and over the camera we chatted. David goes through life
+on one leg&mdash;fishes through the ice in winter, traps, mends nets, drives
+dogs, and does it all with the dexterity and cheerfulness of a young
+strong man. He tells of his accident. &quot;I was young fellow, me, when a
+fish-stage fell on me. I didn't pay no notice to my leg until it began
+to go bad, den I take it to the English Church to Bishop Bompas. He tole
+me de leg must come off, an' ax me to get a letter from de priest (I'm
+Cat-o-lic, me) telling it was all right to cut him. I get de letter and
+bring my leg to Bompas. He cut 'im off wid meat-saw. No, I tak' not'in',
+me. I chew tobacco and tak' one big drink of Pain-killer. Yas, it hurt
+wen he strike de marrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Heavens! Didn't you faint with the awful pain?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What? Faint, me? No. I say, 'Get me my fire-bag, I want to have a
+smok'.'&quot;</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_X"></a><h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h3>PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Never the Spirit was born: the Spirit shall cease to be never.<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Never was time, it was not; end and beginning are dreams.</span><br>
+Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the Spirit,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Death hath not touched it at all, though dead the house of it seems.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>We have just finished supper and are sitting reading on the upper deck
+about seven o'clock, when a cry comes from below, followed by the
+rushing back and forth of moccasined feet. In a flash Bunny Langford,
+one of the engineers, has grabbed a lifebuoy, runs past us to the stern,
+and throws it well out toward a floating figure.</p>
+
+<p>It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution
+just twenty-four hours before. Finishing his turn at stoking, he had
+gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen,
+carrying the hatch with him. At first we think nothing of the incident,
+as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him. As soon as the
+startled people realise what has happened the steamer's engines are
+reversed and a boat is lowered. We call out to De-deed to swim to the
+buoy, but he doesn't see it or doesn't understand. The black head gets
+smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again. Down it goes
+for the second time. A strange, constricted feeling comes into our
+throats as we cry out, &quot;Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming! They are
+almost up to you!&quot; The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but
+a dozen yards away. Will he hold up? As we look, the head sinks, <i>and it
+does not come up</i>. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of
+De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with
+grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles
+down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before
+us&mdash;the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the
+rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is
+well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the &quot;Little Lake&quot; of the
+Mackenzie, goes out with the current.</p>
+
+<p>The Mackenzie River, &quot;La Grande Rivi&egrave;re en Bas,&quot; as the people of
+Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the
+greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers
+the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of
+either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the
+Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little
+Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight
+miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion
+of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from
+source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep
+to two and a half to three miles.</p>
+
+<p>From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom
+exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as
+&quot;The Head of the Line.&quot; Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie,
+when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was
+at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains
+bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with
+muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of
+water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second.
+No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard
+a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for
+commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough &quot;white coal&quot;
+rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The
+Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range.
+The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the
+Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main
+river through passes in that range.</p>
+
+<p>At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated
+on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on
+their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course
+the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.</p>
+
+<p>We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River
+and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o'clock we are at
+Fort Simpson in latitude 62&deg;, the old metropolis of the North. Fort
+Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie,
+the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of
+the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it
+was known in fur annals as &quot;The Forks of the Mackenzie.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its
+quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and
+try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In
+those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were
+received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes
+with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold
+stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front
+of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums
+have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in
+fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall
+unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a
+rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across
+the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the
+life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry
+feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and
+exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while
+the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history
+so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of
+the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent
+to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0192"></a>
+<img src="images/img0192.jpg" width="365" height="204" alt="Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson" title="">
+<BR><B>Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>&quot;I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice,
+bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or
+reptiles would be acceptable. They may either be skinned or placed in
+rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of
+the body to admit the spirits to the intestines.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most
+tickles my fancy.</p>
+
+<p>I think of the little group that we had forgathered with at Chipewyan,
+driven even in this year of grace to lavender-water and red ink, when
+permits run dry. One turns back the clock to the time of the Chartists
+and the year of the nuptials of the young Queen in England. We see up
+here on the fringe of things the dour and canny but exceedingly humorous
+Adam McBeaths, John Lee Lewises, and George Simpsons, the outer vedette
+of the British Empire; and, seeing them, get some half-way adequate
+conception of what a modicum of rum or &quot;strong spirits of any kind&quot;
+meant in the way of cheer at old Fort Simpson in those days. When we try
+to get a picture of one of these Hudson's Bay men gravely opening a
+shrew-mouse, mole, or &quot;other small quadruped,&quot; while his chum pours in
+the <i>aqua vitae</i> or precious conversation water, we declare that science
+asks too much.</p>
+
+<p>An outer stairway leading to the second story of a big building invites
+us. Opening the door, we find ourselves in the midst of an old library,
+and moth and rust, too, here corrupt. We close the door softly behind us
+and try to realise what it meant to bring a library from England to Fort
+Simpson a generation ago. First, there arose the desire in the mind of
+some man for something beyond dried meat and bales of fur. He had to
+persuade the authorities in England to send out the books.
+Leather-covered books cost something six or seven decades ago, and the
+London shareholders liked better to get money than to spend it. We see
+the precious volumes finally coming across the Atlantic in wooden
+sailing-ships to Hudson Bay, follow them on the long portages, watch
+them shoot rapids and make journeys by winter dog-sled, to reach Simpson
+at last on the backs of men. The old journals reveal stories of the
+discussion evoked by the reading of these books afterward as, along with
+the dried fish, deer-meat, and other inter-fort courtesies, they passed
+from post to post. Was never a circulating library like this one. And
+now the old books, broken-backed and disembowelled, lie under foot, and
+none so poor to do them reverence. Everything is so old in this North
+that there is no veneration for old things.</p>
+
+<p>It is but a few years since the founder of this library died, and his
+son now sits in his saddle at Fort Simpson. If you were to wander across
+the court, as I did to-day, and look into the Sales Shop, you would see
+the presentation sword of this last-generation Carnegie, ignobly slicing
+bacon for an Indian customer. <i>Sic transit gloria mundi</i>!</p>
+
+<p>What are the books which this sub-Arctic library sent out? We get down
+on the floor and gently touch the historic old things. Isn't it Johnson
+who says, &quot;I love to browse in a library&quot;? Judging by the dust and
+cobwebs, there hasn't been much browsing done among these volumes for
+years. Present-day Simpson has seldom &quot;fed on the dainties that are bred
+in a book.&quot; Here is a first edition of <i>The Spectator</i>, and next it a
+<i>Life of Garrick</i>, with copies of <i>Virgil</i>, and all <i>Voltaire</i> and
+<i>Corneille</i> in the original. A set of Shakespeare with exquisite line
+drawings by Howard shows signs of hard reading, and so does the <i>Apology
+for the Life of Mr. Colly Cibber</i>. One wonders how a man embedded in
+Fort Simpson, as a fly in amber, would ever think of sending to the
+<i>Grand Pays</i> for <i>Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy</i>, yet we find it here,
+cheek by jowl with <i>The Philosophy of Living or the Way to Enjoy Life
+and Its Comforts. The Annual Register of History, Politics, and
+Literature of the Year 1764</i> looks plummy, but we have to forego it. The
+lengthy titles of the books of this vintage, as for instance, <i>Death-Bed
+Triumphs of Eminent Christians, Exemplifying the Power of Religion in a
+Dying Hour</i>, bring to mind the small boy's definition of
+porridge&mdash;&quot;fillin', but not satis-fyin'.&quot; Two more little books with big
+titles are <i>Actors' Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of
+Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues</i>, and <i>The London Prisons, with an
+Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in
+Them</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But the book that most tempts our cupidity is <i>Memoirs of Miss A&mdash;&mdash; n,
+Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars</i>. We want
+that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the
+Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its
+silver mouths. We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we
+hunger to steal it. Jekyll struggles with Hyde. At last the Shorter
+Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it
+down and softly close the door behind us. And ever since we have
+regretted our Presbyterian training.</p>
+
+<p>At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an
+old cathedral. Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their
+kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic. We walk along the
+shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in
+washing clothes with washboards&mdash;the old order and the new. A little
+dive into the mosquito-ridden woods discloses a wonderful patch of
+Pyrola and a nest of Traills' flycatcher, and makes us wish that the
+minutes were longer and the mosquitoes fewer. What a beautiful tiling
+this Pyrola is, with its inverted anthers and the cobwebby margins of
+its capsule! Its bracted, nodding flowers run through all shades of
+white, pale yellow, and dark yellow.</p>
+
+<p>Down on the beach we chat with a prospector and his son, a lad of
+fifteen, who are building a skiff in which to ascend the Liard, hunting
+gold. Yesterday a Mr. and Mrs. Carl and a Mr. and Mrs. Hall passed us on
+the river. Outfitted for two years, they will prospect for gold in the
+Nahanni Mountains and toward the headwaters of the Liard. One of the
+couples has just come out from Glasgow and this is their honeymoon. We
+half envy them their journey. Can anything compare with the dear
+delights of travelling when you do not know and nobody knows just what
+lies round the next corner?</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0197"></a>
+<img src="images/img0197.jpg" width="310" height="310" alt="A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson" title="">
+<BR><B>A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The dogs at Simpson are &quot;wicked.&quot; Picking our way among them, I
+particularly approve this term of the natives, attributing as it does a
+human conception and malice aforethought to these long-legged wraiths.
+The first articulate sound an Indian child of the Mackenzie learns to
+make is &quot;Mash!&quot; an evident corruption of the French &quot;<i>Marche</i>.&quot; This is
+what Shakespeare meant when he speaks of &quot;a word to throw at a dog.&quot; A
+brown baby just emerged from the cocoon stage of the moss-bag toddles
+with uplifted pole into a bunch of these hungry mongrels and disperses
+them with a whack of the stick and the lordly &quot;Mash!&quot; of the superior
+animal. For our own part we are &quot;scared stiff,&quot; but follow along in the
+wake of our infant protector to a wee wooden church which staggers under
+the official title, &quot;The Cathedral of St. David.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0198"></a>
+<img src="images/img0198.jpg" width="307" height="380" alt="A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson" title="">
+<BR><B>A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We have had occasion to speak of the splendid service rendered to
+Northern and Western Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company and by the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police. A third factor through the years has been
+building Empire with these. Are we not as a people too prone to minimise
+the great nation-building work performed by the scattered missionaries
+in the lone lands beyond the railway? Ostensibly engaged in the work of
+saving souls, Canadian missionaries, both Roman and English, have opened
+the gates of commerce, prosecuted geographical discovery, tried to
+correct social evils, and added materially to our store of exact
+science. Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools
+established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to
+deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman,
+the last thing you ask is, &quot;To what church does he belong?&quot;
+Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running
+through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no
+Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton.
+The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide
+the field between them.</p>
+
+<p>The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure
+than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had
+two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade
+Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the
+wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan
+scribe merely as &quot;a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the
+Portage.&quot; In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between
+his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago,
+only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is
+literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world's map has
+ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his
+sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we
+might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from
+London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson's
+Bay forts, and substituting for Europe's vineyards and pleasant vales an
+unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.</p>
+
+<p>We are told that Bishop Bompas's father was Dicken's prototype for
+Sergeant Buzfuz. A new vista would open up to the counsel for Mrs.
+Bardell could he turn from his chops and tomato-sauce to follow the
+forty-years' wandering in the wilderness of this splendid man of God,
+who succeeded, if ever man succeeds, in following Paul's advice of
+keeping his body under.</p>
+
+<p>Bishops Bompas was one of the greatest linguists the Mother Country ever
+produced. Steeped in Hebrew and the classics when he entered the
+Northland, he immediately set himself to studying the various native
+languages, becoming thoroughly master of the Slavi, Beaver, Dog-Rib, and
+Tukudk dialects. When Mrs. Bompas sent him a Syriac testament and
+lexicon, he threw himself with characteristic energy into the study of
+that tongue. There is something in the picture of this devoted man
+writing Gospels in Slavi, primers in Dog-Rib, and a Prayer Book in
+syllabic Chipewyan, which brings to mind the figure of Caxton bending
+his silvered head over the blocks of the first printing-press in the old
+Almonry so many years before. What were the &quot;libraries&quot; in which this
+Arctic Apostle did his work? The floor of a scow on the Peace, a hole in
+the snow, a fetid corner of an Eskimo hut. His &quot;Bishop's Palace,&quot; when
+he was not afloat, consisted of a bare room twelve feet by eight, in
+which he studied, cooked, slept, and taught the Indians.</p>
+
+<p>They tell you stories up here of seeing the good Bishop come back from a
+distant journey to some isolated tribe, followed at heel by a dozen
+little Indian babies, his disciples for the days to come. Bishop Bompas
+lived in one continent, but manifested in two, keeping himself closely
+in touch with the religious and Church growth of the Old World. When the
+British press had been given over to any particular
+religious-controversial subject, and the savants had finally disposed of
+the matter to their own satisfaction, travelling out by summer traverse
+or winter dog-sled would come a convincing pamphlet by Bishop Bompas, to
+upset altogether the conclusions of the wranglers.</p>
+
+<p>There is one tale of this man which only those can appreciate who travel
+his trail. An Indian lad confides to us, &quot;Yes, my name is William
+Carpenter&mdash;Bishop Bompas gave me my name, he was a good man. He wouldn't
+hurt anybody, he never hit a dog, he wouldn't kill a mosquito. He had
+not much hair on his head, and when it was <i>meetsu</i>, when the Bishop eat
+his fish, he shoo that mosquito away and he say, 'Room for you, my
+little friend, and room for me, but this is not your place: go.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We call upon the present incumbents of the little church of St. David.
+They are young people, the Rev. and Mrs. Day, putting in their first
+year in this Northern charge. Their home with its spotless floors and
+walls papered with old copies of <i>The Graphic</i> and <i>Illustrated London
+News</i> is restful and attractive. The garden of the parsonage shows an
+amount of patient work on the part of some one. Potatoes eighteen
+inches high and peas twice the height of this, with turnips and cabbages
+and cauliflower are good to look at. There are records to show that,
+years ago, Fort Simpson produced tomatoes and decent crops of barley.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0202"></a>
+<img src="images/img0202.jpg" width="369" height="263" alt="Interior of St. David's Cathedral" title="">
+<BR><B>Interior of St. David's Cathedral</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Entering the little church we see the neat font sent here by Mrs.
+Bompas, &quot;In dear memory of Lucy May Owindia, baptised in this Church,
+January, 1879.&quot; Owindia was one of the many red waifs that the good
+Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took into their big hearts. Her story is a sad
+one. Along the beach at Simpson, <i>Friday</i>, an Indian, in a burst of
+ungovernable temper murdered his wife and fled, leaving their one baby
+to perish. It was not until next day that the little one was found,
+unconscious and dying. The Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took the child into
+their loving care. To the name Owindia, which means <i>The Weeping One</i>,
+was added the modern Lucy May, and the little girlie twined herself
+closely round the hearts of her protectors. When the time seemed ripe,
+Owindia was taken back to England to school, but the wee red plant would
+not flourish in that soil. She sickened and died. Hence the memorial and
+the inscription we read this July day. Much history of militant energy,
+much of endurance, and countless chapters of benevolence did the good
+Bishop write into the history of the North before, off on the Yukon side
+in 1906, &quot;God's finger touched him and he slept.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Missionaries of the present day are not without their troubles. Mrs. Day
+tells of potato-whiskey making in some illicit still back in the
+mosquito-woods, the results of which she fears; and, even as we speak,
+an Indian lunatic pokes his head through the palings of the
+potato-patch. From far back in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and from
+Fort Liard, the Hudson's Bay men have come to make their reports to Mr.
+Brabant at Simpson. They brought their wives and babies with them,
+brought also a quantity of beautiful porcupine-quill work, Fort Liard
+being one of the few places in the North where this art flourishes.
+Tomorrow they will start back, tacking against the stream, as the
+imported brides are doing before them.</p>
+
+<p>To dive into the journals of the past, of which the loft above the
+offices here at Simpson is full, is even more interesting than talking
+with the people of the present. We take 1837, the year which saw the
+accession in England of the young and well-beloved Queen, and from
+these musty books unearth a running commentary of what is doing in Fort
+Simpson in that year.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, January 1</i>. The people were brought into the Hall, and enjoyed
+their meal with great appetites, being also treated to a glass of wine
+and a fathom of tobacco and a pipe. Wind East.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, February 11</i>. Rabbits are numerous, but the ladies of the
+Establishment make no great effort in snaring them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, February 14</i>. Late last night arrived a woman, <i>Thawyase</i>, and a
+boy, the family of the late <i>Thoesty</i>. They have all come to take refuge
+here as they are starving. The woman at dusk decoyed old Jack away to
+camp in the woods&mdash;and the old fellow has found a mate.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One wonders if either <i>Thawyase</i>, the decoyed Jack, or the old
+chronicler was conscious of the fact that this was St. Valentine's Day.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, March 27</i>. Two geese have been seen to-day, the first this
+season.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 2</i>. <i>Marcel</i> sowed some oats. Mosquitoes begin to become
+annoying.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 5</i>. Wild fowl are beginning to frequent the small lakes of
+the neighbourhood. The willows and young trees are now budding forth
+beautifully.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 18</i>. <i>Hope</i> began to plough this morning with the bull, but
+as this is the first time he has been yoked, the day's work is found to
+be but poor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, May 19</i>. Felix and Roderick McLeod made twelve bags of pemmican
+to-day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>1837, May 21</i>. The Mackenzie River broke up to-day, and continued
+drifting pretty thick till evening.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 18</i>. Some of the Indians killed a bear before the door and
+it supplied us with a little fresh meat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 19</i>. Flies so numerous that we are under the necessity of
+putting our cattle into the stable, otherwise they will fall victims to
+the cruel insects.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 20</i>. Weather very suffocating, thermometer 85 above at
+three p.m., not as much as a cloud to be seen in the firmament and not
+the least air to afford any refreshment; this along with the solitude of
+the time is enough to make people dull. No Indian from any quarter: well
+supplied with ammunition last spring, they forget us when they can get
+their own mouths satisfied. Ashley grinding barley in the steel mill.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 21</i>. <i>Le Mari</i> has just brought in some fish and a little
+bearskin in order to get a chemise, he says he is not able to hunt
+without a chemise, as there are so many flies just now. I have taken it
+upon myself to give him the shirt on credit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Here a new hand writes the records, untrammelled by any orthographic
+rules.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, June 24</i>. Flys very numerus and trublsome to the Cattel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, July 11</i>. Starvan Indians going and coming ourly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, July 13</i>. Six squas arrived with plenty Bearrys&mdash;that's all they
+subsist on in this part of the River.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, July 26</i>. Barley is getting ripe. But small birds nip off the
+ends of the stalks as fast as it ripens.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, August 23</i>. Last night the bull broke into one of the gardens
+where oats was sown and eat the whole up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, September 18</i>. An Express arrived from Fort Norman with
+despatches from the Gentlemen of the Arctic Discovery Expedition, and it
+is most satisfying to learn that the first object of the Expedition was
+successfully accomplished: on the 4th August the Company's flag was
+planted on Point Barrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, September 19th</i>. <i>Louson</i> put parchment in the window-frames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, October 11</i>. Ice is forming since yesterday along the beach.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 1</i>. This being the holiday for All Saints, the men
+though no saints celebrated it off duty. The weather cold but fine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 2</i>. I have been these two days occupied with the
+blacksmith in making an oven, and this evening it being finished we give
+it a fair trial by placing a large trout in it for supper and it is
+found to answer most excellently.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 3</i>. Strong northwest wind with drift and cold. About
+one o'clock of last night the Aurora had a most unusual appearance,
+seemingly black in place of the white commonly observed and forming an
+arch from east to west, consisting of five streaks, here and there
+broken off.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1827, November 5</i>. Blacksmith making iron runners for our traineaux
+from old gun-barrels.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, November 30</i>. This being the anniversary of the Tutelar Saint of
+Scotland, we had in addition to our usual dinner a roasted swan and a
+moose-nose, a rice pudding, a cranberry tart, and a glass of wine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, December 1</i>. I was obliged to give four pounds of dried meat to
+the dogs for there are some that are almost dead and they et all the
+windows of the Forge.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1837, December 2</i>. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of
+insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and prevent
+them devouring themselves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>December 25</i>. Thermometer 35 below the cypher this morning, this being
+Christmas no labour done. Wind N.W.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>1838, January 1</i>. The morning was ushered in by a salute fired by our
+people at the windows and doors, after which they came to wish us a
+Happy New Year&mdash;and in return, in conformity to the custom of the
+country they were treated, the men with half a glass of brandy each, and
+the women with a kiss, and the whole of them with as many cakes as they
+choose to take and some raisins. One of our gentlemen who had a bottle
+of shrub treated them to a glass, and after some chit-chat conversation
+they retired, firing a salute on going out. In the evening they played
+at Blind-man's-buff, concluding the f&ecirc;te by a supper in the Hall. I also
+gave each of the men a fathom of twist tobacco and a clay pipe.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XI"></a><h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;With souls grown clear<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In this sweet atmosphere,</span><br>
+With influences serene,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Our blood and brain washed clean,</span><br>
+We've idled down the breast<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of broadening tides.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>Chas. G.D. Roberts</i>.</p>
+
+<p>About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we
+push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and
+parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen
+present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.
+We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed
+into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet
+photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the
+Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we
+proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due
+northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the
+pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the
+river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so
+low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we
+impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the
+Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course
+for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0208"></a>
+<img src="images/img0208.jpg" width="359" height="223" alt="Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal
+mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow
+the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake
+Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A
+ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the
+pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed
+view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who
+understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have
+that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to
+attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when
+many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so
+blatantly dub &quot;progress.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence
+we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road
+to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to
+the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons
+passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the
+silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.</p>
+
+<p>Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded,
+and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's
+development and acceptance&mdash;banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings
+of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and
+unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the
+Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into
+its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the
+Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the
+Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams
+hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to
+the <i>inconnu</i> and the Indian.</p>
+
+<p>It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream
+to its mouth, &quot;discovering&quot; a river along whose shores centuries before
+had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race,
+wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or
+chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age
+follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time
+these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed &quot;the red men&quot; and &quot;the American
+Indian.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply
+turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl&mdash;gulls in great
+variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny
+laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers
+and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are
+to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the
+banks&mdash;the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid
+golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss
+dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash
+breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the
+swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of
+upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being
+modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.</p>
+
+<p>Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters
+begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly
+south to kinder skies, the <i>inconnu</i> hurry northward seeking the sea.
+Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's &quot;<i>Le convert du bon
+Dieu</i>,&quot; silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and
+ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering
+Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated
+fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the
+six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or
+unwitting of shelter.</p>
+
+<p>According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the
+ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds
+the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for
+him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut
+etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest
+it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his
+man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys
+upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues
+a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great
+hunter, man.</p>
+
+<p>In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the
+intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the
+Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke
+not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice
+of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power&mdash;the
+Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his
+children.</p>
+
+<p>Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is
+saying &quot;Spring,&quot; full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the
+open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the
+honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and
+darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary
+streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting
+ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and
+all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.</p>
+
+<p>Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and
+wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into
+a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever
+hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has
+always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along
+her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of
+life; their unvoiced prayer is, &quot;Give us our fish in due season.&quot; From
+the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and
+dipped and seined their sustenance&mdash;inconnu, jack-fish, grayling,
+white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice
+or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway&mdash;a trail worn
+smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast
+in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.</p>
+
+<p>Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and
+lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of
+recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the
+great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along
+these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph,
+self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the
+noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the
+keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife,
+Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand
+despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise
+was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the
+Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game
+of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a
+man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.</p>
+
+<p>About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and
+Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size.
+One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is &quot;just
+like a town.&quot; Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough
+record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will
+always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered
+the fringed gentian (<i>Gentiana crinata</i>) with its lance-shaped leaves,
+delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian
+is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and
+it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63&deg;. Purple
+asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse
+or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled
+flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and
+purple columbines already forming seed.</p>
+
+<p>Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance
+from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche
+Trempe-l'eau or &quot;The Rock by the Riverside,&quot; an outcrop of Devonian
+limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above
+the river. We come into view of the &quot;boucans&quot; or beds of lignite coal
+which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in
+1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his
+journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back,
+for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it
+would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would
+come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter
+monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there
+were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the
+Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their
+eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of &quot;small white buffalo&quot; which they
+hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the
+<i>Sass-sei-yeuneh</i> or &quot;Foolish Bear&quot; of the Slavis.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0215"></a>
+<img src="images/img0215.jpg" width="363" height="223" alt="Indians at Fort Norman" title="">
+<BR><B>Indians at Fort Norman</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast
+of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes
+into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in
+a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been
+in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the
+current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor
+against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is
+a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by
+the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.</p>
+
+<p>The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole
+of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the
+outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established
+winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water,
+probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave
+Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual
+shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and
+fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are
+surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very
+late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.</p>
+
+<p>March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three
+feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier
+water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs
+are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings
+blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September
+is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last
+of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre
+of the lake freezes over.</p>
+
+<p>When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one
+going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle &quot;Boyne
+Water.&quot; The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across
+the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the &quot;Nest of
+the Wind&quot; of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this
+great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in
+thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that
+the Great Spirit, &quot;in the beginning,&quot; spread out there to dry. We find
+Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning,
+the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and
+Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat
+coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to
+his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library,
+and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas,
+beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman
+lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the
+outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and
+pink-teas.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0217"></a>
+<img src="images/img0217.jpg" width="262" height="373" alt="Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman" title="">
+<BR><B>Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0218"></a>
+<img src="images/img0218.jpg" width="361" height="261" alt="The Ramparts of the Mackenzie" title="">
+<BR><B>The Ramparts of the Mackenzie</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path
+leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It
+is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of
+children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and
+awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb
+flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at
+lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the
+peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float
+between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass
+Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for.
+The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection.
+If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they
+have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a
+wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache
+of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when
+ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky
+replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.</p>
+
+<p>It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest
+spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,&mdash;the Ramparts. The
+great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here
+narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles
+forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred
+feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers,
+and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, &quot;turned on edge,&quot; flows,
+maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of
+the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring,
+the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a
+skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the
+cliffs above.</p>
+
+<p>As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian
+artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with
+the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted,
+our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of
+this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the
+picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn
+and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and
+envelopes the earth as with a garment,&mdash;the light that never was on sea
+or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to
+pass the portal into the Arctic World.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0220"></a>
+<img src="images/img0220.jpg" width="364" height="239" alt="Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth" title="">
+<BR><B>Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians
+has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting
+for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big
+steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their
+old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock,
+ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower
+down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed
+from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river;
+and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at
+midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle.</p>
+
+<p>The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say
+our &quot;joggafy&quot; lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar
+bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in
+America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the
+Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen
+silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there?
+Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his
+daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,&mdash;Mrs. Pierre la Hache.
+Tenny wears his &quot;other clothes&quot; and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for
+this is his home. &quot;It looks like a swan on the water,&quot; he says, when the
+first white houses come into view. &quot;You like it, do you not?&quot; &quot;Like it?
+Good Hope is God's Country!&quot; There is no place like home, even when it
+is the Arctic Circle!</p>
+
+<p>The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the
+dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the
+big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr.
+C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand
+servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the
+greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has
+continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition
+is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employ&eacute;s a pension
+after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely
+deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old
+gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to
+his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the
+younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up
+the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr.
+Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope
+Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.</p>
+
+<p>Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses,
+and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.
+Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back
+from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women
+call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to
+rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is
+hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list
+of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the
+unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss
+Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide
+world.</p>
+
+<p>We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of
+pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your
+throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine
+and <i>galettes</i>, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the
+window-ledge and look around the walls of the &quot;homey&quot; room we wonder if
+this really can be the &quot;Arctic Circle, 23-1/2&deg; from the North Pole,
+which marks the distance that the sun's rays,&quot; etc., etc., as the little
+geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday
+School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women,
+earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and
+girls&mdash;the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a
+pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there
+a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned
+hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend
+runs,&mdash;&quot;Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a
+bottle and a little loaf of bread.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first
+Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the
+first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: &quot;And
+how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?&quot; Quick came the
+girlie's reply, &quot;They had to leave The Company's service!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. &quot;We get a mail every
+year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail.&quot; This is to her
+the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A
+letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope
+crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it
+travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the
+Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by
+dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence
+the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good
+Hope on the Arctic Circle.</p>
+
+<p>We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and
+devotion to The Company,&mdash;these are the two key-notes of her character.
+Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made &quot;outside&quot;
+to Montreal when she was a young mother&mdash;it was just fifty years
+ago,&mdash;measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died,
+&quot;<i>Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants</i>!&quot; Some years after
+this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies,
+snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until
+it was torn from her by force.</p>
+
+<p>We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the
+whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable
+gardens are in evidence here,&mdash;potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages.
+Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's
+Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the
+store of the &quot;free-trader,&quot; he says, &quot;Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman,
+kindly, and dear, but she doesn't approve of me. She makes a point of
+not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why?&quot; we ask, much surprised.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh,&quot; with a laugh, &quot;you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B.
+Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns
+and a tail!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We step into the &quot;Little Church of the Open Door,&quot; and sit down and
+think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the
+mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see
+across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a
+transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a
+saint,&mdash;St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery
+outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts
+will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, &quot;Our Lady of
+Good Hope,&quot; the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri
+Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<h3>ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,<br>
+And out of my full heart,<br>
+Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold<br>
+The Infinite thou art.<br>
+What matter all the creeds that come and go,<br>
+The many gods of men?<br>
+My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>A Pagan Hymn</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber,&quot; said
+text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We
+didn't find him.</p>
+
+<p>It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel
+since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the
+true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a
+master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were,
+men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for
+tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.</p>
+
+<p>On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing,
+and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of
+the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and
+this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is
+always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his
+dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is
+a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he
+is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing
+with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little
+half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of
+good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly
+round the neck with, &quot;Everybody are my friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode
+on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to
+trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco,
+looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with
+him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures
+between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began.
+&quot;What for this fellow, huh?&quot; and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a
+little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or
+the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap,
+the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which
+looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each
+bargain sealed with a handshake.</p>
+
+<p>Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of
+animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours,
+the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a
+Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did
+when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same
+place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the
+claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0228"></a>
+<img src="images/img0228.jpg" width="311" height="383" alt="A Kogmollye Family" title="">
+<BR><B>A Kogmollye Family</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats
+while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to
+do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their
+names and to ask ours. &quot;Major Jabussy,&quot; &quot;Missa Blown,&quot; they got the
+names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into
+roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no
+one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this
+Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one
+exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair,
+the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in
+physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and
+Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six
+feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage
+and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has &quot;arrived&quot;; he has an
+air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms &quot;Outside&quot; you seldom see.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to
+the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the
+Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for
+the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from
+the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for
+the American whalers.</p>
+
+<p>One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the
+Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two
+wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did
+she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak
+the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big
+seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years
+followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of
+walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet
+sinks in a well.</p>
+
+<p>One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord
+the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot
+consistency which was his taste, she said, &quot;I'm not as young as I was,
+you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get
+another wife to help me with the work.&quot; Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon
+the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak,
+dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and
+as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a
+rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.</p>
+
+<p>How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire
+trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North
+family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but
+never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a m&eacute;nage of nicer
+adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of
+life, waggish and keen, &quot;quick at the uptak',&quot; as the Scotch say,
+presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing
+her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior
+economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet,
+dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and
+plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of
+height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a
+man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception
+where men of the world forgather.</p>
+
+<p>Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the
+Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet,
+the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple
+dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking
+back to Old World culture and distinction.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0231"></a>
+<img src="images/img0231.jpg" width="305" height="352" alt="Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family" title="">
+<BR><B>Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for
+her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy
+and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family
+fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps
+with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of
+her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the
+exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had
+brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the
+matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two
+school-girls.</p>
+
+<p>The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in
+vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were
+all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking
+Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If
+no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony
+there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?</p>
+
+<p>Kipling declares, &quot;There's never a law of God or man runs north of
+fifty-three.&quot; The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent
+quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He
+is his own man.</p>
+
+<p>In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of &quot;One
+man, One wife,&quot; allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and
+elsewhere, so that it may read, &quot;One man, one wife at a time.&quot; Are we so
+sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the
+Eskimo?</p>
+
+<p>Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread,
+in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On
+the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples;
+here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill
+as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of
+seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In
+many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women
+outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and
+provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo
+is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large
+families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now,
+the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and
+provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a
+floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and
+generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can
+comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from
+extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the
+Nunatalmutes?</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo
+equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a
+significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either
+the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment
+to the latitude of 68&deg; North and take cognizance of the fact that no
+seductive &quot;Want Columns&quot; in the daily press here offer a niche whereby
+unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as
+chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To
+keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own
+proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind
+is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all
+must have in order to live.</p>
+
+<p>Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a
+man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each
+partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness
+fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of
+human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle
+perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it
+seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?</p>
+
+<p>I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always
+content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit,
+nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a
+reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of
+seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely,
+but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the
+Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three
+winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her
+feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.</p>
+
+<p>In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate
+to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her
+brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast
+consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The
+ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests
+present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one
+needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as &quot;odours of Edom and
+offerings Divine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a
+retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight
+suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands
+above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a
+gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in
+the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the
+air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice
+repeated,</p>
+
+&quot;Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya&mdash;yae!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory
+and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride,
+pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.</p>
+
+<p>By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most
+admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most
+misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The
+Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known
+but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is
+an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line
+between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty
+miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four
+peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
+and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of
+Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days
+brought their most precious medium of exchange,&mdash;a peculiar blue jade,
+one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a
+tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so
+the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's
+ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.</p>
+
+<p>This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and
+merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old
+men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious
+oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and
+courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these
+Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of
+delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no
+red-hots nor &quot;fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled
+and f-five a bag!&quot;, but the Arctic concomitants of these,&mdash;boiled
+beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that
+smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in
+the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the
+counters that are different.</p>
+
+<p>Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down
+into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and
+fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the
+world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south
+were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that
+disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great
+Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771,
+followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives
+their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at
+Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band
+of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in
+1820 was more happy. He says, &quot;The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands
+in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile
+intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making
+bows.&quot; Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this
+tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, &quot;I called out '<i>Tima</i>'
+(Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out
+'<i>Tima</i>.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily
+by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white
+man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and
+they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up
+a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would
+eat it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian
+missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of
+such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited
+the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but
+rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John
+Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen,
+the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them,
+and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and
+his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo
+is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid
+moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.</p>
+
+<p>Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated
+religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to
+turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell
+to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, &quot;Goodbye, my
+dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never
+reach you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north,
+&quot;keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole.&quot; But the Eskimo
+has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and
+it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what
+it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast
+it doesn't drop below 55.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,&mdash;the land and the sea,
+with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his,
+that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the
+Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most
+insistent one would be, &quot;Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but
+hang on to your fish-net.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo
+and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the
+contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The
+Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together
+the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of
+revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the
+blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts
+Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but
+with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies,
+and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In
+the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of
+one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against
+misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo
+stays on the coast to-day because it is to him &quot;God's country&quot; and not
+because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.</p>
+
+<p>For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed
+the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different
+bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the
+Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the
+ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the
+season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the
+intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the
+Eskimo?</p>
+
+<p>Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta
+region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of
+that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever,
+consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling
+decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though
+consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian,
+measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal
+than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.</p>
+
+<p>What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them
+making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic,
+so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole
+horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but
+call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates
+once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and
+molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side
+of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the
+Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by
+marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the
+whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its
+changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of
+the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the
+Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo
+mothers, and, for &quot;floating fathers,&quot; marking their escutcheon with
+every nationality under the sun,&mdash;American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,
+Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all
+miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is
+different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a
+Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or
+Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.
+There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo
+&quot;wives&quot; outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.
+One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken
+&quot;outside&quot; by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or
+eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south
+to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the
+marriage-contract is &quot;good for this season only,&quot; and the wife and
+children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him
+with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.</p>
+
+<p>What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her
+people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of
+Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the
+erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she
+is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and
+capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man
+of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her
+second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she
+shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she
+again essays Hymen's lottery.</p>
+
+<p>Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share
+that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a
+child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the
+half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness
+forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall
+below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the
+ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity
+plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the
+blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see
+and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied
+and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in
+this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, &quot;The
+sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and
+fourth generation;&quot; it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own
+inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally
+descend in direct line.</p>
+
+<p>We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he
+approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of
+hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft,
+his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But,
+most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children.
+&quot;A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure,&quot; is a pretty theory,
+but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own
+footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the
+igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in
+and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe
+air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but
+there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive.
+He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his
+place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent
+entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no
+power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of
+doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden
+Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily
+even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered
+into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is
+but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be
+born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day
+meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the
+clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born
+while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from
+the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at,
+much less fuss over, the little stranger.</p>
+
+<p>Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown
+man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy
+to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the
+newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers
+around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes
+possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in
+twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to
+influence the character and destiny of the growing child.</p>
+
+<p>We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The
+summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its
+earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's
+back under her <i>artikki</i>, or upper garment, which has been made
+voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King
+Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a
+bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is
+wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother
+who first crooned in love and literalness,</p>
+
+&quot;By-o, Baby Bunting,<br>
+Daddy's gone a-hunting,<br>
+To get a little rabbit-skin,<br>
+To wrap his Baby Bunting in.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet.
+While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer
+enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a
+beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins
+pendant,&mdash;rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the
+floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and
+jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of
+hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young
+hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the
+culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in
+one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.</p>
+
+<p>A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns
+to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon
+the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as
+the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the
+Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being
+inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.</p>
+
+<p>The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not
+unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for
+twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a
+little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out
+every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At
+eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line
+on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an
+air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not
+think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with
+the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam,
+and says, &quot;The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their
+play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North,
+as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their
+vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no
+molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a
+walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was
+neither Rugby nor &quot;Soccer,&quot; but there seemed to be a good deal of
+tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball,
+down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft
+parts of his anatomy. &quot;You're angry, now,&quot; said a Major of the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. &quot;No, sir,&quot; said the under
+dog, with difficulty protruding his head, &quot;I never get mad when I play.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.
+It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated
+difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on
+each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his
+adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound
+by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to
+him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.
+All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a
+row of &quot;heathen&quot; Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind,
+for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted
+discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the
+ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball
+diamonds, and &quot;sport&quot; carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line
+of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and
+out among the camps of the Eskimo,&mdash;&quot;Self-reverence, self-knowledge,
+self-control.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0246"></a>
+<img src="images/img0246.jpg" width="329" height="267" alt="Farthest North Football" title="">
+<BR><B>Farthest North Football</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude
+imitations of their elders. And they play &quot;house,&quot; and &quot;ladies,&quot; and
+&quot;visiting,&quot; just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas;
+but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up
+in her mother's long dresses.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0247"></a>
+<img src="images/img0247.jpg" width="265" height="313" alt="Two Spectators at the Game" title="">
+<BR><B>Two Spectators at the Game</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in
+spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative
+of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time
+that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle
+are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the
+meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and
+south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the
+anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game,
+help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six
+months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever.
+The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any
+suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are
+finished and the new hunts not yet begun. &quot;I'll eat my hat&quot; is an empty
+threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing
+pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.</p>
+
+<p>At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me
+this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie
+Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and
+cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again
+indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken
+violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one
+little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained,
+alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young
+Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the
+silent camp.</p>
+
+<p>One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that
+little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing,
+waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies
+of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as
+its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went
+in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that
+A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too,
+and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have
+been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly
+compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0249"></a>
+<img src="images/img0249.jpg" width="367" height="291" alt="An Eskimo Exhibit" title="">
+<BR><B>An Eskimo Exhibit</B>
+</center>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><tt>A&mdash;Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>B&mdash;Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the
+missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word &quot;Lamb&quot; having no
+meaning to an Eskimo.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>C&mdash;Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>D&mdash;Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>E&mdash;Model of Eskimo paddle.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>F&mdash;Skin model of the <i>Oomiak</i> or Eskimo woman's boat.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>G and H&mdash;Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half
+a thimbleful of tobacco.</tt></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of
+loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had
+never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry
+admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he
+is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with <i>after</i> the fit of
+passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools,
+with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their
+wise papers on the training of &quot;the child,&quot; the Eskimo children we saw
+were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense
+of the word, more truly &quot;educated&quot; than many of our children are.
+Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained
+admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint
+of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the
+family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very
+nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the
+mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the
+fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national
+greatness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<h3>FORT MACPHERSON FOLK</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;I have drunk the Sea's good wine,<br>
+Was ever step so light as mine,<br>
+Was ever heart so gay?<br>
+O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee,<br>
+For this old joy renewed,<br>
+For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued<br>
+With sunlight and with sea.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>A Pagan Hymn</i>.<br>
+
+<p>On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow
+passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the
+steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants
+is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of
+running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial
+banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in
+the scow may sleep in peace.</p>
+
+<p>At Point Separation, 67&deg; 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the
+east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles,
+the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden
+sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred
+miles east and west.</p>
+
+<p>The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It
+was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and
+Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in
+their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later,
+Richardson, this time concerned with the <i>Plover</i> Relief Expedition of
+the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,</p>
+
+&quot;July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my<br>
+instructions, a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug<br>
+a pit at a distance of ten feet from the best grown tree on the<br>
+Point, and placed in it, along with the pemmican, a bottle containing<br>
+a memorandum of the Expedition, and such information respecting<br>
+the Company's post as I judged would be useful to the<br>
+boat party of the <i>Plover</i> should they reach this river. The lower<br>
+branches of the tree were lopped off, a part of its trunk denuded<br>
+of bark, and a broad arrow painted thereon with red paint. In<br>
+performing these duties at this place, I could not but recall to<br>
+mind the evening of July 3rd, 1826, passed on the very same<br>
+spot with Sir John Franklin. We were then full of joyous anticipation.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>As we look at these enduring lobsticks, we recollect that Commander
+Pullen, with two boats from the <i>Plover</i> in 1849, visited the depot and
+found the precious pemmican. We leave the Mackenzie proper for the
+present and enter the easternmost channel of its farthest north
+tributary, the Peel, and follow this considerable stream thirty-three
+miles to Fort Macpherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.</p>
+
+<p>Fort Macpherson has a striking site. To the east, spreads a rolling
+wooded plain of alluvial origin, containing thousands of lakes. The west
+aspect gives us an uninterrupted view of the wooded valley of the Peel,
+backed by a heathery slope with the northern Rockies on the far horizon.
+Due north, upstarts a peak of the Rockies known locally as Black
+Mountain&mdash;a dark barren spur two thousand feet in height. A winter trail
+from Macpherson to Arctic Red River cuts no fewer than thirty-three
+small lakes.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0253"></a>
+<img src="images/img0253.jpg" width="315" height="418" alt="Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs" title="">
+<BR><B>Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>On the beach to meet us are Mounted Police and Eskimo from Herschel
+Island, Church of England missionaries, traders of the H.B. Co., and
+Loucheux Indians. But here, as at Arctic Red River, it is that Polar
+gentleman the Eskimo who claims our attention. Let Sergeant Fitzgerald,
+R.N.W.M.P., stationed at Herschel Island, speak for the Kogmollye and
+Nunatalmute Eskimo. In his departmental report this officer states, &quot;I
+have found these natives honest all the time I have been at Herschel
+Island. I never heard of a case of stealing among them.&quot; He has been
+there five years. Up here on the Arctic the bare word of an Eskimo is
+accepted of all men. If he states to an H.B. Co. factor that he has an
+order from a whaling captain to get certain goods for himself, that
+unwritten order is honoured though it may date back two or even three
+years, whereas an order presented by a white man must be in writing and
+certified.</p>
+
+<p>Why should I enter the lists and take up icy spear for my Eskimo fellow
+British subject? Because he is so very worth while. Because through the
+years the world has conspired to libel him. Because within a decade or
+two he will have passed utterly off the map. And because it is so very
+much pleasanter to write appreciations than epitaphs. This man wins you
+at once by his frank directness; his bearing is that of a fearless
+child. The Indian, like Ossian's hero, scorns to tell his name, and on
+occasion will dodge the camera, but the Eskimo likes to be photographed.
+Young and old, they press to our side like friendly boys and girls round
+a &quot;chummy&quot; teacher, volunteering information of age, sex, and previous
+condition, with all sorts of covetable bits of intimate family history.
+You love the Eskimo because he is kind to his dogs and gentle to little
+children. His entire willingness to take you on credit is contagious,
+trust begets trust even in walrus latitudes.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0255"></a>
+<img src="images/img0255.jpg" width="367" height="278" alt="Two Wise Ones" title="">
+<BR><B>Two Wise Ones</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a clever chap. With no school-teacher, no
+school, no modern appliances, he does many things and does each
+admirably. He is a hunter by land and sea, a fearless traveller, a
+furrier, a fisherman, a carver, a metal-smith, and he takes in every
+task the pride of a master mechanic,&mdash;&quot;the gods see everywhere.&quot; The
+duties of the man and the woman are well-defined. The head of the
+Kogmollyc household is the blood-and-flesh-winner, the navigator of the
+kayak, the driver of dogs. It is he who builds the houses on the march,
+and when occasion requires he does not consider it <i>infra dig.</i> to get
+the breakfast or mind the baby. The wife dresses the skins, prepares
+the food, makes all the clothing, and the lord of the igloo demands from
+her the same perfect work that he turns out himself.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0256"></a>
+<img src="images/img0256.jpg" width="320" height="383" alt="A Nunatalmute Eskimo Family" title="">
+<BR><B>A Nunatalmute Eskimo Family</B>
+</center>
+
+
+<p>When an Eskimo wife has finished making her spouse a pair of waterproof
+boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up. If there is one
+little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her,
+and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways. Either she
+must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word,
+or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker.
+We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was
+no recrimination. No word was spoken on either side, the exacting
+husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.</p>
+
+<p>With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin. Her
+tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a
+repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden
+dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs. The whole performance
+was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.</p>
+
+<p>If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo
+foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many
+surprises would await her. Instead of asking for references from her
+last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her
+teeth. In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as
+important a factor as your hands. The reporter for the funeral column of
+an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of
+speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little
+ones, would call pathetic attention to, &quot;the tired and patient teeth
+worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household.&quot; A young
+wife's cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that
+shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the
+seagull and chew these into shape. You see, after the boots are wet
+each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with
+oil and chewed into shape. We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at
+this wifely duty. Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands,
+incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way
+round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking
+like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make.
+Solomon's eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70&deg;
+North would read, &quot;She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh
+willingly with her hands; she riseth also while it is yet night and
+cheweth the boots of her household.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove.
+The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of
+the woman are brought into requisition. The raw sealskins or hides of
+the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up
+and dried thoroughly. Before this stiff material can be worked up into
+garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically
+chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task. Creasing the hide along
+its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way
+along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way
+back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of
+the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.</p>
+
+<p>It falls to the lot of the woman, too, to do her share of boat-making.
+The men deftly fashion the frames of kayak and oomiak, using in their
+construction not a single nail or piece of iron, but fastening the wood
+together by pegs and thongs of skin. Then the women come on the scene,
+measure the frame, and sew green hides of the proper shape to fit,
+making wonderful overlapping seams that are absolutely watertight. As it
+is necessary to put the skin covering on while the hides are raw, the
+whole job has to be completed at one sitting. So a bee is held of the
+women of the communal camp.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0259"></a>
+<img src="images/img0259.jpg" width="367" height="157" alt="Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks" title="">
+<BR><B>Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks</B><BR>
+The scenes etched in the larger represent the events of one year of the
+carver.
+</center>
+
+<p>Where did the Eskimo get his versatile ability? Only the walrus knows.
+The whalers have inducted the Eskimo into the art of making
+cribbage-boards. They use for each board a complete tusk of
+walrus-ivory, covering the whole with a wealth of descriptive carvings
+illustrative of all that comes into the yearly round of an Eskimo's
+life,&mdash;ice-fishing, bear-hunting, walrus-sticking. So far as we could
+find out, the Husky's connection with cribbage ceased with his making
+these <i>edition de luxe</i> boards. He seemed himself to have gathered no
+inkling of the fine points of that game which one instinctively
+associates with Dick Swiveller as tutor and as pupil the little
+Marchioness, &quot;that very extraordinary person, surrounded by mysteries,
+ignorant of the taste of beer, and taking a limited view of society
+through the key-holes of doors.&quot; In the world outside, far from igloos
+and ice-floes, where people gather round cheery Christmas fires with
+&quot;one for his nob,&quot; &quot;two for his heels,&quot; and &quot;a double run of three,&quot;
+these ivory crib-boards are sold for from seventy-five to one hundred
+dollars each. We have two among our most treasured trophies, and with
+them an ivory ring beautifully formed which we saw made. Set in the ring
+is a blue stone of irregular shape which was fitted into its ivory niche
+with a nicety of workmanship that few jewellers could attain. I had
+fashioned for me also a gavel in the shape of a sleeping seal, made of
+fossil ivory from the Little Diomedes. The contrast of the weathered
+brown of the outside of the ivory with the pure white of the inner
+layers, when worked up into a carved design, gives the effect of cameo
+and intaglio combined.</p>
+
+<p>We tasted many new Eskimo dishes. When, on our return, we confessed that
+the brain of the seal served here is a delicious dish, we ran against
+the sensibilities of refined natures. But why is it cruder to enjoy
+seal's brains <i>&acirc; la vinaigrette</i>, than to tickle our taste with brains
+of the frolicking calf? The seal furnished a more equivocal dinner than
+this, nothing less than entrails <i>au naturel</i>, which our hostess draws
+through her fingers yard by yard in pure anticipative delight, each
+guest being presented with two or three feet of the ribbon-like <i>pi&egrave;ce
+de r&eacute;sistance</i>. The scene that jumps to our memory as we watch this
+feast of fat things is connected with food-manipulations in Chicago. It
+was down at Armour's in the stockyards that we had seen Polacks and
+Scandinavian girls preparing in the succulent sausage a comestible that
+bore strange family semblance to that which our friends are now eating
+before us, this linked sweetness long drawn out.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0261"></a>
+<img src="images/img0261.jpg" width="374" height="191" alt="Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo" title="">
+<BR><B>Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo</B>
+</center>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><tt>A&mdash;Eskimo soapstone lamp which burns seal-oil. The wick is of reindeer
+moss.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>B&mdash;Eskimo knife of Stone Age.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>C&mdash;Its modern successor, fashioned from part of a steel saw, with handle
+of ivory. This is the knife used by the women; note how the old shape is
+retained.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>D&mdash;Eskimo Tam O'Shanter. The band is of loonskins, the cap proper being
+carefully constructed from swans' feet. This admirably shows the
+cleverness of the Eskimo in adapting natural forms to economic use, each
+foot of the swan being a true sector of a circle.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>E&mdash;Old-time stone hatchet.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>F and G&mdash;Knives filed from saw-blades, with bone handles.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>H&mdash;Mortar for pulverising tobacco into snuff.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>I&mdash;Needle set in a wood handle, and by rapid rotary motion used to
+pierce ivory.</tt></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. John Firth, of the Hudson's Bay Company here, gives us much
+information regarding these people who for thirty-seven consecutive
+years have traded with him. The Kogmollycs have been here &quot;from the
+beginning,&quot; the Nunatalmutes moving into this region in 1889, driven out
+of their hunting grounds inland from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, by a
+scarcity of game. The two tribes live in peace and intermarry. The aged
+among them are respected. Criminals and lunatics are quietly removed
+from the drama. Supposed incurables commit suicide and in that act
+reach immediately a hot underground heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Nature to these Eskimo is especially benign. The junction of the
+Mackenzie and the Peel is covered with a forest of spruce, and even to
+the ocean-lip we trace foot-prints of moose and black bear. In the delta
+are cross, red, and silver foxes, mink and marten, with lynx and rabbits
+according to the fortunes of war. The Eskimo declare that, east of Cape
+Parry, bears are so numerous that from ten to twenty are seen at one
+time from a high hilltop.</p>
+
+<p>The Chauncey Depew of the Kogmollycs, the man with the best stories and
+the most inimitable way of telling them, is Roxi. It was Roxi who gave
+us the love story of his cousin the Nuntalmute Lochinvar. This young man
+wooed a maid. The girl's father had no very good opinion of the lad's
+hunting ability and was obdurate. The lover determined to take destiny
+into his own hands. A ravine of ice stretched between his igloo and that
+of the family to whom he would fain be son, and over the chasm a
+drift-log formed a temporary bridge. Lothario, one night, crossed the
+icy gully, entered the igloo of his elect, seized her in her
+<i>shin-ig-bee</i> or sleeping-bag and lifted the dear burden over his back.
+In spite of struggles and muffled cries from within, he strode off with
+her to his side of the stream. The gulch safely crossed, he gaily kicked
+the log bridge into the gulf and bore his squirming treasure to his own
+igloo floor. He had left his seal-oil lamp burning and now it was with
+an anticipative chuckle of joy that he untied the drawstring. We end the
+story where Roxi did, by telling that the figure which rolled out
+sputtering from the <i>shin-ig-bee</i> was the would-not-be father-in-law
+instead of the would-be bride!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIV"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<h3>MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Into this Universe, and <i>Why</i> not knowing<br>
+Nor <i>Whence</i>, like Water willy-nilly flowing,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,</span><br>
+I know not <i>Whither</i>, willy-nilly blowing.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>The Rubaiyat</i>.<br>
+
+<p>The Midnight Sun! The sun does not sink to the horizon, but pauses for a
+moment and rises again. Dawn and eventide are one. The manifestations of
+light ever since we left Athabasca Landing have been wonderful,
+uplifting. The supreme marvel of the Midnight Sun is not what we see but
+what we feel. Standing at this outpost of Britain's Empire, we give our
+imagination rein and see waking worlds and cities of sleep. As this red
+sun rises from its horizon-dip, it is the first of the unnumbered
+sunrises which, as hour follows hour, will come to the continents.
+Longfellow says:</p>
+
+&quot;Think, every morning where the sun peeps through<br>
+The dim, leaf-latticed windows of the grove,<br>
+How jubilant the happy birds renew<br>
+Their old, melodious madrigals of love!<br>
+And when you think of this, remember too<br>
+<i>'Tis always morning somewhere</i>, and above<br>
+The awakening continents, from shore to shore,<br>
+Somewhere the birds are singing evermore.&quot;<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0264"></a>
+<img src="images/img0264.jpg" width="368" height="219" alt="Home of Mrs. Macdonald." title="">
+<BR><B>Home of Mrs. Macdonald.</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>How do the people of Macpherson divide into day and night their
+largesse of light? By common consent four o'clock in the morning seems
+to be bedtime, and by four in the afternoon people are busying
+themselves with breakfast. <i>In Polar Circles, do as the Polars do</i>, is
+good advice, and we follow suit. Individuality is strongly marked at
+this metropolis on the Peel. Every one you meet is a mine of interest,
+and sharp contrasts present themselves. Mrs. Macdonald discusses fur and
+deer-meat with Jack Johnson. He is a trapper who plays the game alone
+and who last year was reduced to killing his favourite dog for food.
+Current report credits him with having &quot;killed his man in the Yukon.&quot;
+Mrs. Macdonald is a Loucheux woman who, at the age of fourteen or
+fifteen, married Archdeacon Macdonald of the English Church and for
+eight long years afterwards assisted him in his life work of translating
+the Gospels into the Loucheux language. She has come all the way from
+Winnipeg to the Arctic Circle to spend the summer visiting her people.
+We lose our hearts to her two sons, splendid fellows both.</p>
+
+<p>It is the Eskimo who brings both missionary and trader to Fort
+McPherson. Are these Eskimo, Christians? Are they <i>civilised</i>? These are
+the questions that confront us when we speak of these Farthest North
+Canadians. It is an age of classification. You cannot find a flower
+nowadays that some one has not tacked a Latin name to, and it goes by
+inverse ratio&mdash;the smaller the flower the longer the name. Every bird
+you hear sing, even though it stop but an hour to rest its tired pinion
+on its northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat.
+How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape? In the northeast of
+Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary. In Alaska,
+on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to
+its bosom. In between these two come the people we are studying. The
+Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to
+influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not
+Episcopalians. What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of
+integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one? Heathens?
+The question sets us thinking.</p>
+
+<p>The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as &quot;Any irreligious, rude,
+barbarous or unthinking class or person.&quot; This Eskimo is not
+&quot;irreligious,&quot; for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and
+an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death,
+and he accedes to Kipling's line without ever having heard it,&mdash;&quot;They
+that are good shall be happy.&quot; He is not &quot;rude,&quot; but exceedingly
+courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude.
+&quot;Unthinking&quot; he certainly is not. Six months' darkness within the igloo
+gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker
+has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated
+cobbler is your true philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>There remains but the one ear-mark, &quot;barbarous.&quot; The dictionary declares
+that barbarous means, &quot;not classical or pure,&quot; &quot;showing ignorance of
+arts and civilisation.&quot; On the first of these indictments our poor
+Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical. And what man dare
+pronounce on the purity of another? Then we come to &quot;arts&quot; and
+&quot;civilisation.&quot; In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every
+European who has visited him. The stumbling-block in this honest search
+for a tag to put on my people is the term &quot;civilisation.&quot; One is
+reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons:
+&quot;Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man's doxy.&quot; Was it not
+Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, &quot;I am conscious that life has
+been trying to <i>civilise</i> me for now seventy years with what seems to me
+very inadequate results&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>If &quot;Christianity&quot; with the Eskimo means taking him into the white man's
+church, and &quot;civilising&quot; means bringing him into close contact with
+white men's lives, then he has not yet attained the first, and has but
+little to thank the second for. Two years ago eighty of these people in
+one tribe died of measles, a white man's disease. A stray chaplain
+wandered into an encampment of Eskimo, finding his way from a whaling
+ship. He told the people of Heaven, its golden streets, pearly gates,
+and harp-songs, and it meant nothing to these children of frost. They
+were not interested. Then he changed his theme, and spoke of Hell with
+its everlasting fires that needed no replenishing. &quot;Where is it? Tell
+us, that we may go!&quot; and little and big they clambered over him, eager
+for details.</p>
+
+<p>Prayer as presented by the white man is recognised as an incantation
+which should bring immediate and literal results. An enquiring scientist
+was seated one day with Oo-vai-oo-ak, the two fishing through adjacent
+air-holes in the ice. Calling across to the white man, Oo-vai-oo-ak
+said, &quot;How is it, brother, have you any fish?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; replied the man of letters, &quot;I have taken nothing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Have you spoken to God this morning?&quot; asked the Eskimo in a
+business-like tone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; said the wilted Walton.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, that's what's the matter,&quot; returned Oo-vai-oo-ak; &quot;I always speak
+to God every morning before I go fishing. Once, when I went to Herschel
+Island, a missionary told me what to say. It always works. I have many
+fish.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The scientist, interested, queried, &quot;And do you do the same when you go
+duck-hunting or goose-hunting or when you are after seal?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No,&quot; eagerly responded Oo-vai-oo-ak, dropping his line and pressing
+close to the geologist, &quot;Is there a prayer for duck, and for geese, and
+one for seal? The missionary never told me that. You teach it to me, eh?
+I like to make sure what to say to catch that fellow,&mdash;goose and seal.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But, unfortunately for both, the university man did not have the charm.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0268"></a>
+<img src="images/img0268.jpg" width="367" height="245" alt="Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge" title="">
+<BR><B>Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Broadly speaking, the Eskimo's theory of things, evolved from white
+spirits on the ice-floes or carried across in the age of the mastodon
+from sires and grandsires in Asia, does not differ materially from our
+own. There is a Good Spirit, called by different tribes Cood-la-pom-e-o,
+Kelligabuk, or Sidne, who dwells high in the zenith, and to whom it is
+good to pray. There is an Evil Spirit, Atti, symbolising cold and death.
+Their heaven is a warm underworld reached by entrances from the sea.
+Hell is a far, white, dreary plain. The Eskimo pray to Sidne; but it is
+wise to propitiate Atti or Tornarsuk, and in this last idea they but
+follow their Chinese or Tartar ancestors. In common with all nations,
+the Kogmollycs have a tradition of the flood. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the
+Elder said, &quot;This world once covered with the sea.&quot; Asked why she
+thought so, she replied, &quot;You have been down to the land of the
+caribou, eh? Little smooth stones from the sea are there, and shells.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The labrets or lip-ornaments, shirt-stud shaped effects worn in holes
+pierced in the cheek, strike us with interest. Is it too daring a
+conjecture to trace in these, which Eskimo men so sedulously cherish and
+resolutely refuse to talk about, a religious significance? The term
+&quot;Kelligabuk&quot; in a literal translation means &quot;Mastodon.&quot; This animal,
+whose bones not infrequently are unearthed from ice-floes, has been for
+all time venerated as a god of the hunting grounds. Is it too fanciful
+to suggest that the labrets are a sort of peripatetic idol carried
+around on the person as an imitation of the tusks of this God-Mammoth?</p>
+
+<p>East and south of the Mackenzie delta the Eskimo tell of a Supreme
+Goddess, Nuliayok, who was once a coy maiden and refused to marry a
+mortal. Wooed by a gull, she accompanied the bird to an inland home, to
+find instead of her dreams of delight a nest of sticks and rotten fish
+on a high-hung ledge. Jostled by the other fulmars, or gulls, who tried
+to push her off the rocks, she sent for her father. In the night-time he
+came and sailed with her over the water in an oomiak. The deserted
+fulmar-bridegroom, taking a leaf out of Prospero's book, raised a storm.
+The father, to lighten the craft and propitiate the storm-spirit at the
+same time, threw the poor bride over-board, and cut off her fingers as
+she clung to the boat. As the four fingers dropped into the sea they
+changed respectively into beluga the white whale, nutchook the common
+seal, oog-zook the big seal, and ibyl the walrus. After thus giving
+origin to the four great sea-friends of the Innuit, the Goddess
+Nuliayok let go the boat and went to the world beneath the sea, where
+she now lives in a whalebone house with a dog for husband. She cannot
+stand erect, but hunches over the ground, holding one foot under her as
+a baby does who has not yet learned to walk.</p>
+
+<p>It is to Nuliayok that the spirits of sea-animals go after staying three
+days by their dead bodies; and this is the reason why the Eskimo breaks
+the eyes of a killed seal. He does not want it to witness the indignity
+of seeing its own body denuded of its skin. This too is the <i>raison
+d'&ecirc;tre</i> of the ceremonies which every Eskimo punctiliously performs in
+connection with the animal he kills. Each animal has a soul or spirit to
+be offended or placated; if pleased, the spirit of the dead animal
+communicates with its living kin, who in turn will deem it an honour to
+be killed by such considerate folk as the ceremonious Innuit. Round the
+igloo fire we heard another tradition of Nuliayok. The Goddess of the
+Sea once gave birth to a litter of white and red puppies. These she put
+into two little water-tight baby-boots and set them floating before a
+north wind. The puppies landed on southern shores and became the white
+race and the red race, the Europeans and the Indians. The Innuit, of
+course, had lived from the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>We arrogate to ourselves the term of &quot;white race,&quot; but if these Eskimo
+were to wash themselves daily (which they do not do yearly) they would
+be as white as we are. They have fleshy intelligent faces and eyes with
+more than a suggestion of the almond-slant of the Oriental. The idea
+occurs to us that the full appearance of the cheeks of the women is more
+likely to be caused by the exercise of chewing skins and boots than by
+an accumulation of fatty tissue. The men are distinguished by the thin,
+straggling growth of beard and moustache which adorns their Asiatic
+progenitors. The labrets of the men are offset by the long pendant
+earrings of the women, which are made from H.B. Co. beads and shells
+brought by Alaska Indians from the Pacific, It is only the women who
+here tattoo their faces, the three long stripes extending from lower lip
+to the chin. The men crop their hair in the style of the tonsure of the
+monk. Neither man nor woman provides any head covering except the hood
+of the <i>artikki</i> or smock, which hood, fringed with waving hair of the
+carcajou or wolverine, hangs loosely at the back until called into
+requisition by a winter's storm or a summer's siege of mosquitoes.</p>
+
+<p>Eskimo clothing is much lighter in weight than it seems, and this is one
+reason why the Eskimo attach&eacute;s of every Arctic expedition have moved
+around with less exhaustion than their European or American leaders. A
+well-made Eskimo outfit of inner and outer suits, with mittens, socks,
+and boots, weighs about thirteen pounds, while one imported fur coat of
+European deerskin will alone weigh more than that.</p>
+
+<p>A custom noted at the afternoon whale-meets and pink-teas might
+fittingly find way into the latitudes where narrow toes and French heels
+obtain. Two ingenious young Kogmollyc belles had placed applique pockets
+mid-leg on their lower garments. When the walrus was passed round and
+conversation became general, the boots were slipped off quietly and one
+foot at a time was thrust for a resting spell into the pocket provided
+on the opposite trouser-leg. This act of easement was done deftly, and
+the neat action of instep boot-jack never lost its fascination for us.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0272"></a>
+<img src="images/img0272.jpg" width="292" height="419" alt="A Wise Man of the Dog-Ribs" title="">
+<BR><B>A Wise Man of the Dog-Ribs</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>All the way from boundary-line to ice-barrier we had seen Indians
+tricked out in grotesque garments borrowed from the white man and used
+in combination with their own tribal covering of skins and furs. These
+sun-bonnets and shepherd's-plaid trousers, silk hats and red-flannel
+petticoats, the trader had persuaded the child of the woods to buy. The
+debonair Eskimo is a re-incarnation of the bastard brother of Aragon's
+Prince, and, leaning his furry back against the North Pole, says with
+him, &quot;I smile at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no
+man's pleasure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business,
+laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0273"></a>
+<img src="images/img0273.jpg" width="297" height="380" alt="A Study in Expression" title="">
+<BR><B>A Study in Expression</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>You cannot induce an Eskimo to think he wants anything just because you
+have found that thing to your liking. There are two reasons for this.
+First, long experience in the most rigorous climate which the human race
+inhabits has taught this man what garments are the most suitable for him
+in which to live and move and have his being. Second, although the
+Indian may ape the white man as a superior being from whom eleemosynary
+grub and gew-gaws may be wheedled, the Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta
+considers himself to be the superior of every created being. The Eskimo
+knows what he wants; he is always sure of it, and there is no
+vacillating. When he comes into the H.B. Company's post to trade, skins
+are his currency, the pelts of the silver-fox his gold coinage. A good
+silver, or black-fox is worth here about one hundred dollars in barter.</p>
+
+<p>We saw a band of Nunatalmutes come into Fort Macpherson to do their
+summer shopping. They wanted English breakfast tea, superior rifles and
+ammunition, and a special brand of tobacco. Failing any or all of these,
+it was in vain that the Factor displayed before them the wares of John
+Bull, Uncle Sam, or Johnny Canuck, or any seductive lure made in
+Germany. Ig-ly-o-bok and Nan-a-sook-tok bought what they found to their
+liking, took small change out of two silver-fox skins, and put the
+remaining six pelts back into the wooden box which formed at once their
+savings bank and letter of credit for the season to come. The
+hungry-eyed H.B. man confided to us that two of these coveted pelts had
+been thus exhibited to him and thus tucked back into the Eskimo
+sinking-fund for three successive seasons.</p>
+
+<p>As regards weapons, we found Eskimo hunters in the transition stage. The
+old-time spears, four feet long and tipped with ivory, are still in
+active service. The bows, with arrows finished in copper, flint, and
+bone, have been relegated largely to the boys, while Krag-Jorgensen,
+Lee-Enfield, and other high-power guns are bought from American whalers.
+The fish-hooks which I got in friendly barter are interesting to any one
+born with angling blood in his veins. Beautifully fashioned of ivory,
+copper, bone, and beads, the contrivance is a sinker, bait, and hook,
+all in one. The daily baskets procured with this lure incontestably
+proves the Husky a judicious hooker.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo is a merger. Father Petitot shows us the close analogy
+between the Kogmollyc language and the tongues of eastern Asiatic
+tribes, ancient and modern. This Eskimo's speech, then, gives him a
+connection with the effete East (which is his west), while enamelled
+washbasins, with here and there a corrugated wash-board, prove that
+slowly but surely Canadian culture is reaching him from the south.</p>
+
+<p>With two modifications, this Eskimo is invariably truthful. Like the
+Indians to the south of him, seeking to please you by answering a
+question in the way that you desire, he will at times tell you an
+untruth, for it seems to him discourteous to answer your question other
+than in the way which you anticipate. For instance, if you say to Roxi,
+&quot;Wasn't that a grey goose we heard overhead?&quot; Roxi will readily assent,
+though he well knows it to have been a mallard duck, but he would spare
+your ignorance. Again, it is Eskimo etiquette to belittle your own
+success in hunting and, in so doing, be not literally truthful. When we
+place this delightful trait alongside the fish-stories we are familiar
+with, who would seek to change the heathen?</p>
+
+<p>Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of
+each other for better or for worse. It is an easy union entered upon and
+maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one
+manifest advantage,&mdash;Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When
+unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of
+the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes
+herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium
+attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam
+husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young
+Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways. She
+asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, &quot;No. You may go
+to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction,
+and I hunt.&quot; Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e.,
+the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six
+nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father,
+for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the
+ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was
+strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a
+tree handy he would have been lynched. This would have been the first
+lynching recorded in Canada. The feeling of the Eskimo community was
+that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the
+bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper
+state to her father's door or to let her have the dogs.</p>
+
+<p>In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in
+re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical
+ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores. The ceremonies which
+approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the
+importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of
+what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them
+grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out
+each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a
+freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony,
+replied, &quot;New light, new sun,&quot; showing his belief that the sun was
+yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to
+igloo reminds us of the &quot;first-footing&quot; of the Scottish village. The
+mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the
+old Lord of Misrule.</p>
+
+<p>About the season of Christmas, a great meeting is held in the igloo,
+presided over by the Angekok or medicine-man, who entreats the invisible
+powers for good fortune, immunity from storms, and a plenitude of
+blubber for the ensuing year. This invocation is followed by a family
+feast. Next day the ceremonies are carried on out-of-doors, where all
+from oldest to youngest form a ring-around-a-rosy. In the centre of the
+circle is set a crock of water, while to the communal feast each person
+brings from his own hut a piece of meat, raw preferred. This meat is
+eaten in the solemn silence of a communion, each person thinking of
+Sidne, the Good Spirit, and wishing for good. The oldest member of the
+tribe, a white-haired man or tottering dame, takes up a sealskin cup,
+kept for this annual ceremony, dips up some of the water and drinks it,
+all the time thinking of Sidne, the Good Spirit, while the others close
+their eyes in reverent silence.</p>
+
+<p>Before passing the cup on to the rest of the company that they may
+drink, the old man or woman states aloud the date and place of his or
+her birth, as accurately as it can be remembered. The drinking and
+thinking ceremony is performed by all in succession, down to the last
+naked baby cuddling in its mother's <i>artikki</i>, the little child that
+cannot yet speak. The solemn rite is brought to a close by the tossing
+of presents across the ring from one to the other, the theory being
+that, as they generously deal with others, so Sidne will deal with them
+in the coming year. So up here on the edge of things, among our
+&quot;uncivilised heathens,&quot; we have our Christmas presents and &quot;<i>Peace on
+earth, good will to men</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XV"></a><h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<h3>MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;Man does not live by bread alone.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Exigencies of life have caused the Mackenzie Eskimo to formulate on
+vital matters an unwritten law to which each gives assent. Succinctly
+stated, this system of Northland jurisprudence runs thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>(a) Should a man, inadvertently or by malice aforethought, kill
+another, the wife and children of the man so killed remain a burden on
+the murderer so long as he or they live.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>(b) A drift-log found is treasure-trove, and belongs to the finder, who
+indicates possession by placing upon it a pipe, mitten, or personal
+trinket of some kind</i>. Whalers, missionaries and Mounted Police are a
+unit in testifying that precious flotsam of this kind has remained four
+or five years in a land of wood-scarcity without being disturbed.</p>
+
+<p><i>(c) No one must eat seal and walrus on the same day</i>. Thus a check is
+given to luxuriousness and the Eskimo is self-prevented from falling
+into the fate which overtook Rome.</p>
+
+<p><i>(d) All large animals killed are to be looked upon as common property
+of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them</i>.
+Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of
+the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's
+crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, holding
+all things in common.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo realises that the pleasure of life is in pursuit, not in
+acquisition. Where wants are many, joys are few; the very austerity of
+his life has made a man of him. Laying up few treasures for the elements
+to corrupt, accumulating no property except a little, a very little, of
+the kind designated by Wemmick as &quot;portable,&quot; he, to better and saner
+effect than any man, decreases the denominator of his wants instead of
+increasing the numerator of his havings. Surrounded by the palcocrystic
+ice, the genial current of his soul has not been frozen by that ice. An
+Eskimo family accepts life with a smile and, in the faith of little
+children, goes on its way.</p>
+
+<p>An old Scot once prayed, &quot;O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at
+this time the savin' grace o' <i>continuance</i>.&quot; Only one man has less need
+to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo.
+The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is
+spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are
+never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the
+little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no
+broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out
+dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning
+clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the
+opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the
+Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active
+ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.</p>
+
+<p>On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo
+attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live
+beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is
+happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother
+often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest
+of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and
+spreading over every life it touches.</p>
+
+<p>There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which
+we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his
+generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs
+met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man
+exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all
+carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or
+the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the
+leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his
+price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was
+dropped back into <i>artikki</i> recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy
+child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift.
+It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be
+scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who
+tried to beat down his price as &quot;the <i>cheap</i> engineer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little
+group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs,
+and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while
+the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men
+were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet
+nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our
+researches. The whalers call him &quot;Set-'em-Up,&quot; for his name bears the
+convivial translation, &quot;Give us a drink.&quot; &quot;You going to make better man,
+you get Outside&mdash;make him like Emmie-ray?&quot; As Emmie-ray pursues the
+tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue,
+with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of
+the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating
+Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.</p>
+
+<p>Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people,
+instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him
+for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the
+world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts
+of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be
+a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's
+blood.</p>
+
+<p>Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came
+originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees
+before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their
+predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon
+estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil,
+its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel
+wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has
+another unit&mdash;blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and
+Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your
+apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber
+and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season.
+These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at
+the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the
+white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has
+pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.</p>
+
+<p>At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous
+Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder,
+but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had
+whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the
+whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater
+part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and
+who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty
+Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi
+had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of
+the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry,
+and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into
+the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to
+the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the
+sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the
+dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking
+bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard
+the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on
+Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the
+ocean from another age and a far land, &quot;Thy necessity is greater than
+mine.&quot; Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the
+shores of many seas.</p>
+
+<p>Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of
+geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to
+the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination
+still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of
+rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if
+you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a
+thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was
+served, though he <i>would</i> eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a
+distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the
+gastronomic line he drew. &quot;Aw!&quot; replied he, &quot;No fellow eats owl, you
+know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all
+right. The crow's a kind of <i>rook</i>, you know, and every fellow eats
+<i>rook-pie.&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin
+in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable
+compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this
+people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him
+through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a
+hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the
+light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly
+pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal,
+then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This
+jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of
+food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his
+own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.</p>
+
+<p>Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a
+feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so &quot;bluggy.&quot; You feel
+differently about it at 70&ordm; North. You put prejudice far from you,
+comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese,
+and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with
+mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment.
+Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square
+there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.</p>
+
+<p>We had brought with us on our transport two years' provisions for the
+detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel
+Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated
+cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their
+commissariat. Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip
+bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick
+or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the
+tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old
+body herself. Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg,
+seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of
+desiccated vegetables. I know. I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed,
+&quot;Honesty <i>is</i> the best policy. <i>I've tried baith</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a
+bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back
+between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw
+or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes
+like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. If you have scooped shrimps
+from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a
+parasite.</p>
+
+<p>Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale
+which in life holds the baleen. What is whale-gum like? It tastes like
+chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber
+tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would
+liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a
+southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as
+lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled
+beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and
+gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and
+moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than
+pigs-feet.</p>
+
+<p>Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that
+overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You
+may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the
+musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's
+scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my
+vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw
+the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the
+association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat <i>must</i>
+taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first
+blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is
+that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing
+exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by
+cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much
+better frozen than cooked.</p>
+
+<p>Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much
+esteemed delicacy. During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide
+light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo. The
+blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in
+sealskin bags&mdash;the winter provision of gas-tank, electric
+storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this
+master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not
+centuries, the inventive adaptability of his &quot;civilised&quot; cousins. The
+blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its
+flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an
+inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land
+kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he
+has never seen. He doesn't eat it, but drops it into the cavernous
+recesses of his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of
+English undefiled. &quot;Disgusting,&quot; you say. It's all a matter of latitude.
+Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet
+of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer
+period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of
+an &quot;all-day sucker.&quot; These little babies have the digestion of an
+ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts
+until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at
+once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about
+as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little
+chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it
+with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled
+Fauntleroy on an imported apple. The Eskimo mother has no green apples
+to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon
+the troubled waters. Every day in the year her babies are crammed with
+marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.</p>
+
+<p>To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only
+vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their
+food is eaten. They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the
+marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised
+and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the
+Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen
+hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island
+sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis
+of the <i>Karluk</i>, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132
+ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked
+whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>Who are these people, and whence came they? Each little tribe is a book
+unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are
+confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they
+are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning
+himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation
+chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. &quot;<i>We used to know
+it.&quot; &quot;Our fathers have told us.&quot; &quot;This land-whale with its tail in
+front once lived in the land of the Innuit</i>.&quot; We are now the ones to
+become excited. Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had
+been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest. &quot;Where did
+your fathers see this animal?&quot; we asked. &quot;Here, in this country. In the
+ice his bones were hidden,&quot; said the old man. With this he relapsed into
+the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Mogg, of the whaling schooner <i>Olga</i>, two winters ago pursued
+his whaling operations far to the north and east. Ice-bound at Prince
+Albert Land, he stumbled upon a little settlement of Eskimo. These were
+completely isolated from and had had no communication with white men or
+any community of their own race. Only one of their number had seen a
+white man before&mdash;one old, old woman, the grandmother of the band. The
+captain of the <i>Olga</i> speaks Eskimo fluently, and to him this ancestress
+of the &quot;lost tribe&quot; had an interesting story to tell. She remembered a
+white man who came across the Great Sea from the west in &quot;a big kayak,&quot;
+and she extended her arms to show its size. Her people had given this
+stranger seal-meat and blubber and the &quot;Chief&quot; from the great ship had
+presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the
+seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very
+child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early
+fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage
+and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the
+little girl's questioning wonder,&mdash;&quot;Of what animal is this the skin?&quot;
+Thus does history manifest itself on the other side of the shield &quot;after
+many days.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Through the years, the Eskimo has fared better than the Indian. It
+would seem that the London Directorate of the H.B. Co. expected its
+servants within the Arctic Circle in the days that are past to do almost
+a Creator's part and make all things of nothing. The scanty provisions
+and trading goods from England which filtered in thus far were to be
+given to the Indians in exchange for furs, while the Factor and his
+people were largely expected to &quot;live on the country.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Cannibalism was not unknown. The winter of 1841-2 was an especially hard
+one. On the 18th March, 1841, J. William Spence and Murdock Morrison
+were dispatched with the winter express from Fort Good Hope to Fort
+Macpherson. During the second night out, while they were asleep in the
+encampment, they were knocked on the head by four starving Indian women,
+immediately cut to pieces, and devoured. It is further reported that
+these women previously had killed and eaten their husbands and all their
+children except one little boy. Of the two murdered Scots they ate what
+they could that night and made pemmican of what was over, reporting
+afterward that one was sweet but that the other, tasting of tobacco, was
+not so good.</p>
+
+<p>Father Petitot gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His na&iuml;ve
+words are, &quot;<i>Chie-ke-nayelle,</i> a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning
+fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his
+features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his
+youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine of 1841. He
+killed his young daughter with a hatchet-blow, cooked her like flesh,
+and ate her as a meat-pate. It is said that after one has partaken of
+human flesh, the appetite for it often returns. I hasten to add that
+<i>Chie-ke-nayelle,</i> in spite of the soubriquet <i>mangeur de monde</i> which
+is irrevocably rivetted to his name, has not succumbed to such an
+appetite. He is indeed an excellent Christian. Nevertheless, I would not
+like to camp with <i>Chie-ke-nayelle</i> in time of famine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another starvation story related by the good Father is not quite so
+ghastly. He tells us of one &quot;M. Finlaison of burlesque memory,&quot; who,
+when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of
+his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish
+reel. That was their dinner for the day,&mdash;instead of meat they had
+sound. The narrator adds, &quot;In America they would have lynched the
+too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed and
+applauded the master.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The winter of 1844 also was a season of distress. Referring to this
+year, a beautiful young Indian woman said to the sympathetic priest, &quot;I
+did not wish to eat the arm of my father. I was then a small child of
+eight, and I had not been able to see my old father eaten without crying
+out with loud screams. But my mother called to me in rage, 'If you do
+not eat of it, it is that you condemn us and hate us, then you will
+surely go the same way.' And I ate the flesh of my father, hiding my
+sobs and devouring my tears, for fear of being killed like him; so much
+was I afraid of the eyes of my mother.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another Indian woman confesses, &quot;I left my husband, a hunter at the
+fort, and took with me by the hand my only child, a boy of six, and
+directed my steps towards <i>Ka-cho-Gottine.</i> It was indeed far. I only
+knew the way by hearsay. Once I myself have eaten of my father, but now
+I am a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm
+in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days.
+Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on
+the final resurrection day?&quot; Here Father Petitot interpolates, &quot;Ah! if
+she had only read Dante!&quot; &quot;I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he
+was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart
+for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and
+knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death
+that awaited my only child. But what could I do?&quot; This story has a more
+comfortable ending than the previous one. We breathe relief in learning
+from the priest that the following night the little boy overtook his
+mother. He had walked all day and all night, following her snowshoe
+tracks. They went on together, the third day they snared some hares, and
+their troubles were over.</p>
+
+<p>Father Petitot tells of a Rabbit-skin Indian who found a mummified body
+in the forks of a tree near the Ramparts of the Mackenzie and who came
+running into the Mission, his hair on end with fright, asking excitedly,
+&quot;Did God make that man or was he made by the men of the Hudson's Bay?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Another tale of his is of an Indian, <i>Le Petit Cochon</i>, who had a
+tape-worm and thought it was a whale. &quot;Unfortunate!&quot; exclaims the
+Father, &quot;possessed of a whale! That's the difference between <i>Le Petit
+Cochon</i> and Jonah.&quot; Sucking Pig said he would join the Church if the
+priest would rid him of the tape-worm. But we must use the words of
+Petitot himself, for they are too delicious to lose. &quot;Christmas night,
+1865, after midnight mass, <i>Le Petit Cochon,</i> carefully purged, both as
+to body and soul, by an emetic, two purgatives, and a good confession,
+content as a King, received holy baptism. I gave him the name of Noel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In starvation times, guests were not appreciated. Robert Campbell of the
+H.B. Company, writing from Fort Halkett in 1840, says, &quot;God grant that
+the time of privation may soon end, and that I may not see a soul from
+below till the snow disappears.&quot; These days of the early forties when
+England was engaged with the Chartist risings at home and her Chinese
+wars abroad, were surely parlous times up on this edge of empire. The
+Fort Simpson journals of February 4, 1843, record, &quot;The <i>Cannibal</i>, with
+young <i>Noir</i>, and others of the party of <i>Laman</i>, arrived this evening
+in the last stage of existence, being compelled by starvation to eat all
+their furs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Still these sonsy Scots kept a good heart and were able to jest at their
+misfortunes with the grim humour that belongs to their race. Neither
+empty larder nor other misfortune disheartened them. The recurrence of
+New Year's Day and the Feast of St. Andrew were made ever occasions for
+rejoicing. Up on the Pelly Forks under date of November 30th, 1848, the
+record reads, &quot;Though far from our native land and countrymen, let us
+pass St. Andrew's Day in social glee. So fill your glasses, my lads, and
+pass the bottle round.&quot; Three years later, on the same anniversary, the
+lines are, &quot;Very cold for St. Andrew's, and no haggis for dinner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And as January Ist ushers in the year 1845, the Factor at Fort
+Macpherson bursts into verse:</p>
+
+&quot;This day, Time winds th' exhausted chain<br>
+To run the twelvemonths' length again.<br>
+I see the old bald-pated fellow<br>
+With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,<br>
+Adjust the unimpaired machine<br>
+To wheel the equal, dull routine.<br>
+
+<p>Underneath the record a postscript appears, in another hand:</p>
+
+&quot;Oh let us love our occupations,<br>
+Bless the Co. and their relations,<br>
+Be content with our poor rations,<br>
+And always know our proper stations.<br>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XVI"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<h3>THE TALE OF A WHALE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>&quot;In the North Sea lived a whale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What is a whale? Well, although the whalers dub it so, it is not a fish,
+but is a true mammal, the last of the mammoth creatures that trod the
+earth and floundered the seas of a past age. The whale is the biggest,
+the meekest, and the most interesting of living animals. As we go north,
+we readjust all our ideas of distance and immensity. Rivers are longer,
+lakes more majestic, and whales bigger than we have ever dreamed.
+Examining a stranded whale at Herschel, we see the flippers to be really
+hands with four fingers and a thumb enveloped in a sheath, and
+rudimentary hind-legs are discovered under the tough skin. Without
+doubt, the ancestors of the whale were land mammals which became adapted
+to a littoral life, and in splashing round the shore acquired the habit
+of swimming. Subsequently carried out to sea, they became under the new
+environment the structure as we see it.</p>
+
+<p>Off the delta of the Mackenzie, the Circumpolar of Arctic Bowhead whale
+<i>(Balaena mysticetus</i>) is making his last stand. Unless a close season
+is enforced, this cetacean carrying round his ten thousand dollar
+mouthful of baleen will soon fold his fluked fins like the Arab and
+swing that huge body of his into line with the Great Auk, the
+Sea-Otter, the Plains Buffalo, and all the melancholy procession of
+Canadian Has-Beens.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0296"></a>
+<img src="images/img0296.jpg" width="367" height="265" alt="We Tell the Tale of a Whale" title="">
+<BR><B>We Tell the Tale of a Whale</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Whales divide themselves into two great classes: those furnished with
+teeth (the <i>Denticete</i>) and those in which the place of teeth is
+supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or &quot;whalebone&quot; of
+commerce (the <i>Mysticete</i> or <i>Balaenidae</i>). The members of the Baleen
+Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the
+Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality
+of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the &quot;Arctic
+Whale,&quot; &quot;Polar Whale,&quot; &quot;Greenland Whale,&quot; &quot;Bowhead,&quot; &quot;Right Whale,&quot; or
+&quot;Icebreaker.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to
+one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of
+exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons.
+Comparisons are illuminating. The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field
+Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in
+longitudinal measurement. The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen
+to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil
+each,&mdash;lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy! The eyes placed
+in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange. The
+tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of
+which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he
+feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil. The
+aorta is as big as a man's waist and, at each pulsation of the heart,
+spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood. The heart itself is more
+than a yard in transverse diameter. The toothed whales carry the teeth
+in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti
+or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca'ing Whale, the White
+Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as
+Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins. Only the toothed whale eats fish;
+the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life,
+called &quot;brit&quot; by the whalers. The Bowhead that we have come up to the
+Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria. He couldn't eat a herring
+if by that one act he might attain immortality.</p>
+
+<p>Whale errors die hard. Artists persistently depict the big animals as
+spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales
+breathe out air only from their lungs. They come to the surface for
+that purpose, the &quot;blowing&quot; being quite analogous to the breathing of
+land mammals. Noticing the condensation of a whale's breath up here in
+the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular
+blunder. Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale)
+bulls. &quot;At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea.&quot;
+Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything
+but common or seaside air.</p>
+
+<p>The Bowhead is hunted for his &quot;whalebone&quot;; the Cachalot or true Sperm,
+the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and
+spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>It is customary to call whales &quot;fierce,&quot; &quot;savage,&quot; &quot;murderous,&quot; but this
+is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate. Every family,
+however, has its black sheep. The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of
+sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales. One Killer taken
+up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals,
+and it choked to death on the fifteenth. Banded in Molly Maguire groups,
+the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in
+swimming off the Pribilofs. We have seen them, a pack of hungry
+sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale! A number of these brigands of the
+Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened
+mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead's tongue is
+eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles. At the approach of the Killer
+even sea-lions seek the shore. And the Alaska Indian who would pose as
+Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the
+crest of his totem.</p>
+
+<p>The American is more aggressive&mdash;shall we say progressive?&mdash;than the
+Canadian. The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his
+summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada. Each of these
+floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen
+thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been
+content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into
+their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0299"></a>
+<img src="images/img0299.jpg" width="360" height="267" alt="Two Little Ones at Herschel Island" title="">
+<BR><B>Two Little Ones at Herschel Island</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Is there much money in whales to-day? Are not oil and whalebone drugs in
+the market? Let us see. Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island
+anchorage. Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out
+from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter
+waiting-quarters. One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of
+outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit.
+In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer <i>Orca</i>, captured
+twenty-eight whales. The <i>Jeanette</i> in 1905 got ten whales and a calf,
+the <i>Karluk</i> got seven whales, the <i>Alexander</i> eight, the <i>Bowhead</i>
+seven. The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them
+thirty-three whales and one calf. At fifteen thousand dollars each (San
+Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very
+nearly half a million. Two years later the <i>Narwhal</i> took out fifteen
+whales, the <i>Jeanette</i> and <i>Bowhead</i> each four. Although the average
+bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far
+beyond that figure. A whale caught by Capt. Simmons of the ship <i>John M.
+Winthrop</i> carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its
+head,&mdash;$16,750! One of these at a time would be good fishing.</p>
+
+<p>The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American
+steam-whaler <i>Grampus</i>, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one
+whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go
+&quot;to the east'ard of P'int Barrow&quot; for this big whale; since that date
+the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five
+whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the &quot;bone&quot; (baleen) at
+two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a
+pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half
+millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the
+past twenty years, by the back-door route.</p>
+
+<p>Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert
+evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the <i>Narwhal</i>, in 1907
+lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen
+whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous,
+but that they are on the move east and north.</p>
+
+<p>The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San
+Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go
+into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible
+next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can
+stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its
+catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible;
+dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over
+again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks,
+and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a
+lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one
+twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one
+forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth,
+fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth.
+Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It
+looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco
+waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B.
+overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the
+vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come
+across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land
+or marine) induces in most of us.</p>
+
+<p>A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific
+route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a
+half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the
+whaling-fleet. &quot;The farther north the finer fur&quot; is a recognised law.
+The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns,
+ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the
+choicest furs this continent produces.</p>
+
+<p>The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this
+international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British
+Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver
+Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur
+bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would
+think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the &quot;feel&quot; of
+Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta
+claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs,
+feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60&deg; and the uttermost edge of
+things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be
+hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the
+rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by
+interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of
+these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.</p>
+
+<p>Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by
+deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its
+biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern
+Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon
+the shingle. &quot;As far as we go!&quot; This is essentially the Island of
+Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's
+last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings.
+We are in latitude 69-1/2&deg; N. and just about 139&deg; west of Greenwich; we
+are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in
+South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never
+dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above
+sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel
+at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is
+twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For
+six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice
+hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose
+from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for
+twenty years to make their home!</p>
+
+<p>The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one
+corner,&mdash;who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from
+Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste
+hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is
+interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily
+lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his
+boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the
+whaler picked up and attached to his m&eacute;nage the Eskimo from the mainland
+in little bunches <i>en famille</i>. Ensuing connubial complications brought
+the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from
+each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American
+citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax
+Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty
+whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.</p>
+
+<p>Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can
+winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a
+feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and
+automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers'
+quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest
+Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear
+panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.</p>
+
+<p>North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy
+arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief
+smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly
+desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that
+they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above
+ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between
+this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is
+nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid
+disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of
+America &quot;the ocean graveyard&quot; and &quot;the step-mother to ships.&quot; There have
+been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the <i>Penelope</i> off
+Shingle Point, the <i>Bonanza</i> off King Point, the <i>Triton</i> on the shores
+of Herschel itself, the <i>Alexander</i> near Horton River, a little
+missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship <i>The Duchess of
+Bedford</i>, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in
+Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the
+ocean of her quest.</p>
+
+<p>The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for
+miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with
+drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,&mdash;a boon more prized by
+them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps
+and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where
+whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.</p>
+
+<p>In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,&mdash;saxifrages, white anemones
+through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox
+dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight
+Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It
+sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the
+evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints
+and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish,
+shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature
+whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the
+short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds
+nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming,
+the &quot;cockshut light&quot; of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the
+morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the
+day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into
+activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are
+cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter
+deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the
+year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring &quot;leads&quot;
+in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend
+out in the track of the big Bowhead.</p>
+
+<p>Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for
+&quot;Outside&quot; got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel
+all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy
+threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are &quot;mounted&quot; in
+imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride
+here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got
+to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One
+able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a
+medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the
+request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the
+island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was
+signed &quot;T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.,&quot; and, after making it, the A.B., M.D.
+saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury
+spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes
+&quot;you never can tell.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size:
+they are &quot;suckers&quot; under a year, &quot;short-heads&quot; as long as they are
+suckled, &quot;stunts&quot; at two years, &quot;skull-fish&quot; with baleen less than six
+feet long, and &quot;size-fish&quot; at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A
+whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds
+enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the
+greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand
+years! A &quot;sucker&quot; who happened to be disporting round the British Isles
+when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring
+with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an
+Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps.
+Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a
+thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of
+Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual
+migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and
+salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads
+trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey
+in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept
+them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year
+by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in
+successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family
+of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm,
+excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change
+in the season of their amours.</p>
+
+<p>A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended
+motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds
+beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface
+horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same,
+a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale
+of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an
+hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five.
+Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that
+a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains
+23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead
+feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. He quaintly elucidates
+this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons
+would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in
+the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive
+and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.</p>
+
+<p>The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and &quot;long years
+afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke.&quot; Those who stick
+harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating
+rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in
+blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and
+a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage
+connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir
+John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the &quot;North
+Sea&quot; lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of
+having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of
+Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his
+inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked <i>Ansell Gibbs</i>.
+The <i>Ansell Gibbs</i> was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield
+Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871. Imagination sees opportunity in
+this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept
+apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern
+Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of
+utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's
+enamoured dolphin?</p>
+
+<p>Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday,
+while officers from three ships were &quot;gamming&quot; over their afternoon
+walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, &quot;I hear a Bowhead!&quot; There was
+much chaffing about &quot;Kelly's band,&quot; but Kelly weighed anchor and went to
+find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the
+bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made
+by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to
+give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice.
+Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the
+water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths.
+Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck,
+at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is &quot;gallied&quot; or
+stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but
+there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From
+the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out &quot;hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo&quot; of the
+hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that
+&quot;beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before
+slipping back to 'F' again.&quot; He assures us that, &quot;with the Humpback the
+tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a
+violin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year
+men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a
+mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they
+strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to
+the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He
+carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers
+and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the
+ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm,
+and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He
+had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0310"></a>
+<img src="images/img0310.jpg" width="364" height="221" alt="Breeding Grounds of the Seals" title="">
+<BR><B>Breeding Grounds of the Seals</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has
+entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have
+shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out
+strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a
+cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on
+Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention
+of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance
+which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which
+clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the
+harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the
+&quot;fish&quot; is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound,
+and hot air from the engine pumped into the &quot;proposition&quot; keeps it
+afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales
+in one day,&mdash;Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.</p>
+
+<p>The Eskimo say, &quot;There is no part of a seal that is not good,&quot; and the
+same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The
+viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear
+in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From
+the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields
+of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers
+for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn
+can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is
+absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the
+Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more
+than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders
+find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the
+Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward
+and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now,
+enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow
+fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she
+must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like
+it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will
+bear the legend, &quot;Whale cream soda&quot; and &quot;Best Whale Milkshake.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the
+whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of
+ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.</p>
+
+<p>What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and
+flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all
+the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made
+from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone
+horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a
+dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last
+generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never &quot;broke its mighty heart&quot;
+in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible
+steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new
+avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers
+of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine
+filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the
+manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and
+elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this
+writing advertises:</p>
+
+WHALEBONE TEETH $5<br>
+A GREAT DISCOVERY<br>
+THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST<br>
+AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN<br>
+DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH<br>
+Guaranteed ten years<br>
+YOU BITE CORN OFF THE COB<br>
+
+<p>Spermaceti, the solid waxy body carried round in the Cachalot's head in
+solution, is a valuable whale-product. Bland and demulcent, spermaceti
+is employed as an ingredient in ointments, cosmetics, and cerates.
+Spermaceti candles of definite size form the measure of electric light,
+giving rise to the phrase &quot;of so many candle-power.&quot; Present-day
+spermaceti is both a saving and a destructive agent. Large quantities of
+it are used in Europe in the manufacture of ecclesiastical candles, and
+part of the same consignment may help to make self-lubricating
+cartridges.</p>
+
+<p>Most valuable of all whale-products, the costliest commodity on this
+earth ounce for ounce with the one exception of radium, is ambergris. As
+amber was once considered &quot;the frozen tears of seagulls,&quot; so ambergris
+for ages puzzled the ancients. Some called it &quot;the solidified foam of
+the sea,&quot; with others it was a &quot;fungoidal growth of the ocean analogous
+to that on trees.&quot; When people in the old days came across anything
+exceedingly costly they wanted to eat it, on the same principle which
+makes the baby put each new gift into his mouth. So we have historic
+record of pearl soup a la Cleopatra, and dishes dashed with ambergris.
+Milton sings of,&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;Beasts of chase, or fowl of game,<br>
+In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,<br>
+Grisamber-steamed.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>What is this choice tidbit? It is a morbid secretion of the intestines
+of the sick Sperm-whale, and sells for from thirty to forty dollars an
+ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a
+dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or
+cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island
+beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that
+solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy
+odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a
+floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In
+pharmacy, it is regarded as a cardiac and anti-spasmodic and as a
+specific against the rabies. For years it has been used in sacerdotal
+rites of the church; and suitors of old times sought with it to charm
+their mistresses. The dying sperm, spouting up the ghost, offers of his
+very vitals to aid the lover and serve the church.</p>
+
+<p>Fascinating are the finds of ambergris. The barque <i>Sea-Fox</i> of New
+Bedford, in 1866, off the coast of Arabia, took a one hundred and
+fifty-six pound mass of ambergris, which was sold to the Arabs of
+Zanzibar for ten thousand dollars in gold. The <i>Adeline Gibbs</i>, in the
+same year, took one hundred and thirty-two pounds from a bull-sperm
+south of St. Helena, and sold the hunk for twenty-three thousand
+dollars. Three winters ago an Arctic whaling-crew put into Seattle, and
+there leaked out the interesting story of how, not recognising the
+priceless unguent, they had greased their oars, masts, and knee-boots
+with &quot;a big lump of ambergrease.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In modern whaling not an ounce of the carcase is cast as rubbish to the
+void. The intestines make a soft kid which takes any dye and is largely
+used for artistic leather-work. The size of these immense strips makes
+possible splendid belts for machinery with a minimum of joinings. The
+chemically-macerated bones are turned into an &quot;indestructible&quot;
+crockery-ware which is far more enduring than anything made of
+vegetable-fibre. The Beluga gives us the best shoe-strings in the world.
+You can lace your shoes with a Beluga lace for two years and be sure it
+will not break the morning you are in an especial hurry to catch an
+inter-Reuben train.</p>
+
+<p>An interest attaches to living whales which outweighs the fascination
+with which we study their dead parts. Each species of the whale
+propagates with one of its own species only. The fidelity of whales to
+each other exceeds the constancy of birds. The whale mother gives birth
+to one calf, and in extremely rare cases two calves, producing every
+second year, the young being born between the end of March and the
+beginning of May. When the mother suckles her young she throws herself
+on one side on the surface of the sea and the calf regularly feeds at
+the breast (like a young Eskimo) for nearly two years. During this time
+the baby is extremely fat and the mother correspondingly emaciated.
+Perhaps nothing in nature is more touching than the devotion of a female
+whale to its wounded young. Whalers harpoon the babe at the breast so
+that they may afterwards secure the dam. In this case, the mother joins
+the wounded young under the surface of the water, comes up with it when
+it rises to breathe, encourages it to swim off, assists its flight by
+taking it under her fin, and seldom deserts it while life remains.</p>
+
+<p>Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the
+thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities
+in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great
+Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to
+restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which
+has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a
+thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant
+generations of man grow another one to take its place.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XVII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<h3>SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+&quot;The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,<br>
+That blaze in the velvet blue.<br>
+They're God's own guides on the Long Trail&mdash;<br>
+The trail that is always new.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+<i>Kipling</i>.<br>
+
+<p>A tax on tea caused the revolt of the thirteen Colonies, a taunting load
+of tennis-balls lost France to the Dauphin. Eighty years ago on this
+Arctic edge, white beads, or the lack of them, lost a lucrative
+fur-trade, alienated the Loucheux and caused the death of whites.
+&quot;Trifles make the sum of human things.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The old records tell the story. John Bell from Fort Good Hope, under
+date of August 14th, 1827, writes to the Factor at Fort Simpson:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The beads sent in for the Loucheux trade are not sufficiently large to
+please them. I request you will endeavour to send in the largest size
+for the trade of the ensuing year. A specimen of the kind wanted I send
+enclosed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Factor at Fort Simpson, under date of November 22nd of the same
+year, writes to the Governor and Chief Factors at Montreal:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I now forward a specimen of the common white beads wanted for the trade
+with the Loucheux Indians. It is their request and I hope it will be
+attended to. I would not venture to make the demand, were it not from
+conviction that without this favourite article these Indians look with
+indifference on the best of our goods. No other ornamental article is
+ever asked for or wanted by these natives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The same official on March 15th, 1828, pleads with Montreal:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The white beads demanded for the Loucheux trade I hope will be sent,
+and of the size according to sample enclosed. May I use the freedom of
+representing the importance of getting this article to the liking of the
+Indians, to come up by the Montreal canoes and be ready for outfit 1829?
+Three kegs will contain the quantity required, 200 to 250 pounds.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again on the 29th of November, 1829, he writes Montreal:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The White Beads asked for the trade with the Loucheux are not according
+to the order sent, 15 pounds only of the quantity received (200 pounds)
+are of the proper size, the remainder being the same as those in outfit
+1825 so much complained of. They will not be satisfactory to the
+Indians. We request you will be pleased to make a strong representation
+to their Honours at Home that this article be sent according to order
+and sample. We now conceive to say anything further would be tiresome.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Fort Simpson Factor on March 19th, 1830, reports to Montreal:</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>&quot;The goods came. The white beads was too small and not according to
+order or sample asked for. The Indians would not take them and left the
+Fort dissatisfied.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Trader at Fort Good Hope augments the story by recording that the
+Indians would be better pleased in trade with two small kegs of the
+special beads they wanted than with half a ton of any other trade goods
+which London could manufacture and send out. The sequel of the story is
+that, disappointed time and again in not getting their favourite beads,
+the Loucheux Indians failed to bring in the autumn supply of meat to
+Fort Good Hope and in consequence, before the snows of the winter of
+1831 had melted, many of the white men attached to that post died of
+starvation.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0319"></a>
+<img src="images/img0319.jpg" width="369" height="225" alt="The Keele Party on the Gravel River" title="">
+<BR><B>The Keele Party on the Gravel River</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We had gone North with the birds in spring and now, as we turn our faces
+homeward, the first migrants with strong wing are beginning their
+southward flight. Our travel is against current now, for we make slower
+time than we did coming in and consequently see more of the passing
+shore-line. The last specimens we gather within the Arctic Circle are
+the blue blossoms of the flax. In them we see the earnest of many a
+cultivated farm of the future. The days are getting perceptibly shorter
+and one by one the old familiar constellations come back in the
+heavens. We find it a relief to have once more a twilight and a
+succeeding period of dusk. Yet are we loath to leave this fascinating
+North with its sure future, its quaint to-days, and all the glamour of
+its rich past.</p>
+
+<p>We had just passed Fort Norman when the sharp eyes of an Indian
+deck-hand saw three figures on the beach ahead. Pulling in at the point
+where the Gravel River joins the Mackenzie, we find a regular Robinson
+Crusoe group,&mdash;Mr. J. Keele, of the Dominion Government Survey, and his
+two associates. Going in on the Yukon side, Mr. Keele's task has been to
+cross the Divide between the Yukon and the Mackenzie, mapping the rocks.
+The only white man they had seen in sixteen months was a French priest
+who had passed yesterday, and whose knowledge of current events in
+Canada and Europe was scanty. They were glad to see us. A moose-skin
+boat showed how they had run the rough Gravel; the meat of two moose
+smoked over the camp-fire; their dogs were fat. These are men who know
+the woods&mdash;no hard-luck story here. It needs only Friday's funny fat
+umbrella to complete the picture, with the goat scampering in the middle
+distance.</p>
+
+<p>Coming on board, the surveyors are greedy for newspapers, and we in
+return learn somewhat of that great slice of land which they are the
+first to traverse. The Gravel River is two hundred and fifty-five miles
+long, with &quot;white water&quot; all the way. The force of the current may be
+appreciated from the fact that it is forty-four hundred feet above the
+sea-level at the Height-of-Land, and only four hundred feet here where
+it enters the Mackenzie. All along the banks of the Gravel are moose,
+mountain sheep, and caribou. The winter cabin of the party was built on
+the Ross River and there, during the past winter, they experienced a
+temperature of 54&deg; below. A party of this kind must be to a large extent
+self-supporting, as it would be impossible to carry from the outside
+food for such a long sojourn. Speaking with Mr. Keele, one is forcibly
+struck with the fact that what the technical schools teach their
+students forms but a small part of the equipment of the man who would do
+field work in Northern Canada&mdash;packing, tracking, hunting, and breaking
+trail,&mdash;each man must do his share of these.</p>
+
+<p>The Keele party on the great watershed, as they travelled east, crossed
+two families of Mackenzie River Indians going westward to hunt, on the
+west side of the ridge, the marten and the beaver. It was 32&deg; below, and
+cold. The whole families were on the march, a little baby tucked in the
+curve of the sled, and tottering on foot an old, old woman, bent and
+wrinkled and scarcely able to move. As the Indians were on their return
+journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again.
+But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow
+falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in
+the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many
+journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering
+capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of
+hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that
+luxurious garment. In order that one might be warmly clad, many have
+gone cold, more than one sad, tired, old head has lain down for the last
+time by the lonely camp-fire.</p>
+
+<p>Sad is the lot of the Indian woman of the North. Fated always to play a
+secondary part in the family drama, it is hard to see what of pleasure
+life holds for her. The birth of a girl baby is not attended with joy or
+thankfulness. From the beginning the little one is pushed into the
+background. The boy babies, even the dogs, have the choicer bed at
+night, and to them are given the best pieces of the meat. The little
+girl is made to feel that she has come into a world that has no welcome
+for her and her whole life seems to be an apology. You read it in the
+face of every Indian girl or woman you meet, from the shrinking pathetic
+little figure in the camp to the bent old crone, whose upturned face
+with its sadly acceptive look gives you the flicker of a smile.</p>
+
+<p>Storm-stayed at Wrigley Harbour at the entrance to Great Slave Lake, we
+have some splendid fishing,&mdash;jackfish, whitefish, loche, inconnu, &quot;and
+here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling.&quot; Within an
+hour I get fifteen graylings to my own rod. Collectively they weigh just
+a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the
+fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish.
+Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and
+the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had &quot;The Complete Angler&quot;
+for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the
+catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the
+grayling is eating fit only for &quot;anglers and other honest men.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The traverse of Great Slave Lake in the teeth of a wind is not without
+its interest, for the new steamer has yet to be tried in the waters of
+what practically amounts to an open sea. She behaves well, and brings
+us dry-shod into Fort Rae.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0323"></a>
+<img src="images/img0323.jpg" width="339" height="257" alt="The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake" title="">
+<BR><B>The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We are the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae, and we
+afford as much interest to the Indians as they afford us. Lone Fort Rae,
+clinging to the Northern Arm of Great Slave Lake, was noted in the past
+as a &quot;meat-post.&quot; It supplied the Mackenzie District with dried
+caribou-meat, and formed an outfitting point for the few big game
+hunters who trended east from here into the Barren Grounds seeking the
+musk-ox. Its foundation dates back to some time before the year 1820. We
+cross a bridge of clever Indian construction and sit for a while to muse
+on a flat boulder of primal rock. This stands as bell-tower to a quaint
+bell cast in Rome and bears an inscription to some dead and gone Pope.
+The missionary priest over half a century ago paddled in here bringing
+the Gospel to the Dog-Ribs.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0324"></a>
+<img src="images/img0324.jpg" width="272" height="284" alt="The Bell at Fort Rae Mission" title="">
+<BR><B>The Bell at Fort Rae Mission</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The musk-ox <i>(Ovibos moschatus)</i> is a gregarious animal which would
+appear to be a Creator's after-thought,&mdash;something between an ox and a
+sheep. The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the
+appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd. The
+present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and
+between the meridians of 86&deg; and 125&deg;. As it is the most inaccessible
+game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being
+hunted to extinction. Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed
+like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up
+wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees
+fit. Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle
+and horns outside, to meet a common danger. The robe of the musk-ox is a
+rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being
+very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base. According to
+the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April. The
+mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a
+sheltered place for the cradle. Three days after its post-natal burial
+it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf's
+burden.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0325"></a>
+<img src="images/img0325.jpg" width="373" height="289" alt="The Musk-ox" title="">
+<BR><B>The Musk-ox</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to
+Fort Resolution. Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the
+topics of conversation. Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk,
+and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and
+deposited at the front door of the H.B. Co. Factor there&mdash;a cow but no
+cow-food. All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North. She was
+fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her
+kind. One of Mr. Keele's men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which
+ate bacon-rinds with a relish. The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb
+trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become
+burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish
+enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead. A dog in
+the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the
+asphodel meadows. I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner
+probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to
+work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.</p>
+
+<p>From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories
+from the outgoing traders. We learn that when the church was still
+young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the
+wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were
+to be considered fish, or flesh. Rome evidently was not &quot;long&quot; on North
+American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever
+by declaring said tails &quot;fish&quot; and not flesh. This is why you can
+discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and
+commit no sin.</p>
+
+<p>The stories give us some idea of the difference between winter and
+summer travel across Great Slave Lake. Captain Mills tells of two Indian
+women, one old enough to have a daughter of forty, who drove a dogsled
+one hundred and forty-eight miles from Providence to Rae, in four days.
+The older one walked ahead of the dogs and made the trail while the
+other drove. Coming back, it took them five days, and the old woman
+explained, &quot;We didn't make such good time, as we had a man with us.&quot; It
+was her son-in-law whom she brought back with her.</p>
+
+<p>A striking picture is given us of a woman who walked alone from Hay
+River to Province on snowshoes, taking thirteen days to do it. She had
+no matches, and carried her fire with her, keeping it alight in a little
+copper kettle. This, of course, necessitated her guarding it very
+closely and stopping to renew the fire from time to time; for if the
+burning wood was once permitted to die down, her life in that intense
+cold would go out with it.</p>
+
+<p>How cold does it get? Mr. Campbell Young, of our little group, says that
+he has been out when a thermometer&mdash;one obtained from the U.S.
+Meteorological Station&mdash;registered seventy-six degrees below zero, and
+has worked in weather like that. &quot;I've been trapping in that
+temperature, when of course the weather was absolutely still, and I tell
+you I'd rather be out in seventy-six below than to cross Smith Portage
+with the mosquitoes.&quot; Mr. Christie, of the Keele Survey Party, says,
+&quot;Last winter I had to go out and get a moose for the camp, and on the
+second day I met the Mounted Police boys who told me it had been
+seventy-five below. I had started out when it was quite mild, only
+forty-five below. You know when it is below fifty, for then your breath
+begins to crackle, and that's a sure sign.&quot; Mr. John Gaudet says, &quot;I
+was driving last winter on Lesser Slave Lake when it was sixty-four
+below. Yes, it was quite cold.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At Resolution we see once more our old friend Dr. Sussex, happy and
+busied among his Indians. It is just hail and farewell. The little &quot;red
+lemonade&quot; kiddies are the first to greet us as we come into Fort Smith,
+and here everybody goes visiting. Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald tells us
+that her grandfather had two wives, and was the father of twenty-two
+children. She says she and her brother are glad of this, as it gives
+them so many friends in all parts of the country; and we notice that at
+every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit&mdash;a cousin
+here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling
+cards and little friendly gifts up here is a &quot;musky-moot&quot;; the more
+formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may
+stay a day or two, is a &quot;<i>skin-ichi-mun.&quot;</i> Visiting a little on our own
+account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the
+gaudy calendars of the advertiser have not yet made their way. Each man,
+foolish enough here to want a calendar, marks out his own on pencilled
+paper. We come across an H.B. Journal of the vintage of 1826 where the
+reckless scribe introduces two Thursdays into one week, acknowledging
+his error in a footnote with the remark, &quot;It is not likely that the eye
+of man will ever read this record.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At Fort Smith we leave the steamer <i>Mackenzie River</i> to take passage in
+the <i>Grahame</i> from Smith's Landing, and once more essay the Mosquito
+Portage. We find our winged friends in fine fettle. Their eyes are not
+dimmed, their strength not abated. For miles we notice blackened and
+dead stems of young spruce, cut off as if by machinery, at a uniform
+height of two and a half feet from the ground. The top of the dead stem
+shows the depth of the snow when the rabbits, running along the surface,
+had nibbled off and eaten the growing spruce. A fur-trader at our side
+says, &quot;While at Fort Macpherson I noticed that the ice always melted in
+the spring in Peel's River before it did in the Mackenzie. It would
+break up in the Peel about the Queen's Birthday and begin to go out.
+Reaching the Mackenzie, it came up against a solid mass of unbroken ice
+which sent it back to flood the whole country. It was a curious
+experience to paddle round in a canoe for miles and miles where one had
+set rabbit snares but a few weeks before. The poor rabbits themselves
+were at a loss, for no kind monition apprised them of the coming flood.
+We could see whole colonies of them,&mdash;each a shipwrecked sailor on his
+own little raft of bark, buffeted here and there with the stream and
+peering out across the swollen waters, like Noah's dove, seeking some
+green thing.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+<h3>TO MCMURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Think o' the stories round the camp, the yarns along the track&mdash;<br>
+O' Lesser Slave an' Herschel's Isle an' Flynn at Fond du Lac;<br>
+Of fur an' gun, an' ranch an' run, an' moose and caribou,<br>
+An' bull-dogs eatin' us to death! Good-bye&mdash;good luck to you!&quot;<br>
+<br>
+
+<p>Our arrival at Chipewyan is opportune. Honorine Daniels, unceremoniously
+known as 'Norine among her friends (and they are legion), is about to
+join hand and fortune with one of the Mercredi boys. 'Norine owns a
+cottage in her own right, and to-night under her roof-tree there is to
+be a wedding-dance. We wait round, hungering for an invitation, finally
+to be told largely, &quot;You don't need no invitation, everybody goes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We go with the crowd. The room is full to overflowing. Babies are
+deposited on the benches along the wall, dogs look in at the window. The
+air is heavy with mosquitoes and tobacco-smoke. But joy reigns. Nobody
+is too old or too obese to dance. Old Mr. Loutit and lame Jimmy Flett
+each secures a sonsy partner. There are three fiddlers, and these
+relieve each other in turn, for fiddling, beating time with your
+moccasin on the earthen floor, and &quot;calling out&quot; is hard work for one
+man. There are but two kinds of dances,&mdash;the Red River jig, and a square
+dance which probably had for honourable ancestors the lancers on the
+father's side and a quadrille on the mother's.</p>
+
+<p>Endurance is a sign of merit in the Red River jig. A man or woman steps
+into the limelight and commences to jig, a dark form in moccasins slips
+up in front of the dancer, and one jigs the other down, amid plaudits
+for the survivor and jeers for the quitter.</p>
+
+<p>It is the square dance that interests us, our attention being divided
+between watching the deft forms in the half light and listening to the
+caller-off. <i>Louie-the-Moose</i> first officiates. His eyes look dreamy but
+there is a general's stern tone of command in his words:</p>
+
+&quot;Ladeez, join de lily-white han's,<br>
+Gents, your black-and-tan!<br>
+Ladeez, bow! Gents, bow-wow!<br>
+Swing 'em as hard's ye can.<br>
+<br>
+&quot;Swing your corner Lady,<br>
+Then the one you love!<br>
+Then your corner Lady,<br>
+Then your Turtle Dove!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Over and over again Louie reiterates his injunction, to the
+accompaniment of pattering moccasins and a humming chorus from door and
+windows. There are phrases of variation, too. We catch the words,
+&quot;<i>Address your pardner,&quot; &quot;Adaman left,&quot; &quot;Show your steps,&quot; &quot;Gents walk
+round, and all run away to the west</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then Michel Manvil takes hold of the situation. He stands up to it, and
+we hear</p>
+
+&quot;Ladies round ladies, and gents all so!<br>
+Ladies round gents, and gents don't go!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Why should they, we wonder!</p>
+
+<p>The third fiddler is a full-blooded Chipewyan. In some dancing academy
+in the woods he has learnt a &quot;call-off&quot; all his own, and proud indeed is
+he of his stunt. We manage to copy it down in its entirety, fighting
+mosquitoes the while and dodging out into the open now and again for a
+little air.</p>
+
+&quot;'Slute your ladies! All together!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ladies opposite, the same&mdash;</span><br>
+Hit the lumber with yer leathers,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Balance all, and swing yer dame!</span><br>
+Bunch the moose-cows in the middle!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Circle, stags, and do-si-do&mdash;</span><br>
+Pay attention to the fiddle!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swing her round, an' off you go!</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;First four forward! Back to places!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Second foller&mdash;shuffle back!</span><br>
+Now you've got it down to cases&mdash;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swing 'em till their back-teeth crack!</span><br>
+Gents, all right, a heel and toeing!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swing 'em, kiss 'em if you kin&mdash;</span><br>
+On to next, and keep a-goin'<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Till you hit your pards ag'in!</span><br>
+<br>
+&quot;Gents to centre; ladies round 'em,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Form a basket; balance all!</span><br>
+Whirl yer gals to where you found 'em!<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Promenade around the hall!</span><br>
+Balance to yer pards and trot 'em<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Round the circle, double quick!</span><br>
+Grab and kiss 'em while you've got 'em&mdash;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hold 'em to it; they won't kick!&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>The perspiring musician pushes his instrument into the hands of <i>Running
+Antelope</i> and turns to us with, &quot;There's another verse, but I don't
+always give it.&quot; We ask him to repeat it for us, but he seems a little
+at a loss. &quot;It's hard to call it out without the fiddle. When yer
+playin' you just spit it out&mdash;the words come to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is August 6th at Chipewyan, and once again we are at the parting of
+the ways. Every one we know is heading for &quot;Outside&quot; by way of the
+steamer <i>Grahame</i> and the Athabasca scows. Our own ambition is to make a
+traverse of the great Peace River Country before the snows. We have had
+no mail since last May, and the temptation to follow the multitude as
+far as McMurray in the hope of finding letters there is too strong to be
+resisted. We will then return and try to perfect arrangements for the
+Peace.</p>
+
+<p>The outgoers are a cosmopolitan and happy &quot;bunch,&quot;&mdash;Major Jarvis,
+R.N.W.M.P., fur-traders galore, three Grey Nuns and a priest, Mr. Wyllie
+and his family bound for the Orkney Islands, fifty-four souls in all,
+without counting the miscellaneous and interesting fraternity down on
+the lower deck among the fur-bundles.</p>
+
+<p>It is essentially a <i>voyage de luxe</i>. When Mr. Keele imagines a place is
+good, the steamer stops and we all gather fossils. When lame James, the
+steward, our erstwhile jig-expert, is about to serve coffee, he pokes
+his head over the side and orders the engines stopped that we may drink
+the beverage without spillage. The beardless prospector buys tinned
+peaches from the commissariat, opens them with a jack-knife and passes
+them round the deck with impartiality and a
+to-hell-with-the-man-that-works smile. Who would envy kings?</p>
+
+<p>We arrive at McMurray in time for treaty-payment. Tethered horses at the
+tepee-poles, store-dolls for the babies, and unmistakable &quot;Outside&quot;
+millinery prove the prosperity of these Crees, and proves also their
+proximity to Edmonton. One little group looks tattered, out-at-heel,
+and hungry,&mdash;a Cree widow presenting her four offspring that they may
+receive the annual payment. The officials within the treaty tent declare
+the youngest baby an illegitimate child and will pay it no treaty,&mdash;it
+&quot;has no name.&quot; I catch the anxious look in the mother's eye. Five
+dollars goes a long way when baby bodies have to be fed and clothed. The
+situation is crucial. Without a sponsor, the priest will not name the
+baby. With no name, it cannot draw treaty. I conclude to father the
+child, as its own (un)lawful father will not. My offer to give my name
+to the girlie, after due deliberation of Church and State, is accepted.
+Under the name of Agnes Deans Cameron the Cree kiddie is received into
+the Mother Church and finds her place on the list of treaty-receiving
+Indians&mdash;No. 53 in the McMurray Band. May she follow pleasant trails!</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0334"></a>
+<img src="images/img0334.jpg" width="364" height="222" alt="A Meadow at McMurray" title="">
+<BR><B>A Meadow at McMurray</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Back of McMurray lies a lush land. We tread a path a full mile in length
+leading to meadows where, belly-high, the horses graze. Every yard of
+our way is lined with raspberry bushes bent with their rich, red burden.</p>
+
+<p>While the furs are being transferred from the <i>Grahame</i> to the scows,
+the working of our typewriter is a matter of much wonderment. Old Paul
+Fontaine, a half-breed who thinks he is a white man, first looks through
+the door, then comes into the dining hall where we are, takes his hat
+off, and watches respectfully. Then, with an air of great conviction,
+&quot;This is the first time I ever see that. It is wonderful what man can
+do&mdash;wonderful. There is only one thing left to be done now&mdash;and that is
+to put the breath of life into a dead body.&quot; Solemnly putting on his
+hat, he turns and walks out.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Loutit, another fellow-passenger attracted by the click of the
+machine, comes in and recounts her arts, wild and tame. In winter she
+goes off in dog-cariole, traps cross-foxes off her own bat, shoots
+moose, and smokes the hide according to the ancient accepted mode.
+Coming home, she takes the smoked hide and works upon it silk embroidery
+of a fineness which would be the envy of any young ladies' seminary in
+Europe or America. She weaves fantastic belts of beads and sets the
+fashion for the whole North in <i>chef d'oeuvres</i> of the quills of the
+porcupine. She is a most observant &quot;old wife.&quot; Watching, fascinated, the
+lightning play of the machine, &quot;Much hard that, I think, harder than
+bead-work, eh?&quot; Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to
+find out how the dickens when you strike capital &quot;A&quot; at one end of the
+keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small &quot;o&quot; at the other
+end. There is something uncanny about it, and our stock goes up.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0336"></a>
+<img src="images/img0336.jpg" width="369" height="258" alt="Starting up the Athabasca" title="">
+<BR><B>Starting up the Athabasca</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We confess to being a little homesick as we wave farewell to the half
+hundred passengers in the familiar scows embarked for their two hundred
+and thirty-eight mile journey up the Athabasca. It will be a tiresome
+enough trip, though, for every foot of the way the big boats will have
+to be tracked (towed) by teams of half-breeds scrambling along the
+shore, now on land, now splashing in the water. The party will have the
+mosquito as companion on the sorrowful way and it will take them four
+weeks to make Athabasca Landing, the distance which in the spring we
+dropped down in little over a week. We send letters home, and with
+hand-shaking all round bid farewell to Mr. Wyllie, the Grey Nuns, and
+the rest.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0337"></a>
+<img src="images/img0337.jpg" width="282" height="387" alt="On the Clearwater" title="">
+<BR><B>On the Clearwater</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Our way back on the <i>Grahame</i> to Chipewyan is not without adventure. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon we run up hard and fast on a batture!
+There is no swearing, no shouting of orders. The deck-hands from long
+experience know exactly what to do. The engines are reversed and, in
+their efforts, seem to speak Cree, for we catch the sound of the
+familiar &quot;Wuh! Wey!&quot; But it is no go. The sun sinks behind the bank,
+over the tops of the poplars floats a faint rosy glow which fades into
+purple and then into black, and we are still there hard and fast. The
+drifting sand piles up against us, and, in scows, the whole cargo is
+removed. The captain throws out a kedge-anchor, and in a mysterious way
+we pull ourselves off by hawsers, as a man lifts himself by his own
+boot-straps.</p>
+
+<p>We have head-winds all the way. At four o'clock on the morning of August
+14th, stress of weather causes us to run in under the lee of an island.
+We tie up at the base of some splendid timber. Spruce here will give
+three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground. With an improvised
+tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big
+poplars (rough-backed). The first ran seven feet three inches, the
+second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches. Within
+view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and
+interspersed with them were spruce with a base-girth scarcely less.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at Chipewyan, we are able to arrange to be taken up the Peace in
+the same little tug <i>Primrose</i> which had before carried us so safely to
+Fond du Lac.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIX"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<h3>UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;What lies ahead no human mind can know,<br>
+To-morrow may bring happiness or woe.<br>
+We cannot carry charts, save the hope that's in our hearts<br>
+As along the unknown trail we blithely go.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>When we leave Chipewyan August 17th, the fall hunt of waveys has already
+begun. We learn afterwards that the Loutit boys alone made a bag of
+sixteen hundred of these birds which, salted down, form a considerable
+part of the winter food of the old Fort. Mrs. William Johnson comes down
+to see us embark. She has overwhelmed us with generous kindness at our
+every visit to Chipewyan, kindness we cannot soon forget. It is a small
+group which now starts out in the little tug on the bosom of the mighty
+Peace,&mdash;Major Routledge, R.N.W.M.P., Mr. and Mrs. John Gaudet with their
+two olive-branches &quot;Char-lee&quot; and &quot;Se-li-nah,&quot; now returning to Lesser
+Slave Lake from a visit to Fort Good Hope, Miss Brown and myself.</p>
+
+<p>This part of the journey we are to enjoy more keenly than all that has
+gone before. Rising on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, the
+Peace River is the largest affluent of the Mackenzie, being already a
+splendid stream when it cuts through that range. With but one break, the
+Peace River affords a nine hundred mile stretch of navigation, and we
+can justly describe the country through which it flows as a plateau in
+which the river has made for itself a somewhat deep valley. Extensive
+grassy plains border it on both sides, and north of Fort Vermilion
+country of this character extends to the valley of the Hay River.
+Crossing the Quatre Fourches, an offshoot of the Peace at the Lake
+Athabasca edge, we turn our faces due west to a land of promise. The
+Mackenzie River and the banks of the Great Slave may some day afford
+homes to a busy and prosperous populace, but there are many fertile and
+more accessible lands to be settled first. With the Peace River Country
+there is no conjecture, for it is merely a question of the coming of the
+railway. Given a connection with the world to the south, the district
+watered by the Peace will at once support a vast agrarian population.
+The advance riders are already on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>It is not our intent to go to the expense of using a steamer for our
+whole journey up the Peace. Scows will allow us to proceed more
+leisurely and to see more as we go, so the second day we turn the
+steamer back and transfer ourselves and our belongings into a little
+open craft or model-boat <i>The Mee-wah-sin.</i> We have a crew of five men,
+one on the steering-sweep and four to track, and in this wise we make
+our way for three hundred miles up the great river to Fort Vermilion.
+One day we improvise a sail and so make fifty miles in a favourable
+wind, but, with this exception, every other mile of the journey is by
+patient towing.</p>
+
+<p>Incidents are many. The first morning after we turned back the little
+tug, the Kid and I left the slow trackers behind and were glad to
+stretch ourselves in a long forenoon's tramp along the sandy beach. The
+mosquitoes were practically gone and for the first time all summer one
+could really enjoy the woods, where a tang of autumn in the air made
+every breath a tonic draught. Exulting in the fact that we were alive,
+we turned a sharp corner and came suddenly face to face with a grey
+wolf, loping along at a swinging pace at the water's edge, muzzle close
+to the ground! To make the story worth telling, one should have
+something to say of &quot;yawning jaws&quot; and &quot;bloodshot eyes&quot; and &quot;haunches
+trembling for a spring.&quot; But this grey wolf simply refused to play that
+part. He took one look at us, evidently didn't approve, and turned up
+from his tracks quietly into the cottonwoods above. As we on our side
+had brought neither gun nor camera from the <i>Mee-wah-sin</i>, we are unable
+to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture. <i>Sic transit lupus</i>!</p>
+
+<p>A week out from Chipewyan, where the Swan River makes into the Peace, we
+came one glorious afternoon upon a camp of Crees, the family of the
+<i>Se-weep-i-gons</i>. They had just killed two bears. We bought the skins
+and a large portion of meat from them, and Mrs. <i>Se-weep-i-gon</i> very
+kindly added to the feast of fat things some high-bush cranberries &quot;in a
+present.&quot; As an excuse for listening to their soft voices, before we
+left the camp we asked the name of every member of the little group,
+scratching the list down on a piece of birchbark. The Crees evidently
+considered this an official ceremony, for after we had paid our score
+and shaken hands with everybody from Grandpa to the latest baby and were
+well out in mid-stream, Mrs. <i>Se-weep-i-gon</i> came running down to the
+bank to call us back. Rowing to the shore we found that she had
+remembered one more child whose name she wanted to add to the list. She
+assured us that this one too had a little brass cross hanging round his
+neck, so we will be sure to know him if we meet him in the woods.</p>
+
+<p>We lived for the next two days on bear-meat and cranberries.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0342"></a>
+<img src="images/img0342.jpg" width="370" height="261" alt="Evening on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Evening on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>So one wonderful day follows another as our little boat is towed first
+against one bank then another of this majestic stream. The forest growth
+is a marvel. We measure one morning three of the spruce trees to which
+our tent-ropes are tied, and get for base measurement six feet eight
+inches, five feet two inches, and five feet respectively. The trees
+averaged ninety feet in height and would give perhaps one thousand feet
+to each tree. The autumn tints on the willows and alders of the high
+river-banks are indescribably beautiful. We pass through one hundred
+miles of a veritable field of the cloth of gold. We look out of our
+tent-flaps at night on this living glory, and wake up to it again with
+each new morning sun.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday evening at dusk we slip into the Hudson's Bay post where the
+Little Red River makes into the Peace, the dear home of Tom Kerr, his
+Scottish wife, and their four bairns. Let me try to give the picture.
+Tom had been off all day cutting meadowgrass, and now wended his way
+home with a load of it in a little Old Country cart drawn by a wall-eyed
+mare. At her side frisked a foal, and two great stag-hounds ran back and
+forward between the master and his home by the riverside. Three children
+bounded out to greet their father. &quot;Oh! Daddy, Daddy, the red coo broke
+away from the byre and is far awa on the ither side o' the burn!&quot; Here,
+in a nutshell, you have the difference between the Mackenzie River of
+to-day and the Peace River. On the Mackenzie, swarthy forms are in
+evidence, Cree and French is spoken on all sides, there are no great
+fields of waving grain, and the dog is the only domestic animal. On the
+Peace is an essentially white race, cows, chickens, trustworthy old
+nags, porridge for breakfast, &quot;the tongue that Shakespeare spake,&quot;
+rendered in an accent born far ayont the Tweed. Right across the mouth
+of the Little Red River, Tom Kerr has a fishing scine. We go down with
+him to lift it, after the cows have been brought back to the narrow
+path. The net yields seven fish and they are of five different
+species,&mdash;trout, ling, sucker, jack-fish, and something else that Tom
+calls a &quot;Maria.&quot; Daily this net is set, and for three hundred and
+sixty-five days every year it furnishes food for the family, in summer
+in the flowing water, and in winter under the ice. You couldn't starve
+at Little Red River if you wanted to. This is one of the most beautiful
+spots in the whole North Countree. Long after Tom and we and Mrs. Tom
+are under the gowans, and the little Kerrs possess the land, there will
+be populous cities along the Peace, and millionaires will plant their
+summer villas on the beauteous spot where we now stand.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0344"></a>
+<img src="images/img0344.jpg" width="274" height="373" alt="Our Lobsticks on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Our Lobsticks on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Bidding the bairns good-bye, we press onward on our way, Tom Kerr
+accompanying us. A great honour awaits us round the next corner, when
+the boatmen announce that they are going to make us each a lobstick. We
+land, as pleased as Punch over the suggestion. We now know what it feels
+like when the philanthropist of a village takes his after-dinner walk
+through the square and sees the sparrows drinking from the memorial
+fountain surmounted with his own bust, done in copper, life-size. It
+takes fully two hours to trim the trees into significant shape, but the
+beauty of this particular kind of Cook's Tour is that you go down when
+you like and stop when you want to. The lobsticks furnished, the men
+form a circle and discharge their muskets in salute, and on we go. We
+learn that the ethics of lobsticks is that each of these men, should
+Fate take him past this point again, will salute the lobstick just made
+and send a strong thought across the spruce-tops to us. There is a
+reverse to the shield. Should we, at any time before this journey ends,
+fail to make good, the men on the return voyage will cut the lobstick
+down. We are going to make no impertinent enquiries regarding the
+ulterior fate of these family trees. Is it not sufficient glory to say,
+&quot;On the Peace River we <i>had</i> a lobstick&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>The Chutes of the Peace! These will live forever with the Ramparts of
+the Mackenzie as the two most majestic visions which the whole North
+Land gave us. We had not been prepared for that wonderful spectacle
+which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars
+for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its
+great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite
+across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet
+and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara,
+yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this
+land so pregnant with possibilities, a land which, though it echo now
+only the quiet foot of the Cree, is so unmistakably a White Man's
+Country, intensifies the sense of majesty and power which here takes
+possession of us. The men talk of the water-power furnished by the great
+falls, and hazard guesses of the future economic purposes to which it
+will be put. For our own part, our one wish is to get away from the
+noise of even these subdued voices and in silence feast our very souls
+on this manifestation of the power of God. The thoughts that we feel
+cannot be put into words. Why attempt the impossible?</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0346"></a>
+<img src="images/img0346.jpg" width="366" height="268" alt="The Chutes of the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>The Chutes of the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Our way lies beyond this, and the Chutes have to be overcome. These
+half-breeds know exactly what to do in every emergency which arises.
+Only one of the men has traversed this river before, and he gives
+orders. We strip our little <i>Mee-wah-sin</i> of her temporary masts and
+canvas awning and take out all our belongings. Everybody works. A
+purchase is obtained by throwing a pulley and rope over a nearby jack-pine, and the boat is pulled
+out bodily from the water. Then the crew drag her along the shore well
+beyond the head of the rapid, and we make camp.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0347"></a>
+<img src="images/img0347.jpg" width="367" height="264" alt="Pulling out the Mee-wah-sin" title="">
+<BR><B>Pulling out the Mee-wah-sin</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>These delicious nights within the tent are memories that will remain
+through all the years to come. It is cool and silent and productive of
+thought. We are selfishly glad that fifty people went out by Athabasca
+ways, leaving to us all the mighty reaches and pleasant pastures of the
+Peace. The midnight is flooded by a glorious moon, and the thoughts born
+this afternoon of that stupendous fall have driven sleep far away.
+Opening the tent-flap, I slip through the camp of sleeping Indians to
+the edge of the fast-flowing stream. The feeling is insistent here which
+has been ever-present since we entered this valley of the Peace&mdash;here is
+the home prepared and held in waiting for the people who are to follow.</p>
+
+&quot;Listening there, I heard all tremulously<br>
+Footfalls of Autumn passing on her way,<br>
+And in the mellow silence every tree<br>
+Whispered and crooned of hours that are to be.<br>
+Then a soft wind like some small thing astray<br>
+Comes sighing soothingly.&quot;<br>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XX"></a><h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<h3>VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and cheerily wise,<br>
+With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes,<br>
+Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,<br>
+Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood,<br>
+Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,<br>
+As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+&mdash;<i>Service</i>.<br>
+
+<p>It is on August 27th, in the evening, that the crew, all slicked up in
+their Sunday-go-to-meetings, draw us up on the beach of the City in the
+Silences, this Past-in-the-arms-of-the-Present,&mdash;Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+The first thing to meet our eye is the red roof of the flour-mill of the
+H.B. Co., a picture of progressiveness set in a living frame of golden
+wheat, the heavy heads nodding to the harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Vermilion is an old post of the Old Company. Alexander Mackenzie on his
+way to the Pacific found people at work here far back in 1792. The
+Vermilion of to-day stands a living monument to the initiative faith and
+hard work largely of one man, Mr. Francis D. Wilson, who has had charge
+of H.B. Co. interests here for nineteen years. Mr. Wilson found this
+place a fur-post on the edge of civilisation, and he has made of it a
+commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre. And his example has
+been contagious, for the half-breeds around him have become farmers, the
+Indians who traded furs a dozen years ago now buy harness and ploughs
+and breach-loading guns from The Company, paying for the same with wheat
+of their own growing.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0350"></a>
+<img src="images/img0350.jpg" width="362" height="237" alt="The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Vermilion is in latitude 58&deg; 30' N.,&mdash;that is, about four hundred miles
+due north of Edmonton, and on practically the same parallel as
+Stockholm. The flour-mill that we now inspect is the most northerly
+wheat-mill on this continent, and it has been running for five years. It
+is the roller process, with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, the
+motor-power being a 40 H.P. Corliss engine. The wheat which feeds these
+rollers is all grown in nearby fields, and the resultant flour is
+consumed by the people of the lone posts of the Peace and the lower
+Mackenzie. Two years ago the H.B. Company paid to farmers, all of whom
+lived within a radius of five miles from the mill, the sum of $27,000
+spot cash for their wheat. An electric plant lights the mill and fort
+buildings, affording fifty six-candle-power lights.</p>
+
+<p>Right up to the door of the mill extends the sixty-acre wheat-field of
+the H.B. Company, from which Mr. Wilson computes that he will this year
+thrash two thousand bushels. If the H.B. wheat-field were to sell the H.B.
+mill these two thousand bushels at $1.25 a bushel (the ruling
+Vermilion price), there would be a net profit of $1500, after paying all
+expense of culture, to the credit of one branch of Mr. Wilson's
+commercial institution. For thirty years, wheat, oats, barley, and
+vegetables have been grown in Vermilion, not as an experiment, but as
+regular commercial crops. Cereals are sown late in April or early in
+May, and the harvest is gathered in August. More than once, wheat has
+matured in eighty-six days from seed-sowing to seed-garnering.</p>
+
+<p>Vermilion farmers boast sulkies and gang-ploughs and the latest geared
+McCormick, Massey-Harris, and Deering farm implements,&mdash;self-binders and
+seeders. Everything is up-to-date. We ourselves counted fifteen
+self-binders at work. And grain is not the whole story. The farmers own
+thoroughbred Ayrshire stock and splendid horses. I happened to be at the
+garden of the Church of England Mission when the potato-crop was being
+harvested, and found that seven bags of seed planted in the middle of
+May produced one hundred bags by the end of August. Five potatoes that I
+gathered haphazard from one heap weighed exactly five and one-half
+pounds. I photographed and weighed a collection of vegetables grown by
+Robert Jones on the Dominion Experimental Farm.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0352"></a>
+<img src="images/img0352.jpg" width="364" height="307" alt="Articles Made by Indians" title="">
+<BR><B>Articles Made by Indians</B>
+</center>
+
+<BLOCKQUOTE>
+<p><tt>A&mdash;Wall-pocket of white deerskin, embroidered in silk-work, and bordered
+with ermine&mdash;the work of a Cree woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>B&mdash;Gloves of white deerskin embroidered in silk, the work of a Slavi
+woman on the Liard River (a branch of the Mackenzie).</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>C, D, E, F, G, H, I&mdash;Moccasins as worn respectively by the Crees,
+Chipewyans, Slavis, Dog-Ribs, Yellow-Knives, Loucheux&mdash;all the work of
+the women.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>J.&mdash;Flour bag from the mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace, the most
+northerly flour-mill in America.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>K&mdash;Sinew, from close to the spine of the moose&mdash;used by the women of the
+North instead of thread.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>L&mdash;Very valuable net of willow-bark made by an old squaw at Fort
+Resolution. This is almost a lost art, and harks back to the pre-string
+days.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>M&mdash;The &quot;crooked knife&quot; or knife of the country.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>N&mdash;Match-box made from a copper kettle by an old Beaver Indian at Fort
+Vermilion-on-the-Peace.</tt></p>
+
+<p><tt>O&mdash;<i>Babiche</i>, or rawhide of the moose or caribou&mdash;&quot;the iron of the
+country.&quot;</tt></p>
+</BLOCKQUOTE>
+
+<p>One cauliflower weighed eight pounds, half a dozen turnips weighed nine
+pounds each, and twenty table beets would easily average six pounds
+each. The carrots and onions were sown in the open in mid-May and were
+as inviting specimens as I have ever seen. Tomatoes ripened in the open
+air on this farm on July 13th. Peas, sown on May 23rd and gathered on
+August 12th, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel. Experimental plots
+of turnips gave sixteen tons to the acre, and white carrots twelve tons.
+Apple-trees and roses we found flourishing on this farm, with
+twenty-five varieties of red, black, and white currants. The wheat story
+is of compelling interest. Preston wheat, sown on May 6th and cut on
+August 22nd, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel; Ladoga wheat, sown
+on the last day of April and cut on September 5th, ran sixty-four pounds
+to the bushel also, and early Riga weighed sixty-three pounds. In the
+garden of the R.C. Mission we were presented with splendid specimens of
+ripened corn and with three cucumbers grown in the open air, which
+weighed over a pound each.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0353"></a>
+<img src="images/img0353.jpg" width="364" height="249" alt="The Hudson's Bay Store" title="">
+<BR><B>The Hudson's Bay Store</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in
+extent than the whole of Belgium. There are probably a million acres of
+land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops
+like those cited. Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there
+are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white. They
+all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by
+hunting, trapping, and freighting. The settlement boasts two churches,
+two mission schools, and two trading stores,&mdash;a happy, prosperous, and
+very progressive community. Everything in the place points to this
+conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>The H.B. Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing
+$1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the
+monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats. This
+sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer <i>Peace River</i>,
+built here four years ago of native timber. She is a hundred and
+ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half
+feet and carrying forty tons burden. She can accommodate thirty
+passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes
+fifteen knots an hour. The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this
+boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.</p>
+
+<p>Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one
+man's logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of
+Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill. Edmond Paul's logs in
+one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at
+the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber. The biggest log in this raft was a
+twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which
+cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.</p>
+
+<p>Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and
+arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful
+of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and
+seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what
+has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole
+country spring when it is given rail communication with the
+plains-people to the south?</p>
+
+<p>Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious
+autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.
+Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these
+walls? Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and
+stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us
+to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home. It is a modern
+house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of
+hollyhocks on all sides. The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace,
+here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty. To the visitor who
+steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the
+reading man and the clever artificer. Scientific works of reference,
+good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged
+travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and
+human-nature, for five long months. The office furniture, hand-made of
+native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson's individual work in both
+design and execution. Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also
+a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these
+carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any
+one in the settlement, whether fort employ&eacute; or not, who cares to come in
+here for a quiet hour to read.</p>
+
+<p>Kipling says, &quot;You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile,&quot; but the
+Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line. In a corner of
+the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history. The
+honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of
+Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a
+sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by
+portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton. It
+carries on it the name of John Broadwood &amp; Sons, London. Mrs. Wilson
+tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house
+to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance.
+The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of
+the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod
+Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and
+the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B. Co., has put in a
+life of loving service among the people of Vermilion. Her knowledge of
+medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of
+need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother
+and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion.
+These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly
+kindness.</p>
+
+<p>Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with
+the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper. The country
+furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and
+bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made
+butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies
+whose four constituents&mdash;flour, lard, butter and fruit&mdash;are products of
+the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid
+fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild
+game&mdash;moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs,
+and mallards. Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen
+different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry,
+blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon. The salt comes from
+Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion
+beets if there should arise a market. What more would you? The
+Vermilionese on his fertile acres is as independent of the world outside
+as is the Eskimo in his Arctic igloo. The farm of Sheridan Lawrence,
+exhibiting its wide-stretching wheat-fields, some heads of which counted
+seventy-one kernels, with its patches of one-pound potatoes, twelve-foot
+sunflowers, and its quiverful of happy, tow-headed children, gives as
+sweet a picture of Canadian thrift and happiness as one would wish to
+see. Indeed, happiness seems to be the keynote of Vermilion, whether we
+seek it within the fort walls of the H.B. Co., on the fat acres of the
+farmers, or within the folds of Protestant or Roman Mission.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0357"></a>
+<img src="images/img0357.jpg" width="281" height="335" alt="Papillon, a Beaver Brave" title="">
+<BR><B>Papillon, a Beaver Brave</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We carry away with us two pictures, that we like to cherish, of the
+convent kiddies of Vermilion. The first thing we saw when we peered
+round a corner of this old-fashioned building was the bright face of
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury playing see-saw with a dozen wide-grinning
+Slavi babies. When the morning came when we were to bid reluctant
+good-bye to Vermilion and all its spontaneous kindness, the last sight
+that met our eyes before we turned the corner of the Peace was the whole
+convent force of Vermilion perched high on stumps and fence-rails,
+wishing us <i>bon voyage</i> with fluttering pocket-handkerchiefs, while
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury, on a ladder, surmounted the crowd and waved
+her farewells with a table-cloth.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXI"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<h3>FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>&quot;'Tis a summer such as broods<br>
+O'er enchanted solitudes,<br>
+Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods,<br>
+And with lavish love outpours<br>
+All the wealth of out-of-doors.&quot;<br>
+&mdash;<i>James Whitcomb Riley</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0359"></a>
+<img src="images/img0359.jpg" width="367" height="201" alt="Going to School in Winter" title="">
+<BR><B>Going to School in Winter</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the
+little <i>Mee-wah-sin,</i> and in the tiny tug <i>Messenger</i> of the H.B.
+Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we
+puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around
+us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing
+cranes are flying.</p>
+
+<p>Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months
+of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect
+and created for herself a warm place in every heart. Se-li-nah, though,
+makes it impossible for us to pose as brave endurers of hardships. Each
+night and morning she carries her little pack on and off shore, takes
+her share of pot-luck at <i>meat-su,</i> and is never cross. Bless the
+kiddie! If ablutions seem to her a work of supererogation and our daily
+play of toothbrush furnishes all the fascination of the unknown, still
+hers is the right stuff for pioneer lands and she has lessons to teach
+us in pluck and endurance.</p>
+
+<p>The first night out from Vermilion we made camp after dark and, on
+waking, found that in our blankets we had lain directly across four new
+bear-tracks. Moose-tracks are plentiful at every stopping-place, so we
+see to it that both guns and camera are primed. At eight next morning we
+pass Not-in-a-gu Seepee. Some Indians hail us, asking for tea, and from
+these we learn that ten families who made this their winter camp last
+season bagged eighty moose among them.</p>
+
+<p>At half-past two our chance came. To get away from the noise of the
+engine, the Kid and I had moved our work directly after breakfast to a
+flour-laden scow that we had in tow, and I was dictating this story to
+the machine when the sharp eyes of Showan in the distance spied a moose.
+He was on the shore cropping willows. It had been generously agreed that
+if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine, so in excited
+whispers the news is telegraphed to our end of the scow and my rifle is
+handed up. The fireman slows up on the engine, but still its throbbing
+sounds distressingly loud as we creep up on the feeding moose and scan
+the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are
+high,&mdash;perhaps one hundred and fifty feet&mdash;and sheer, but there are two
+gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly
+creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,&mdash;a
+regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those
+animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet
+biscuit. And now at last he sees us. I fire, and the shot just grazes
+his spine. Will he take to a gully? No, he plunges into the river
+instead and we follow him up in the little tug. One more shot is
+effective, and I have killed my premier moose. &quot;Cruel!&quot; you say. Well,
+just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat, as, with
+the exception of Vermilion's flesh-pots, we have done, and then find out
+if you would fly in the face of Providence when the Red Gods send you a
+young moose! To illuminate the problem I transcribe the menu of one
+sample week of the summer.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0361"></a>
+<img src="images/img0361.jpg" width="372" height="256" alt="My Premier Moose" title="">
+<BR><B>My Premier Moose</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>This is the literal &quot;dope sheet&quot; of the camp cook:</p>
+
+<p><i>Monday</i>:&mdash;Dried caribou and rice.</p>
+
+<p><i>Tuesday</i>:&mdash;Salt fish and prunes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Wednesday</i>:&mdash;Mess-pork and dried peaches.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thursday</i>:&mdash;Salt horse and macaroni.</p>
+
+<p><i>Friday</i>:&mdash;Sow-belly and bannock.</p>
+
+<p><i>Saturday</i>:&mdash;Blue-fish and beans.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sunday</i>:&mdash;Repeat.</p>
+
+<p>Dragged ashore, the moose proved to be a male of two prongs, about
+eighteen months old, and weighed perhaps four or five hundred pounds. A
+full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton. We are
+to learn that there are many viewpoints from which to approach a moose.
+The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo and Mrs. Gaudet each eloquently
+argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it,
+and Se-li-nah, looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in
+Cree, &quot;<i>Marrow</i> is nice.&quot; Poor young stripling of the Royal House of
+Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!</p>
+
+<p>The first thing Baptiste does is to plunge his penknife into the back to
+see how deep the fat is. We had noticed this testing process before. A
+bunch of feathers is always plucked off the new-killed bird that one can
+immediately gauge the gastronomic niche at which to set one's waiting
+stomach. No more voyaging to-night. The moose is cleaned and skinned.
+Mrs. Gaudet draws the skin. I claim the head. A little Indian boy, who
+with his mother had been added to our ship's crew at Carcajou Point,
+appropriates the kidneys, which he proceeds to roast in the ashes.
+Ten-year-old Bill evidently likes his devilled kidneys rare, for within
+three minutes we see him prancing round the camp, nibbling his dripping
+dainty from the point of an impaling stick.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0363"></a>
+<img src="images/img0363.jpg" width="363" height="225" alt="Beaver Camp, on Paddle River" title="">
+<BR><B>Beaver Camp, on Paddle River</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Having sat round the barbecue half the night, we pull out late the next
+morning. And now, apprised by moccasin telegraph, we are all on the <i>qui
+vive</i> to catch sight of a floating bride. A fur-trader attached to &quot;The
+French Company&quot; at Vermilion has been out on six months' leave and is
+bringing in a bride from Paris. We are to expect them to cross our
+course on a raft, floating in with the current of the Peace as we make
+our way upstream. We see the raft. All is excitement. We direct the
+steersman to draw close in, and the men prime their rifles for a salute.
+She is not visible,&mdash;floating brides on the Peace shrink evidently from
+being the cynosure of passing eyes. Our men fire their salute, the
+steersman on the raft looks puzzled when we, smiling our sympathy, peer
+over the edge of his craft, and see, instead of the Parisian bride,&mdash;a
+load of Poland pigs for Vermilion! It is the wrong raft. The real bride
+passes us in the gloaming ten hours later, when it is too dark to get a
+satisfactory photograph!</p>
+
+<p>On the evening of September 22nd we arrive at Peace River Crossing, or
+Peace River Landing, just a week out from Vermilion. Our course from
+there has been almost due south. We turn the little <i>Messenger</i> back
+here and regretfully bid good-bye to our staunch and friendly boatmen.
+No people in the world could be pleasanter to travel with than these
+splendid men of the North. Indefatigable and ready for any emergency,
+they know their business and are always master of the situation;
+moreover, nature has dowered them with an intuitive delicacy as rare as
+it is pleasing. Through all these weeks, intensely interested as they
+are in everything that is new, never for a moment have they intruded
+upon us or our doings. At night there is not a man of them who will not
+walk a quarter of a mile through the woods rather than pass between our
+occupied tent and the camp fire. But let us offer to show them pictures
+or to explain the workings of the camera or the typewriter and it is a
+different story, for then every man Jack drops his oar or tump-line and
+rushes to our side like an excited schoolboy.</p>
+
+<p>Peace River Crossing is in latitude 56&deg; N. and longitude 117&deg; 20' W.
+From that far-off day in spring when we first touched the Clearwater we
+have been following in the historic footprints of Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie. We now take a day off, with the object of locating
+Mackenzie's last camp on the Peace, which he reached in 1792 and from
+which, in the spring of 1793, he started west across the map seeking an
+unknown route to the Pacific Ocean. We find the remains of that camp. It
+is in the corner of a potato-field a little way beyond Peace River
+Crossing and on the opposite side of the river. Only the foundations of
+the walls are left and the crumbling bricks of two old chimneys.
+Mackenzie was the first man to cross the continent from sea to sea north
+of the latitude of Mexico, and it was from this point where we stand
+that he launched his ambitious canoe. There is no more historic spot on
+the continent than that on which we stand this September day, and as yet
+it is all unmarked of commemorative stone or recording tablet. The lost
+camp had never been photographed until we brought our inquisitive camera
+to bear upon it.</p>
+
+<p>I stoop and pluck from where it nods behind the old chimney a wild
+larkspur, and as I half-mechanically count its forty-two seed-pods, I
+try hard to throw back my thoughts to the year 1792,&mdash;one hundred and
+sixteen years. It is a far call! Canada is tardy in her recognition of
+her early builders of Empire. Our cousins to the south would appear to
+be more appreciative. In song and story and by a memorial World's Fair
+the people of the United States have honoured the discoveries of Lewis
+and Clark, but Mackenzie crossed the continent a full dozen years in
+advance of these explorers.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0366"></a>
+<img src="images/img0366.jpg" width="279" height="405" alt="The Site of old Fort McLeod" title="">
+<BR><B>The Site of old Fort McLeod</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where,
+amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company,
+a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is
+Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the
+noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours
+of dawn and &quot;when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the
+grey.&quot; He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if
+he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting
+whisper, but its burden is ever the same.</p>
+
+&quot;Something lost behind the Ranges,<br>
+Lost and waiting for you: Go!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to
+Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty
+and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his
+name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought
+uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not
+pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in
+astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for
+a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791.
+His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western
+Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of
+Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves &quot;somewhere&quot; far beyond
+the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong
+determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort
+Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we
+stand. The breaking of the spring ice of 1793 sent him forth on the
+quest of that Northwest Passage by Land.</p>
+
+&quot;O Young Mariner,<br>
+Down to the harbor call your companions,<br>
+Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas,<br>
+And, ere it vanishes over the margin,<br>
+After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>We have not time to recount the chapters of the story, to name the
+streams ascended, the boiling gorges passed, the discontent allayed, the
+encouragement given, the lonely night-watches when the leader himself
+looked for comfort to his new-found stars. The Fraser was discovered,
+traced for a while; and then, striking westward, Mackenzie heard the
+beat of the surf upon the rocks, and came out from among the pines to
+the silver Pacific sparkling in the sun. It was a sweet day in summer's
+prime, and as the gulls cried overhead and the sun mixed scent of
+seaweed with balsam breath from in-shore, we can imagine but not divine
+the feelings of that brave man who had thrown himself face-downward on
+the sand and from whose presence the awed companions stole silently
+away. We remember the words of another builder of Empire,&mdash;</p>
+
+&quot;Anybody might have found it,<br>
+But God's whisper came to me.&quot;<br>
+
+<br>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<h3>PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE</h3>
+<br>
+
+
+
+&quot;A haze on the far horizon,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The infinite tender sky,</span><br>
+The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the wild geese sailing high,&mdash;</span><br>
+And all over upland and lowland<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The charm of the goldenrod.</span><br>
+Some of us call it Autumn,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And others call it God.&quot;</span><br>
+
+<p>&mdash;<i>W.H. Carruth</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is
+here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good
+Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they
+left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs
+twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons,
+which weigh over ten pounds each.</p>
+
+<p>To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies
+present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and
+the Pouce Coup&eacute;. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square
+miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water
+are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been
+damaged by frost.</p>
+
+<p>Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande
+Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande
+Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square
+miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their
+cattle longer than six weeks each winter.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0370"></a>
+<img src="images/img0370.jpg" width="371" height="255" alt="Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Pouce Coup&eacute; would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace
+River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves
+the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in
+mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September.
+Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give
+abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in,
+tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and
+pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the
+naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn,
+and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This
+is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and
+the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that
+tickle his palate,&mdash;blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries,
+willow-berries, and saskatoons.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0371"></a>
+<img src="images/img0371.jpg" width="364" height="223" alt="Fort Dunvegan on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort Dunvegan on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles
+south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in
+our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand
+miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the
+suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost
+all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times
+and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us
+through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open
+glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us
+bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this
+land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail
+is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and
+tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are
+fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the
+very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this
+Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling
+amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56&deg; N. I pluck
+a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.</p>
+
+<p>Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser
+Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer
+civilisation,&mdash;the &quot;civilisation&quot; of Chicago! A strong desire possesses
+us to about-face and back to the woods again.</p>
+
+<p>It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we
+intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into
+sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,&mdash;men, women,
+children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering
+flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look
+up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the
+south,&mdash;one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty
+picture,&mdash;the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns
+with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. &quot;It is the <i>Man with
+the Hoe</i>,&quot; I murmur. &quot;Yes,&quot; assents the Kid, &quot;and <i>The Angelus at Lesser
+Slave</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey.
+Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear
+delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the &quot;horse
+latitudes&quot;&mdash;though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey
+leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page.
+The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat
+and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs.
+Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole,
+this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses'
+mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the
+act making possible the writing of this &quot;immortal work&quot;!</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0373"></a>
+<img src="images/img0373.jpg" width="362" height="230" alt="Fort St. John on the Peace" title="">
+<BR><B>Fort St. John on the Peace</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody
+rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a
+gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed
+on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey
+and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in
+Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly
+rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at
+dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the
+latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the
+vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant
+bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year.
+To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot
+straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the
+healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0374"></a>
+<img src="images/img0374.jpg" width="367" height="281" alt="Where King Was Arrested" title="">
+<BR><B>Where King Was Arrested</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in
+which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and,
+driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph
+giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0375"></a>
+<img src="images/img0375.jpg" width="368" height="200" alt="Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons" title="">
+<BR><B>Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,&mdash;tall, straight,
+fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch
+blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one
+granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His
+grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a
+century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He
+married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the
+time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the
+notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to
+lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum,
+he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the
+flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy.
+It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can
+navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this
+Scots-Sioux,&mdash;strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party
+of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching
+Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who,
+too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec
+Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating
+sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile,
+of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of
+the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec
+has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, &quot;Do
+not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young
+fellow of the H.B. Co. says, &quot;It's beastly bad form to ask any man who
+comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a
+wilful-missing, that's his privilege.&quot; However, fate has thrown in our
+way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan
+up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down
+at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or
+less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise
+herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon
+make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs.
+Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0377"></a>
+<img src="images/img0377.jpg" width="280" height="267" alt="Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron" title="">
+<BR><B>Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty
+years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged
+eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little
+brothers and cousins, <i>en famille</i>, they pitched off from Little Red
+River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger
+men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was
+seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it,
+and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless,
+they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who
+nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.</p>
+
+<p>How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the
+woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her
+clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little
+children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters
+who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat
+came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike
+became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate
+of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her
+sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket
+between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make
+Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful
+experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each
+feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out,
+thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping
+companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas.
+The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then
+the sister died. <i>How</i> she died God and the watching stars alone know.
+Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as
+food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but
+admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.</p>
+
+<p>Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language
+which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same
+word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own
+volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human
+imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony
+undergone by these poor creatures&mdash;women and children with affections
+like our own&mdash;shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel
+camp of death!</p>
+
+<p>Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a
+recluse, shunned of all Indians as a &quot;Wetigo&quot; or &quot;Cannibal.&quot; A friend
+was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon
+Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years
+passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is
+The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been
+born.</p>
+
+<p>As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly
+caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the
+Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat
+difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is &quot;even
+as you and me.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+<h3>LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;I hear the tread of Nations yet to be,<br>
+The first low wash of waves where soon shall roll a human sea.&quot;<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0380"></a>
+<img src="images/img0380.jpg" width="363" height="276" alt="A Peace River Pioneer" title="">
+<BR><B>A Peace River Pioneer</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Taking passage on the steamer <i>Northern Light</i>, we leave the settlement
+of Lesser Slave Lake, this world-in-small, on the first day of October,
+and, from here to Athabasca Landing, travel in company with Mr. J.K.
+Cornwall, President of the Northern Transportation Company. Between the
+time of our journey and this writing, Mr. Cornwall has been returned as
+Member of the Alberta Legislature for the district we are now
+traversing. He certainly knows his constituency better than most
+representatives do. There is scarcely a mile of these unmapped ways that
+he has not tramped alone; not an Indian guide in the North can last with
+&quot;Jim&quot; for a week, in summer, or on snow-shoes. When some Lesser Slave
+half-breeds were told that Mr. Cornwall was going to run for the
+legislature against Allie Brick, one of them said, &quot;Jim wins. Allie
+Brick can't run. Not much fun in that race. No man on Peace River can
+run like Jim.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cornwall's pronouncement on the North Country can be taken as
+authoritative. He says, &quot;Practically all the timber of any commercial
+value between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains is in these
+northern watersheds. This timber will be a very important factor in the
+coming development of Prairie Canada to the south, and fortunately, too,
+it is most get-at-able. There are thirty-six hundred miles of river and
+lake in the North on which steamers are plying to-day and which are open
+for navigation for six months in every year. The first railway that
+comes in will tap a system of transporation equalled only on this
+continent by the Mississippi and St. Lawrence with the Great Lakes. The
+American Government has spent two hundred million dollars on the
+improvement of Mississippi navigation, and to-day it is not as valuable
+a national asset as the great Athabasca-Mackenzie-Peace system is as it
+came from the hand of Nature. Thirty thousand bushels of wheat that
+would grade 'No. 1 Northern' was produced in the Peace River Country
+this year, besides thousands of bushels of oats and barley. In this
+Northland there are 100,000,000 acres of land fit for the growing of
+grain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Charles Dickens used to carry a note-book in his vest-pocket in which he
+jotted down names that tickled his fancy. Were Dickens to travel this
+route with us, his name-note-books would bulge. Where Lesser Slave River
+issues out of Lesser Slave Lake, we found Tom Lilac in earnest
+conversation with Jilly Loo-bird. Jilly has navigated the North all the
+way from Athabasca Landing to Hudson's Hope on the Peace, seeking a
+wife, and still lacks his connubial rib. Being told that ladies are on
+board, he breathlessly asks, &quot;What colour?&quot; When he learns that we are
+white, Jilly makes a dash for some cache in the woods which takes the
+place of clothes-closet, but the steamer has passed on before he
+emerges. Another lost chance, both for Jilly and the writer! For two or
+three miles here, where the river runs out of the lake, it never
+freezes, and ducks and wild-fowl remain here all the winter in open
+water. Last month, in this immediate vicinity, no fewer than one hundred
+moose were killed. Lilac tells us that last winter there was no snow
+here until March, and two winters ago absolutely no snow fell whatever,
+so that the sleighs were not gotten out and all the freighting had to be
+done with waggons. &quot;No need to starve here,&quot; says Lilac, &quot;the trout run
+up to forty pounds each. There are whitefish and grayling, and I gather
+berries all the year round. In summer, I get the red and white currants,
+raspberries, saskatoons, blueberries, gooseberries, and strawberries,
+and all winter long there are both high-bush and low-bush cranberries.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0383"></a>
+<img src="images/img0383.jpg" width="307" height="488" alt="Three Generations" title="">
+<BR><B>Three Generations</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Travelling with us are Judge Noel and Judge Beck, making the first
+circuit of justice through this country. Although they had come all the
+way from Edmonton looking for trouble, so splendid has been the
+surveillance of the Mounted Police here that no one could scrape up one
+case for the judges to try. The Peace River people seemed somehow to
+think that in greeting the judges with an empty house the settlement had
+failed to make good. Some one comforts them with setting forth as the
+ethics of the case the fact that the judges should be presented with
+white gloves, as the traditional sign of an empty docket. Again is Peace
+River chagrined, neither The Company nor the French Company has white
+kids in stock. Each judge is made the recipient of a handsome pair of
+moose-skin gloves, as a substitute, ornamented with beads and quills of
+the porcupine.</p>
+
+<p>At Norris's, we leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift
+Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout. The Dominion Government, with a
+series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to
+make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel. Where the Lesser Slave
+River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, and from
+there to Athabasca Landing float down the last stretch of our northern
+waterways of delight. There is frost each night now and the deciduous
+trees on the banks are a rich riot of colour. We resurrect from the
+depths all the warm clothing available and have opportunity of testing
+in their own latitudes the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and
+other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>Every passenger who floats with us enlarges our knowledge and enriches
+our vocabulary. Judge Noel's bodyguard is a young stripling of the
+Mounted Police, born in dear old Lunnon. It is always interesting to
+note the different things of which people are proud. Old men boast of
+their age and young ones of their youth. The fat woman in the side-show
+is arrogant over her avoirdupois; the debutante glories in her slender
+waist; and the globe-trotter triumphs in the miles he has travelled.
+Wyllie claimed distinction in never having left Chipewyan. This Mounted
+Policeman, who stretches out on the scow, plumes himself on two things:
+&quot;I 'old the dahnsin' championship of Edmonton. I got a gold watch lahst
+winter for waltzin'.&quot; We smile approval, and the constable continues, &quot;I
+waltzed,&mdash;reversin',&mdash;an 'our-an'-a-'alf! And&mdash;,&quot; straightening himself
+up, &quot;I am the best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0385"></a>
+<img src="images/img0385.jpg" width="370" height="241" alt="A Family on the Lesser Slave" title="">
+<BR><B>A Family on the Lesser Slave</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Rich is the descriptive language of the North, and we lie awake on the
+scows, rolled in our blankets, loath to lose any of it. &quot;Jim&quot; is at the
+sweep. Many of the men are going out from the North for the first time
+in four or five years. They also seem too interested to slumber, and all
+night long the conversation goes on. A priest is describing some man who
+seems to be hard to identify. &quot;You know him,&mdash;the son of the ole man
+with the patch on his nose wot died. I christen him last winter.&quot; No one
+is more apt at naming than these men. Two days ago, at the treaty at
+Lesser Slave, when a smiling couple drew five dollars for a baby one day
+old, a Cree bystander dubbed the baby &quot;dat little meal-ticket.&quot; A young
+girl who came up to claim her money was nicknamed &quot;Pee-shoo,&quot; or &quot;The
+Lynx,&quot; because of her bad temper. So we see where all the old cats of
+the south come from.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0386"></a>
+<img src="images/img0386.jpg" width="370" height="163" alt="A One Night Stand" title="">
+<BR><B>A One Night Stand</B>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<p>The scow glides on, and we doze, but do not sleep. In the dark she hits
+something and bumps us wide awake to hear the reassuring, &quot;This is where
+Pat Cunningham's horses were drownded last week.&quot; Under Jim's command,
+everybody works, even learned judges from Edmonton. He says, &quot;Take
+another shot at the oars, and then you can hit the feathers.&quot; In the
+morning, one half-breed fails to turn up for <i>meat-su</i> and the comment
+is, &quot;He feels the feathers pullin'.&quot; &quot;Don't blime 'im,&quot; remarks the
+constable, passing the tea, &quot;only fools and 'orses work.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He reached out his hand for a drink,&quot; rendered into trans-Athabascan
+would be, &quot;He got his thievin' irons on the joy-juice,&quot; or &quot;He stretched
+his mud-hooks for the fight-water.&quot; &quot;He set him a-foot for his horse&quot;
+means &quot;He stole his horse,&quot; and from this we derive all such phrases as,
+&quot;He set him a-foot for his blankets,&quot; &quot;He set him a-foot for his furs,&quot;
+&quot;He set him a-foot for his wife.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The springy tussocks of grass growing in swampy places are <i>t&ecirc;tes des
+femmes</i>, a name that pleased our fancy and made us think each time we
+negotiated them of walking over the swaying heads of women in a crowd.
+To call the tribes together, Indians are wont to send out significant
+little pieces of wood. The announcement in the society columns, if the
+Indians had any, would be, &quot;The Crees sent out chips for a crush.&quot; An
+Indian far down the Mackenzie had a name that kings might envy. He was
+known among his tribe as <i>The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps</i>. When a
+beardless and ardent missionary approached this splendid chief, wanting
+to &quot;convert&quot; him to the Christian religion, the old man replied with
+indulgent dignity, &quot;My son, for eighty years have I served the Great
+Spirit in my own way. I fear I am now too old to change.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a><h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<h3>HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT</h3>
+<br>
+
+&quot;The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as<br>
+the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.&quot;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">&mdash;<i>Leviticus, XIX</i>, 34.</span><br>
+<br>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0388"></a>
+<img src="images/img0388.jpg" width="365" height="284" alt="A Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba" title="">
+<BR><B>A Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Edmonton once more. Two Spanish sailors shipwrecked and navigating the
+Pacific on a log, search the shore for a sign. Into what land are they
+drifting? The one at the bow (does a log have a bow?) sees something
+through the haze&mdash;&quot;<i>Gracias a Dios</i>! Praise be to God, it is a
+Christian country! I see the gallows!&quot; We too get our sign. We reach
+Edmonton on Convocation Day.</p>
+
+<p>Most young countries for the first ten years of their lives confine
+their energies to roads, bridges, transportation&mdash;things of the
+market-place. Alberta has been a full-fledged Province of Canada for
+barely three years, and, coming out of the wilds, we sit on the back
+benches and see her open the doors of her first Provincial University.
+The record is unique and significant. On the banks of the Saskatchewan
+rise the walls of the new Parliament Buildings, a replica in small of
+Minnesota's State Capitol at St. Paul. This new Province, carved out of
+the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within
+it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil
+in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a
+hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young
+people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of
+happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would
+you?</p>
+
+<p>The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan.
+On his promised visit to the Orkneys the old man had gotten as far as
+Winnipeg, where the crowds of the modern city affrighted him. &quot;Miss
+Cameron, the men on the streets were as trees walking, and no man
+stopped to ask how the other was doing. If that is the world, I wanted
+to go no farther. I'm going back to Chipewyan, and I will take my family
+with me. We go home with dogs on the first ice!&quot; Poor Wyllie! Before the
+bells rang out the Old Year, his soul heard the summons none may
+disregard, and alone he went out on the Long Journey.</p>
+
+<p>What of Inspector Pelletier, Walker, Joyce, and Conway, essaying the
+traverse from Resolution to Hudson Bay? For weeks after coming out we
+waited for news of the party. Month succeeded month and no word came out
+of the white silence. Hudson Bay has no daily mail service. &quot;There ain't
+no busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay.&quot; It is not until March that
+the welcome word comes that the original party safely made salt water.
+The relieved tension at Regina headquarters and the joy of personal
+friends is dimmed by the news of the death of Corporal Donaldson, who
+joined the others at Chesterfield Inlet. Donaldson, in company with
+Corporal Reeves, started down Hudson Bay in an open boat and encountered
+a herd of walruses. Enraged and maddened at the shots of the men, one
+huge animal made a charge, the boat was upset, and Donaldson, trying to
+make shore, was drowned. Reeves survived.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to be a chapter of accidents. Just as this book goes to press
+we learn of a double fatality which attended the transport of the 1909
+outfit of Count von Hammerstein. This plucky developer of McMurray
+oilfields, while running Grand Rapids on the Athabasca (the rapids which
+we had descended in an empty while the other sturgeon-heads were
+discharging freight at Grand Rapids Island), struck a boulder. The boat
+turned turtle and the three men were tossed into the torrent,&mdash;von
+Hamerstein, V. Volksooky, a young Russian, and a French half-breed, La
+France. The Count was washed ashore and escaped, but the others were
+drowned. Deaths such as these are the price of Empire. When the
+railroad reaches the Athabasca, the running of these dangerous rapids
+will no longer be necessary.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0391"></a>
+<img src="images/img0391.jpg" width="269" height="361" alt="Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>In the footprints of Back and Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and Sir
+John Franklin, for six months we have been treading the silent places.
+We have thought much of these faith-possessed men who found the roads
+that others follow. In faith they wrought. Canada does well to honour
+these great of old, and that she appreciates the work of her early
+explorers is shown in the fact that British Columbia recently granted a
+pension to the granddaughter of Simon Fraser, the man who in 1808 first
+sailed down the great river that bears his name. But the day of our
+great men is not over; Canada still in her great North and West has
+Pathfinders of Empire. The early voyageurs made their quest in the
+dugout and the birchbark; and the tools of these are rails of steel and
+iron horses.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0392"></a>
+<img src="images/img0392.jpg" width="262" height="329" alt="William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>We are accustomed to look upon a railroad as a cold thing of dirt and
+sand and rock, ties and steel,&mdash;a mechanical something associated with
+gradients and curves. But the history of railroading in Canada is one
+long romance; back of each line is its creative wizard. We are too near
+these men to get their proper measure; the historian of the future will
+place their names on Canada's bead-roll:&mdash;Charles M. Hays, the forceful
+President of the Grand Trunk Pacific; Mackenzie and Mann; William Whyte
+of the Canadian Pacific. Canada owes much to Caledonia. Nine-tenths of
+those pioneers of pioneers, the trading adventurers of the H.B. Company,
+came from Scotland, that grey land where a judicious mixture of
+Scripture and Shorter Catechism, oatmeal and austerity, breeds boys of
+dour determination and pawky wit, boys who, whatever their shortcomings,
+are not wont to carry their wishbone where their backbone ought to be. A
+conspicuous example of the dynamic Scottish Canadian, hale at sixty-six,
+is William Whyte, Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At an
+age when most men are content to &quot;drowse them close by a dying fire,&quot;
+William Whyte finds himself in complete charge of all the affairs of the
+Canadian Pacific Railway Company between the Great Lakes and the
+Pacific. Through the positions of brakemen, freight clerk, yard master,
+conductor, night station-agent, passenger agent, this man worked on his
+own passage along Fame's ladder. Twenty years of adolescence and
+preparation, twenty years with the Grand Trunk, a quarter of a century
+with the Canadian Pacific, this is William Whyte's record of splendid
+service. He has always played the game and he is still in the harness.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0393"></a>
+<img src="images/img0393.jpg" width="219" height="315" alt="Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern
+Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern
+Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0394"></a>
+<img src="images/img0394.jpg" width="254" height="298" alt="William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>When people enquired of the early Christians, &quot;What do you call your new
+religion?&quot; they answered, &quot;We call it <i>The Road</i>.&quot; If religion is the
+best work of a man made visible, as I think it is, then the Canadian
+Northern Road may well stand for the religious expression of the men
+who made it. It takes more than money, more than dreams, more than
+ambition, for two men in twelve years to build, own, and personally
+control five thousand miles of railway. As Riley says, it takes sweat. A
+mile a day for twelve years,&mdash;this is the construction-record of the
+Canadian Northern. It sounds like the story of Jonah's gourd. In 1896,
+nothing. In 1909, a railroad line with earnings of ten million dollars a
+year west of Port Arthur alone, and twelve thousand people on the
+regular pay-roll. Beginning in Manitoba and operating in the three
+prairie Provinces, the Canadian Northern is primarily a western railway,
+its remarkable growth being coincident with and closely related to the
+tide of immigration.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0395"></a>
+<img src="images/img0395.jpg" width="362" height="200" alt="In the Wheat Fields" title="">
+<BR><B>In the Wheat Fields</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>As a case in point, on our way south from Edmonton we pass through the
+divisional point of Vermilion on the Canadian Northern, which is not to
+be confounded with our Far North Vermilion-on-the-Peace. Vermilion
+exemplifies wonderfully the Go-Fever and the Grow-Fever of the
+Prairies. Before it was three months old its citizens had organised a
+Board of Trade, had given it a Methodist Church, a newspaper, a bank, a
+public school, three lumber-yards, three hotels, three restaurants, four
+implement warehouses, two hardware stores, two butcher shops, four real
+estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a
+steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a
+bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two
+doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There
+were two pool-rooms and a bowling-alley.</p>
+
+<p>Farther south we reach the town of Vonda. The Canadian Northern reached
+this neighbourhood, and the town-site was surveyed in June, 1905. That
+year Vonda shipped over the line one hundred thousand bushels of wheat,
+and in 1906 her exports were five hundred thousand bushels. The Canadian
+farmer looks upon the railroad as his friend; you cannot expect <i>him</i> to
+use the inclusive condemnation, &quot;Corporations have no souls.&quot; The main
+line of the Canadian Northern runs from Port Arthur on Lake
+Superior&mdash;where, by the way, stands the world's largest grain
+elevator&mdash;to beyond Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan, operating in the
+heart of one gigantic wheat-farm. The method of construction has been
+unique. The owners commenced to build branch railways almost before they
+had a main line. Little spurs to small elevators grew into long branches
+flanked with bigger elevators, and the elevators evolved into villages,
+towns, and cities, until to-day the result of twelve years' growth shows
+a main line of thirteen hundred miles, with over three thousand miles
+of branch railways. An orchard tree is a good fruit-bearer when the
+thick clustering branches are more in evidence than the long thin trunk,
+and the same applies to railroads. But this main line will grow, too.
+Working out from its wheaten heart, its natural line of growth is east
+to Hudson Bay, north beyond Edmonton, and west to the Pacific. Surely
+the tentacles are pushing out. Already the Alberta Legislature has
+granted the Canadian Northern a charter to Athabasca Landing, and one
+hundred miles of steel will here tap all the lush land watered by the
+Peace and the Athabasca.</p>
+
+<p>More interesting than the line which gridirons the wheat-lands we are
+passing through, are the men who made it. To try to write the history of
+Western Canada's development and not speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann
+would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without
+mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil
+Rhodes of Canada&mdash;gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and
+with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher,
+he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of
+action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a
+saw-mill. Three things come to him as priceless treasure out of the
+self-discipline of these experiences: a rare aptitude to see and to
+focus the central idea of any proposition, quick and unerring decision,
+and the power of ready calculation. &quot;I am seldom wrong in a figure,&quot; is
+one of his few admissions about himself. The President of the Canadian
+Northern travels without a secretary, dictates letters sparingly, and
+works in an office as bare of adornment as a monk's cell.</p>
+
+<p>And his working partner? Donald D. Mann is a man of deeds rather than
+words. James J. Hill has declared Mr. Mann to be the greatest railway
+builder in the world. Mr. Mann was born in Ontario not far from the
+sleepy town of Acton and just six miles east of Rockwood, the birthplace
+of James J. Hill. These two boys learned to swim in the same
+swimming-hole. One wonders from what roadside spring they quaffed the
+draught which sent them railroad-building. Mr. Mann thinks it a great
+advantage to be born a country boy, for he says it makes a lad frugal,
+strong, and resourceful. It worked out this way in his own case at
+least, for there is not a thing in railroad building that Mr. Mann
+cannot do with his own hands, from shoeing a mule to finding the best
+pass in the Rockies through which to slide his iron horse down to the
+sea. Direct, strong, simple, he knows how to control himself and manage
+others. D.D. Mann is a conspicuous example of what a Canadian boy has
+managed to accomplish by his own efforts. The beauty of this Western
+Canada is that it holds out opportunities to every plucky lad who has
+initiative and who is willing to work; nothing is stratified, the whole
+thing is formative.</p>
+
+<p>While the steel kings are letting the light of day into this great
+granary, they are being helped by a government representative, as
+democratic and direct as any of the pathmakers whose visible work we
+have been noticing. The Hon. Frank Oliver, Canada's Minister of the
+Interior, is essentially a self-made man. Before the railroad men
+realised their vision splendid, young Mr. Oliver and his bride rode into
+Edmonton on an ox-cart, with a modest little printing-press tucked away
+among the wedding-gifts and household goods. Oliver was a practical
+printer and soon issued a hand-dodger called by courtesy a newspaper.
+The editing habit sticks. The Minister of the Interior owns and
+publishes the Edmonton <i>Bulletin</i>. Mr. Mann says, &quot;I like building
+railroads&quot;; Mr. Oliver might parody him and say, &quot;I like building
+newspapers.&quot;</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0399"></a>
+<img src="images/img0399.jpg" width="238" height="346" alt="Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior" title="">
+<BR><B>Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>Arrived at Winnipeg, we look back across this great prairie we have
+twice traversed. The land stands ready to produce bread for the nations;
+Nature has done her part, now man must do his. The two greatest needs of
+Western Canada to-day are transportation and immigration. Of the one we
+have spoken; the other claims our interest even more compelling, for man
+is more vital than machinery. Canada is a country with a meagre past, a
+solid present, and an illimitable future.</p>
+
+<p>She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man's
+sky,&mdash;where wilderness and man are meeting. The flood of immigration
+hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the
+immigration policy of a government. It is the natural sequence of the
+economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least
+resistance to a more favourable situation. The people who are coming in
+are not dreamers but workers. &quot;The world's greatest wheat-farm,&quot; says
+the economist. It is more than this: it is a human crucible, and we are
+witnessing here the birth-throes of an entirely new nation.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0400"></a>
+<img src="images/img0400.jpg" width="366" height="289" alt="Threshing Grain" title="">
+<BR><B>Threshing Grain</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>While seventy-five per cent of Canada's wheat-farmers are either
+Canadian, American, or British-born, and of the class that preserves the
+homogeneity of the race, every country on the map pays tribute to the
+plains. Austrians are here and Galicians, Hungarians and Belgians,
+Dutch and French and Germans, Italians and Polish, the Russian
+Doukhobortsi, Finns and Danes and Icelanders, Swedes in thousands and
+stalwart Norwegians. South Africans and West Indians are coming in with
+Bermudians and Jamaicans and the bearded Spaniard. Far off on the
+Pacific Coast, strangers are knocking at the western gate,&mdash;Chinese,
+Japanese, and Hindoos.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0401"></a>
+<img src="images/img0401.jpg" width="367" height="249" alt="Doukhobors Threshing Flax" title="">
+<BR><B>Doukhobors Threshing Flax</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>There is no Established Church in Canada; it is the freest land in the
+world. On his one hundred and sixty government-given acres, the new
+arrival may worship his God in his own way. The Greek Church in Winnipeg
+has a Bishop who one day each year makes holy water of the Red River
+when the Czar is performing the same blessing on the Neva. Down in
+Southern Alberta refugee Mormons from Salt Lake grow sugar-beets,
+revere the memory of Brigham Young, and multiply after their kind. Until
+within two years ago the expatriated Russian Doukhobors maintained a
+commonwealth of ten thousand souls, eschewing liquors and flesh-meats,
+making the prairie blossom into bumper harvests, and holding all things
+in common.</p>
+
+<p>Winnipeg has three thousand Icelanders who, every August, take a day off
+to celebrate the fact that the Danish King, in 1874, granted a
+constitution to Iceland. When you ask them why they came to America,
+they say, &quot;Did not our Lief Ericcson discover this continent, why
+shouldn't we come?&quot; The Icelanders boast two members in the Manitoba
+legislature. A Mennonite is a member of the Parliament of Alberta. The
+first graduate of Wesley College in Winnipeg to find a place on the
+staff of his Alma Mater is also a Mennonite. Winnipeg has several, Roman
+Catholic Polish lawyers. Statistics prove that the young Jewish people
+of Western Canada patronise the public libraries more than any other
+class or race. All the citizens-in-the-making are closely interested in
+politics. Recently there was chronicled the formation in Winnipeg of a
+Syrian Liberal Club and a Syrian Conservative Club. Up in Edmonton the
+Galicians (Ruthenians?) have just organised a corps of volunteer militia
+to serve the Canadian country of their adoption.</p>
+
+<center>
+<a name="img0403"></a>
+<img src="images/img0403.jpg" width="315" height="405" alt="Sir William Van Horne, First President
+of the Canadian Pacific Railway" title="">
+<BR><B>Sir William Van Horne, First President of the Canadian Pacific Railway</B>
+</center>
+
+<p>The Americanisation of Canada? During the past seven years over three
+hundred and fifty thousand people have come to us from the United
+States. Is this American invasion to be feared politically? Western
+Canada has no more desirable citizens than those who come to us from
+the south. They are not failures, but are people who have made good,
+intent on making better. One generation at the most,&mdash;sometimes but a
+few years,&mdash;converts these into Canadian voters. The troubled English
+brother should remember that when &quot;American&quot; farmers in Canada pronounce
+on Canadian matters they do so constitutionally at the polls and as
+Canadian citizens. As Canadians we believe that our national
+institutions, though far from perfect, are in some respects superior to
+those of the United States. We believe they are at once more elastic,
+more responsive to the popular will, and more stable because more
+elastic. The west is gaining in political power as it gains in
+population and prosperity, and fortunately our government machinery has
+been well tested before it is called upon to feel the strain of our
+rapidly-increasing population. Canada may construct where older nations
+must reconstruct, and if we borrow an American institution or two,
+provided it be a good one, let no man hold up hands in holy horror.
+Japan has borrowed nationally whenever she saw, lying around loose,
+something she could use, and Japan is as Japanese at heart as she was in
+the days of the Tycoon and the two-sworded Samurai. Belgium to-day,
+after centuries of contiguity and intercourse, is not exactly France;
+and little Switzerland, surrounded by the Powers, will be Switzerland
+till the last curtain-fall.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Is Canada loyal to England?&quot; is a question that sometimes meets us. No,
+Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let
+England see to it that she, too, is loyal.</p>
+
+<p>Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the
+Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace,
+are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated
+as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and
+the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land.
+God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the
+diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people in
+time will intermarry,&mdash;Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with
+these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations.
+Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type
+will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into
+the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who will step out?</p>
+
+<p>In the point of population, Canada begins the twentieth century where
+the United States began the nineteenth. The race is ours to run. Wise
+the nation, as is the individual, who can learn his lesson from a page
+torn out of his neighbour's book, learn what to follow and what to
+avoid. Our fore-elders who laid the foundations for us laid them
+four-square. As Canadians, we owe a debt to the Fathers of Confederation
+and their successors. In the West, our particular thanks are due to the
+Hudson's Bay Company, the R.N.W.M.P., and all those factors which
+established British law &quot;in the beginning.&quot; Canada has never seen a
+lynching; we have had no Indian war; with but one weak-kneed exception
+there has been no attempt to hold up a train within our Western borders.
+This is the inheritance of the people of this generation, and on this
+foundation we must build. Our hope is in the children.</p>
+
+<p>On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had
+been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New
+Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary. They were
+all singing &quot;<i>The Maple Leaf Forever</i>.&quot; It is the lessons these children
+are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the
+future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel
+wheat. In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed. Many
+signs are full of hope. Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with
+dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children
+in school. Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post. At
+all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed
+out with them!</p>
+
+<p>May I close with a purely personal note? At the end of a summer which
+had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman
+priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my
+life. We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls,
+the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the
+Lake of the Woods country. I was anxious to get the story of the
+recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs. But
+the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve. We
+turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary. Looking in
+at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a
+blackboard problem. &quot;If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a
+trench 82 yards long&mdash;&mdash;.&quot; And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse
+stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You are interested?&quot; queried the Father.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; I acknowledged, &quot;I once taught school.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I taught school for twenty-five years,&quot; I admitted.</p>
+
+<p>We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he
+turned to me with, &quot;And you taught school&mdash;for twen-ty five years?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I nodded my head, and we went on. At the next landing the remark was
+repeated. At the foot of the stairs he excused himself and came back
+with the photographs which he presented to me with an Old World courtesy
+and dignity. Grasping my hand in farewell, once more the man of God
+wondered, &quot;And for twen-ty five years you taught school. And you remain
+so&mdash;&quot; He hesitated for the word, and I wondered what it would be. At
+last it came,&mdash;the tribute of one who expected to teach school all his
+life to one who had put in a quarter of a century at the work and still
+survived,&mdash;&quot;You have taught school for twen-ty five years, <i>and you
+remain so glad!</i>&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And this is the keynote of what the summer has left with us. As
+Canadians, looking at this Western Canada which has arrived and thinking
+of the lands of Canada's fertile Northland far beyond, for the future we
+are full of optimism, and of the present we are <i>glad</i>.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="ROUTES"></a><h2>ROUTES OF TRAVEL</h2>
+<br>
+
+<h3>ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO THE ARCTIC VIA THE ATHABASCA AND MACKENZIE RIVER
+SYSTEMS.</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr>
+<td align=center><b>MILES</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PLACE</b></td>  <td align=center colspan=2><b>PASSENGER TARIFF</b></td>
+   <td align=center colspan=2><b>FREIGHT TARIFF<br>per cwt</b></td>  <td align=center><b>MODE OF TRAVEL</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>TIMES</b></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Edmonton</td><td colspan=2></td><td colspan=2></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>100</td><td>Athabasca Landing </td><td colspan=2>$8.00</td><td colspan=2>$1.00</td>
+   <td>Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy</td> <td>Twice a week all year round</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan=2></td><td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td colspan=2></td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Athabasca Landing</td> <td colspan=4></td>
+   <td rowspan=3>Northern Transportation Co.'s SS. <i>Midnight Sun</i> (when business offers) or scows. From
+                 Athabasca Landing to Grand Rapids.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>120</td><td>Pelican Rapids</td><td>$ 7.50</td><td>$ 7.50</td><td> .75</td><td> .75</td></tr>
+<tr><td>165</td><td>Grand Rapids</td><td>$10.00</td><td>$15.00</td><td>1.50</td><td>1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td>252</td><td>Fort McMurray</td><td>$20.00</td><td>$27.50</td><td>3.25</td><td>3.25</td>
+  <td>Scows from Grand Rapids to Fort McMurray</tr>
+<tr><td>437</td><td>Fort Chipewyan</td><td>$35.00</td><td>$45.00</td><td>4.50</td><td>4.50</td>
+  <td rowspan=2>H.B. Co's SS. <i>Grahame</i> (sternwheel river steamer, 130 ft. x 28 ft.; accommodates 30
+    passengers; blankets supplied; bathroom; meals served 50 cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).
+    From Fort McMurray to Smith's Landing.</td>
+  <td>From June to August inclusive<a name="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>539</td><td>Smith's Landing </td><td>$45.00</td><td>$55.00</td><td>5.50</td><td>5.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td>555</td><td>Fort Smith</td><td>$48.00</td><td>$58.00</td><td>6.25</td><td>6.25</td>
+  <td>H.B. Co. Transport, portage by teams from Smith's Landing to Fort Smith.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>749</td><td>Fort Resolution</td><td>$56.00</td><td>$68.00</td><td>7.25</td><td>8.25</td>
+  <td rowspan=10>H.B. Co's SS. <i>Mackenzie River</i> (strong new sternwheel, lake and river steamer; accommodates 50
+    passengers, same conditions as <i>Grahame</i> above). From Fort Smith to Fort Macpherson.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>819</td><td>Hay River</td><td>$59.00</td><td>$73.00</td><td>7.75</td><td>9.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>869</td><td>Fort Rae</td><td>$62.00</td><td>$78.00 </td><td>8.25</td><td>10.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>917</td><td>Fort Providence</td><td>$65.00</td><td>$82.00</td><td>8.25</td><td>10.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1078</td><td>Fort Simpson</td><td>$73.00</td><td>$92.00</td><td>9.25</td><td>12.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1214</td><td>Fort Wrigley</td><td>$80.00</td><td>$102.00</td><td>10.25</td><td>14.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1398</td><td>Fort Norman</td><td>$87.00 </td><td>$112.00</td><td>11.25</td><td>16.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1572</td><td>Fort Good Hope</td><td>$93.00</td><td>$122.00</td><td>12.25</td><td>18.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1780</td><td>Arctic Red River</td><td>$100.00</td><td>$130.00</td><td>13.00</td><td>19.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1854</td><td>Fort Macpherson<br>(Peel's River)</td><td>$103.00</td><td>$133.00</td><td>13.75</td><td>21.25</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<a name="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1">[1]</a><div class="note"><p> For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Edmonton Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.</p></div>
+
+<h3>ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO PEACE RIVER, VIA THE ATHABASCA RIVER (UP
+STREAM), LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LESSER SLAVE LAKE.</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr>
+<td align=center><b>MILES</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PLACE</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PASSENGER TARIFF</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>FREIGHT TARIFF<br>per cwt</b></td>  <td align=center><b>MODE OF TRAVEL</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>TIMES</b></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Edmonton</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>100</td><td>Athabasca Landing </td><td>$8.00</td><td>$1.00</td>
+   <td>Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy</td> <td>Twice a week all year round</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Athabasca Landing</td> <td colspan=2></td>
+   <td rowspan=2>Northern Transportation Co.'s SS. <i>Midnight Sun</i> (sternwheel river steamer, 120 ft. long x 24 ft.
+       beam; accomodates 35 in staterooms; passengers supply their own blankets; meals served 50 cents each;
+       freight-carrying capacity 50 tons). From Athabasca Landing to Mouth of Lesser Slave River.</td>
+<tr><td>75</td><td>Mouth of Lesser Slave River</td><td>$6.00</td><td> .80</td></tr>
+<tr><td>91</td><td>Norris's (head of rapids)</td><td>$8.00</td><td>1.40</td>
+   <td>Portage 16 miles in N.T. Co's passenger and freight waggons from Mouth of Lesser Slave River to
+       Norris's (head of rapids).</td>
+   <td>From May 15 to Oct. 15<a name="FNanchor_1_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_2"><sup>[2]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>194</td><td>Shaw's Point on LesserSlave Lake</td><td>$16.00</td><td>2.50</td>
+   <td>N.T. Co.'s SS. <i>Northern Light</i> (sidewheel river and lake steamer, 100 ft. long x 26 ft. beam;
+       accommodates 35 in staterooms; passengers supply their own blankets; meals served 50 cents each;
+       freight capacity 30 tons). From Norris's to Shaw's Point.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>201</td><td>Lesser Slave Lake Settlement</td><td></td><td></td><td>Portage 7 miles to the settlement.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Lesser Slave Lake Settlement</td><td></td><td></td>
+  <td rowspan=3>From Lesser Slave Lake Settlement to Peace River Crossing, teams and drivers may be hired; fare depends
+                on number of passengers; takes 3 days. Stopping places at intermediate points, with stabling and hay;
+                bunkhouses for travellers who supply their own bedding and provisions.</td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td></td><td>$10.00 to $25.00 according to number</td><td></td><td>All the year round</td></tr>
+<tr><td>90</td><td>Peace River Crossing (Peace River Landing)</td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<a name="Footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_2">[2]</a><div class="note"><p>
+For&nbsp;further&nbsp;particulars&nbsp;regarding&nbsp;dates&nbsp;and&nbsp;rates,&nbsp;application&nbsp;should&nbsp;be&nbsp;made&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;Hudson's&nbsp;Bay&nbsp;Company,&nbsp;Winnipeg;&nbsp;J.K.
+Cornwall,&nbsp;M.P.P.,&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;Northern&nbsp;Transportation&nbsp;Co.&nbsp;at&nbsp;Edmonton;&nbsp;or&nbsp;to&nbsp;A.&nbsp;G.&nbsp;Harrison,&nbsp;Secretary&nbsp;Board&nbsp;of&nbsp;Trade,&nbsp;Edmonton,
+Alberta.</p></div>
+
+<h3>PEACE RIVER ROUTES:&mdash;(1) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING UP TO HUDSON'S HOPE.
+(2) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING DOWN TO FORT CHIPEWYAN.</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr>
+<td align=center><b>MILES</b></td>  <td align=center><b>PLACE</b></td>  <td align=center colspan=2><b>PASSENGER TARIFF</b></td>
+   <td align=center colspan=2><b>FREIGHT TARIFF<br>per cwt</b></td>  <td align=center><b>MODE OF TRAVEL</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>TIMES</b></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan=2></td><td align=center><b>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td colspan=2></td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Peace River Crossing</td><td></td><td></td><td> </td><td> </td>
+   <td rowspan=4>Having arrived at Peace River Crossing, the traveller may go up the Peace by H.B. SS.
+                <i>Peace River</i> (sternwheel river steamer, electric light, bathroom; accomodates 40 passengers;
+                blankets supplied; meals served 50 cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).</td>
+   <td rowspan=4>From June to August inclusive<a name="FNanchor_1_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>70</td><td>Fort Dunvegan</td><td>$10.00</td><td>$ 5.00</td><td>1.00</td><td> .75</td></tr>
+<tr><td>200</td><td>Fort St. John's</td><td>$25.00</td><td>$15.00</td><td>3.00</td><td>2.25</td></tr>
+<tr><td>240</td><td>Hudson's Hope</td><td>$35.00</td><td>$20.00</td><td>5.00</td><td>4.25</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan=2></td><td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td>
+   <td align=center><b>DOWN<br>STREAM</b></td> <td align=center><b>RETURN<br>UPSTREAM</b></td> <td colspan=2></td></tr>
+<tr><td>0</td><td>Peace River Crossing</td><td></td><td></td><td> </td><td> </td>
+   <td rowspan=3>Or, having arrived at Peace River Crossing, the traveller may go down the Peace.&mdash;<br>
+                 By the H.B. SS. <i>Peace River</i>, from Peace River Crossing to the Chutes of the Peace.</td>
+   <td rowspan=4>From June to August inclusive<a href="#Footnote_1_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>280</td><td>Fort Vermilion</td><td>$15.00</td><td>$25.00</td><td>1.00</td><td>3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td>330</td><td>Chutes of the Peace</td><td>$17.00</td><td>$30.00</td><td>1.75</td><td>4.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td>570</td><td>Fort Chipewyan</td><td>$37.00</td><td>$60.00</td><td>3.25</td><td>7.00</td>
+  <td> By H.B. SS. <i>Grahame</i> or Tug <i>Primrose</i>, from Chutes of the Peace to Fort Chipewyan.</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<a name="Footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_3">[3]</a><div class="note"><p> For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,10094 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New North, by Agnes Deans Cameron
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New North
+
+Author: Agnes Deans Cameron
+
+Release Date: July 10, 2004 [EBook #12874]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW NORTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brendan Lane and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW NORTH
+
+_Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic_
+
+BY AGNES DEANS CAMERON
+
+_WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR_
+
+
+_Published November, 1909_
+
+[Illustration: A Magnificent Trophy]
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
+
+JESSIE ANDERSON CAMERON
+
+AND
+
+TO ALL THOSE WHO TRY TO LIVE OUT HER SIMPLE RULE "WE MUST JUST TRY TO DO
+THE VERY BEST WE CAN"
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+It is customary to write a preface. Mine shall be short. Out of a full
+heart, I wish to thank all the splendid people of the North who, by
+giving me so freely information and photographs, and chapters out of
+their own lives, have facilitated the writing of this story. For their
+spontaneous kindness to me and mine no acknowledgment that I can here
+make is adequate. What we feel most strongly we cannot put into words.
+
+AGNES DEANS CAMERON.
+
+August, 1909.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
+
+The Mendicants leave Chicago--The invisible parallel of 49 where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver--Union Jack floats on
+an ox-cart--A holy baggage-room--Winnipeg, the Buckle of the
+Wheat-Belt--The trapper and the doctor--Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks--Boy
+Makers of Empire--The vespers of St. Boniface
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+The 1,000-mile wheat-field--Calgary-in-the-Foothills--Edmonton, the end
+of steel--The Brains of a Trans-Continental--Browning on the
+Saskatchewan--East Londoners in tents--Our outfit--A Waldorf-Astoria in
+the wilderness--The lonely cross of the Galician--Height of
+Land--Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., the sleuth of Lesser Slave
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+Athabasca Landing, the Gateway of the North--English gives place to
+Cree--Limit of the Dry Martini--Will the rabbits run?--The woman
+printer--Hymn-books by hand in the Cree syllabic--Baseball even
+here--Rain and reminiscences--The World's Oldest Trust
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
+
+"Farewell, Nistow!"--The rainy deck of a "sturgeon head" under a
+tarpaulin--Drifting by starlight--The wild geese overhead--Forty-foot
+gas-spout at the Pelican--The mosquito makes us blood-brothers--Four
+days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling
+Athabasca--Nomenclature of the North--Sentinels of the Silence
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
+
+The _Go-Quick-Her_ takes the bit in her mouth--Mallards on the
+half-shell--We set the Athabascan Thames afire--Sturgeon-head breaks her
+back on the Big Cascade--Fort McMurray--A stranded argosy, wreckage on
+the beach--Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader--A land flowing with
+coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
+
+Old Fort Chipewyan--In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John
+Franklin--Sir John turns parson--Grey Nuns and brown babies--Where grew
+the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial--Militant missionaries
+fight each other for souls--The strong man Loutit--Wyllie at the
+forge--An electric watch-maker--Where the Gambel sparrow builds--"Out of
+old books"
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
+
+Farewell to the Mounted Police--Our blankets on the deck--Fern odours by
+untravelled ways--Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of
+daylight--Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man--A 23-inch
+trout--First white women at Fond du Lac--Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a
+Fond du Lac library--The hermit padre and the hermit thrush--Worn north
+trails of the trapper--Caribou by the hundred thousands--The phalarope
+and the suffragette
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
+
+World's records beaten on the Athabasca--Down the Slave to Smith's
+Landing--Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned--The Mosquito
+Portage--Fort Smith, the new headquarters--Lady-slippers and
+night-hawks--Steamer built in the wilderness--Last stand of the wood
+bison--The grey wolf persists--Fur-trade and the silver-fox--Breeding
+pelicans.
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
+
+"Red lemol-lade" kiddies--Tons of crystal salt--Great Slave Lake and its
+fertile shores--Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh
+Edward--Hay River and its annual mail--Ploughing with dogs--Bill
+balked--The Alexandra Falls--Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputations
+while you wait.
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
+
+Drowning of De-deed--Fort Simpson, the old headquarters--A mouldy
+museum--The shrew-mice that were not preserved in rum--The farthest
+north library--Gold-seekers and grub-staked brides--Bishop Bompas, the
+Apostle of the North--Owindia, the Weeping One--Fort Simpson in the
+first year of Victoria the Good.
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
+
+Tenny Gouley tells us things--Mackenzie River, past and present--The
+fringed gentian at Fort Wrigley--The fires Mackenzie saw--The weathered
+knob of Bear Rock--Great Bear Lake--Orangeman's Day at Norman--The
+Ramparts of the Mackenzie--Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle--Mignonette and Old World courtesy--We meet Hagar once
+more--Potatoes on the Circle--The Little Church of the Open Door
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
+
+Arctic Red River--Wilfrid Laurier, the merger--Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko, the
+danseuse--Marriage as the Oo-vai-oo-aks see it--Orange-blossoms at
+Su-pi-di-do's--Trading tryst at Barter Island--Floating fathers--By-o
+Baby Bunting--Wild roses and tame Eskimo--Midnight football with walrus
+bladder and enthusiasm--Education that makes for manliness
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
+
+Sir John Franklin's lobsticks at Point Separation--We reach Fort
+Macpherson on the Peel--Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., eulogizes the
+Eskimo--An Eskimo wife must make boots that are waterproof--She ariseth
+also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her
+household--Cribbage-boards the link between Dick Swiveller and the
+Eskimo--Linked sweetness long drawn out--Chauncey Depew of the
+Kogmollycs
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
+
+The Midnight Sun--Our friend the heathen--"We want to go to
+hell"--Catching fish by prayer--The Eskimo and the Flood--Pink tea at
+the Pole--Always a balance in the Eskimo Bank--Marriage for better and
+not for worse--Christmas carols even here
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
+
+Jurisprudence on ice--The generous Innuit--Emmie-ray, the Delineator
+pattern--Weak races are pressed south--Roxi, a re-incarnation of Sir
+Philip Sidney--Blubbery bon vivants--Eskimo knew the Elephant--We write
+the last chapter of the story of McClure, the navigator--Cannibalism at
+the Circle
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TALE OF A WHALE
+
+Circumpolar Bowhead makes his last stand--Whales here and elsewhere--The
+Yankee peddler at Canada's back-door--Thirteen and a half million in
+whale values--Wind-swept Herschel, the Isle of Whales--One wife for a
+thousand years--Baleen, Spermaceti, and Ambergris--Save the Whale
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
+
+Lives lost for the sake of a white bead--The stars come back--The Keele
+party from the Dollarless Divide--"Here and there a grayling"--Across
+Great Slave Lake--The first white women at Fort Rae--Land of the
+musk-ox--Tales of 76 below--Two Thursdays in one week--Rabbits on ice
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TO MC MURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
+
+The nuptials of 'Norine--Ladies round gents and gents don't go--The
+fossil-gatherers--I give my name to a Cree kiddie--A solid mile of red
+raspberries--The typewriter an uncanny medicine--The Beetle Fleet leaves
+for Outside--Shipwrecked on a batture
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
+
+Ho! for the Peace--One break in 900 miles of navigation--A grey
+wolf--Bear-meat and the Se-weep-i-gons--Ninety-foot spruces--Tom Kerr
+and his bairns--The fish-seine that never fails--Our lobsticks by Red
+River--The Chutes of the Peace
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
+
+The farthest north flour-mill--The man who made Vermilion--Wheat at
+$1.25 a bushel--An Experimental Farm in latitude 58 deg. 30'--An unoccupied
+kingdom as large as Belgium--Where the steamer _Peace River_ was
+built--The hospitable home of the Wilsons--Vermilion a Land of Promise
+Fulfilled--Culture and the Cloister--Thomas of Canterbury on the Stump
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
+
+Se-li-nah of the happy heart--My premier moose--The rare and resourceful
+boatmen of the North--Alexander Mackenzie's last camp
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
+
+Pleasant prairies of the Peace--We tramp a hundred miles--The Angelus at
+Lesser Slave--Poole coats and Norfolk shooting-jackets--Roast duck
+galore--Alec Kennedy of the Nile--Louise the Wetigo, she ate nineteen
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
+
+Jim wins: Allie Brick can't run--100,000,000 acres of
+wheat-land--Jilly-Loo bird still lacks a rib--100 moose in one
+month--Peripatetic judges but no prisoners--The best-tattooed man in the
+Province of Alberta--The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
+
+Edmonton again--Wyllie goes out on the Long Journey--Donaldson killed by
+a walrus--Two drowned in the Athabasca--Steel kings and iron
+horses--Wheat-plains the melting-pot of a New Nation
+
+ROUTES OF TRAVEL
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+A magnificent trophy
+Map showing the Author's Route
+Sir Wilfred Laurier
+Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada
+Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt
+The Canadian Women's Press Club
+A section of Edmonton
+The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan
+Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta
+A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge
+Athabasca Landing
+Necessity knows no law at Athabasca
+The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians
+C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.
+A "sturgeon-head" on the Athabasca
+"Farewell, Nistow!"
+Grand Rapids, on the Athabasca River
+Portage at Grand Rapids Island
+Our transport at Grand Rapids Island
+Cheese-shaped nodules, Grand Rapids Island
+Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police
+Towing the wrecked barge ashore
+The scow breaks her back and fills
+Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray trader
+The steamer _Grahame_
+An oil derrick on the Athabasca
+Tar banks on the Athabasca
+Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca
+Three of a kind
+Woman's work of the Far North
+Lake Athabasca in winter
+Bishop Grouard
+The modern note-book
+Tepee of a Caribou-eater Indian
+A bit of Fond du Lac
+Birch-barks at Fond du Lac
+Fond du Lac
+Father Beibler carrying water to a dying Indian
+Smith's Landing
+A transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing
+Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company
+The world's last buffalo
+Tracking a scow across mountain portage
+The "red lemol-lade" boys
+Salt beds
+Unloading at Fort Resolution
+Coming to "take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake
+On the Slave
+Dogs cultivating potatoes
+David Villeneuve
+Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson
+A Slavi family at Fort Simpson
+A Slavi type from Fort Simpson
+Interior of St. David's Cathedral
+Fort Simpson by the light of the Aurora
+Indians at Fort Norman
+Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman
+The ramparts of the Mackenzie
+Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie mouth
+A Kogmollye family
+Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak family
+Farthest North football
+Two spectators at the game
+An Eskimo exhibit
+Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo togs
+Two wise ones
+A Nunatalmute Eskimo family
+Cribbage-boards of walrus tusks
+Useful articles made by the Eskimo
+Home of Mrs. Macdonald
+Eskimo kayaks at the Arctic edge
+A wise man of the Dog-Ribs
+A study in expression
+We tell the tale of a whale
+Two little ones at Herschel Island
+Breeding grounds of the seal
+The Keele party on the Gravel River
+The first typewriter on Great Slave Lake
+The bell at Fort Rae mission
+The musk-ox
+A meadow at McMurray
+Starting up the Athabasca
+On the Clearwater
+Evening on the Peace
+Our lobsticks on the Peace
+The chutes of the Peace
+Pulling out the _Mee-wah-sin_
+The flour mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace
+Articles made by Indians
+The Hudson's Bay Store
+Papillon, a Beaver brave
+Going to school in winter
+My premier moose
+Beaver camp, on Paddle River
+The site of old Fort McLeod
+Jean Baptiste, pilot on the Peace
+Fort Dunvegan on the Peace
+Fort St. John on the Peace
+Where King was arrested
+Alec Kennedy with his two sons
+Cannibal Louise, her little girl and Miss Cameron
+A Peace River Pioneer
+Three generations
+A family at the Lesser Slave
+A one-night stand
+A rye field in Brandon, Manitoba
+Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway
+William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway
+Donald D. Maun, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern Railway
+William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway
+In the wheat fields
+Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior
+Threshing grain
+Doukhobors threshing flax
+Sir William Van Horne, first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Map of the Author's Route]
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW NORTH
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
+
+
+"We are as mendicants who wait
+  Along the roadside in the sun.
+Tatters of yesterday and shreds
+  Of morrow clothe us every one.
+
+"And some are dotards, who believe
+  And glory in the days of old;
+While some are dreamers, harping still
+  Upon an unknown age of gold.
+
+"O foolish ones, put by your care!
+  Where wants are many, joys are few;
+And at the wilding springs of peace,
+  God keeps an open house for you.
+
+"But there be others, happier few,
+  The vagabondish sons of God,
+Who know the by-ways and the flowers,
+  And care not how the world may plod."
+
+Isn't it Riley who says, "Ef you want something, an' jest dead set
+a-longin' fer it with both eyes wet, and tears won't bring it, why, you
+try sweat"? Well, we had tried sweat and longing for two years, with
+planning and hoping and the saving of nickels, and now we are off!
+
+Shakespeare makes his man say, "I will run as far as God has any
+ground," and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on
+going till we strike the Arctic,--straight up through Canada. Most
+writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and
+travel west by the C.P.R., following the line of least resistance till
+they reach the Pacific. Then they go back to dear old England and tell
+the world all about Canada, their idea of the half-continent being
+Euclid's conception of a straight line, "length without breadth."
+
+[Illustration: Sir Wilfred Laurier]
+
+But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt
+of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary
+and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves
+after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to
+follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from
+Dan to Beersheba to say "All is barren," but to come near to the people,
+our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than
+Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of
+Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting
+that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.
+
+We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of
+all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend
+of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward,--till
+you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our
+ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St.
+Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of
+the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong
+hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on
+the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.
+
+There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage
+was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered
+Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool.
+But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last
+unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out,
+pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a
+dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.
+
+Kipling speaks of "a route unspoiled of Cook's," and we have found it.
+Going to the office of Thos. Cook & Son, in Chicago, with a friend who
+had planned a Mediterranean tour, I gently said, "I wonder if you can
+give me information about a trip I am anxious to take this summer." The
+young man smiled and his tone was that which we accord to an indulged
+child, "I guess we can. Cook & Son give information on _most_ places."
+"Very well," I said, "I want to go from Chicago to the Arctic by the
+Mackenzie River, returning home by the Peace and the Lesser Slave. Can
+you tell me how long it will take, what it will cost, and how I make my
+connections?" He was game; he didn't move an eyebrow, but went off to
+the secret recesses in the back office to consult "the main guy," "the
+chief squeeze," "the head push," "the big noise." Back they came
+together with a frank laugh, "Well, Miss Cameron, I guess you've got us.
+Cook's have no schedule to the Arctic that way." They were able,
+however, to give accurate information as to how one should reach Hudson
+Bay, with modes of travel, dates, and approximate cost. But this journey
+for another day.
+
+Leaving Chicago one sizzling Sunday in mid-May, we (my niece and I) stop
+for a day to revel in bird and blossoms at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota,
+then silently in the night cross the invisible parallel of 49 deg. where the
+eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver.
+
+With the Polar Ocean as ultimate goal, we cannot help thinking how
+during the last generation the Arctic Circle has been pushed steadily
+farther north. Forty years ago Minneapolis and St. Paul were struggling
+trading-posts, and all America north of them was the range of the
+buffalo and the Indian. Then Fort Garry (Winnipeg) became Farthest
+North. Before starting, I had dug out from the Public Library the record
+of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago,
+deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their
+minutes) that "Our Northern tier of States is too far north to
+successfully grow wheat." For years Winnipeg was considered the northern
+limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of
+limitation was pushed farther back until it is
+Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared "Farthest North." To-day
+we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due
+north of Edmonton!
+
+In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh
+beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all
+interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach
+Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These
+were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. "But," the old chap
+says, "the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the
+Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it
+stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal
+to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin'
+red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set
+on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and
+what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart,
+poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the
+old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at
+sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all
+wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife." This incident was
+not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known
+to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his
+way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the
+war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured
+clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing
+this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by
+the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.
+
+[Illustration: Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada]
+
+What Cook & Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg
+furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for
+two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when
+the Second Charles ruled in England,--an age when men said not "How
+cheap?" but "How good?", not "How easy?" but "How well?" The Hudson's
+Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the
+Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can
+travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except
+under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for
+you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and
+sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot.
+Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be
+transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats,
+guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort
+Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between
+Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull
+whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.
+
+For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the
+Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the
+benefit of employes, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here
+they are as we copied them down:
+
+Let all things be done decently and in order.
+    1 Cor. xiv, 40.
+
+Be punctual, be regular, be clean.
+Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
+Be obliging and kind one to another.
+Let no angry word be heard among you
+Be not fond of change. (Sic.)
+Be clothed with humility, not finery.
+Take all things by the smooth handle.
+Be civil to all, but familiar with few.
+
+As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American,--
+
+"Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let
+go your overcoat. Thieves are around,"
+
+the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our
+shoulders, "Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!"
+
+A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a
+transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, "What makes
+Winnipeg?" Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it
+out. "This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our
+nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches
+going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty
+stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the
+remittance man from England, sorr," with a quizzical look at the checked
+suit of his interlocutor, "shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies
+up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!" As Mulcahey winks
+the other eye, we drift out into this "Buckle of the Wheat-Belt."
+
+What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her
+a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of
+her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an
+increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one
+hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the
+world's history.
+
+Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and
+bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has
+had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now
+counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the
+British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway
+tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million
+dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings
+in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801;
+and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without
+Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade
+filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a
+day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed
+a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western
+Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures--the lure of the
+land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is
+estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one
+thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth
+of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring
+the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in
+figures--the "power of the man."
+
+[Illustration: Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt]
+
+Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City
+of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation
+of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg
+sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages--Armenian, Arabic,
+Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu,
+Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that
+some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast
+the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would
+Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the _London
+Times_, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out
+from among the flotsam in the kelp.
+
+Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we
+cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred
+steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate
+that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the
+six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This
+will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold
+by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for
+breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the
+list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics
+of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that
+these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do.
+"But they are all good pay," the implement-man says. Looking at the red
+ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history.
+The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out
+into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these
+ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of
+faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and
+formative!
+
+We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we
+reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A.
+Stewart says to us, "Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has
+fallen by the way." We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a
+cot. "Tell him that you are going into the land of fur," whispers the
+doctor, "he has been a trapper all his life."
+
+Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and
+his snow-shoes pinned him fast. When dragged out he had suffered so with
+the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to
+the hospital. Hard luck? Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with
+mercy. Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice
+of life,--a doctor with a man's brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the
+heart of a little child. The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has
+one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of
+motion remaining in the other leg. His vocal cords are so affected that
+the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the
+mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man. Between patient and
+doctor, a third man entered the drama,--Mr. Grey, a convalescent.
+Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother
+studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel,
+to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.
+
+Who is this patient? A man without friends or influence, not attractive
+in appearance, more than distressing to listen to,--just one more worker
+thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life. The
+consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not
+even arrest the creeping death. Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner
+of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked.
+Dr. Stewart had two men's work to do. He worked all day and was busy
+well into the night. A doctor's natural tendency is to see in each man
+that he ministers to merely "a case," a manifestation of some disease to
+be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages. But in the
+Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young
+men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.
+
+The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper
+was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke
+by twilight. We are happiest when we create. So he said to Carlton, "Did
+you ever write a story?" The head shook answer. "Well, why don't you
+try? You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody
+else knows. Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here."
+
+The outcome was disappointing. The uncouth sounds, translated by Grey,
+were bald, bare, and stiff. Soon the stiffness worked off. With
+half-shut eyes Carlton lived again in the woods. He lifted the dewy
+branch of a tree and surprised the mother deer making the toilet of her
+fawn, saw the beaver busied with his home of mud and wattles, heard the
+coyote scream across the prairie edge. Easily the thought flowed, and
+the stuff that Grey handed in was a live story that breathed. In that
+brave heart the joy of the creator stirred, and with it that feeling
+which makes all endeavour worth while--the thought that somebody cares.
+A close observer at this stage of the game may read, too, on the face of
+Grey the kindly look that comes when we forget ourselves long enough to
+take the trouble to reach out for another man's viewpoint.
+
+Carlton's short stories, submitted to a publisher, were pronounced
+good, were accepted, and brought a cash return. They struck a new note
+among the squabblings of the nature-fakers. Favourable comment came from
+those who read them, who, reading, knew naught of their three authors.
+Before this Carlton had never written a line for publication; but he had
+been a true observer. He had felt, and was able to project himself into
+the minds of those living things he had seen and hunted.
+
+I leave the hospital cot with a strange lump forming in my throat,
+although every one around me, and the patient most of all, is gay and
+blithe. I say to Carlton, "I wish I could take your knowledge and your
+eyes with me into the North, there is so much I will miss because of my
+lack of knowledge." With Grey's kindly interpretation I get my answer,
+"You must take your own mind, your own eyes; you must see for yourself."
+
+During the last day in Winnipeg, while the Kid (like faithful
+Ariovistus) is looking after the impedimenta, I snatch half an hour to
+look in at the Royal Alexandra upon the reception which the Women's
+Canadian Club is tendering to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Rain-bespattered,
+short-skirted, and anchored with disreputable rubbers gluey with
+Winnipeg mud, I sit on the fringe of things, fairly intoxicated with the
+idea that we are off and this North trip no dream. Mrs. Sanford Evans
+presides with her usual _savoir faire_ and ushers in the guest of the
+day, beautifully-gowned and gracious.
+
+Like a bolt from the blue came the summons from the president, and I,
+all muddy, am called to the seats of the mighty. I have never seen a
+more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg
+Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face
+them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of
+mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my
+unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success
+of my journey. Mrs. Humphry Ward calls attention to the lack of
+playgrounds in England. She wants to bring more fresh air and space to
+the crowded people of the Old World. I submit that my wish is the
+mathematical converse to hers. My great desire is to call attention to
+the great unoccupied lands of Canada, to induce people from the crowded
+centres of the Old World to use the fresh air of the New.
+
+[Illustration: The Canadian Women's Press Club]
+
+To those who bid us good-bye at the train, the Kid and I yell
+exultantly, "All aboard for the Arctic Ocean and way ports!"
+
+A group of Galicians sitting by the curb, two mothers and seven small
+children, one a baby at the breast, make the last picture we see as the
+train pulls out. It was the end of their first day in Winnipeg. The
+fathers of the flock evidently were seeking work and had left their
+families gazing through the portals of the strange new land. In the
+half-sad, altogether-brave lines on the young mothers' faces and their
+tender looks bent on the little ones we read the motive responsible for
+all migrations--"Better conditions for the babies." In the little
+fellows of seven or eight with their ill-fitting clothes and their
+dogged looks of determination one sees the makers of empire. Before a
+decade is past they will be active wheat-growers in their own right,
+making two grains grow where one grew before and so "deserving better of
+mankind than the whole race of politicians put together." I think it was
+President Garfield who said, "I always feel more respect for a boy than
+for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that
+ragged jacket?" It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A
+young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg
+students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic
+world--the Rhodes scholarship.
+
+We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers
+from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral,
+has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of
+forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures
+its every thought in bushels and bullion.
+
+The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg
+just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of
+David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here
+and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted
+some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony
+performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding.
+One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, "I wudna
+have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a
+properly-ordained meenister." And he was coming. Even now he was
+floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having
+reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks
+before.
+
+When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton
+phrase, "they do not teem with conversational grace." Straight from
+Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the
+Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago.
+In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and
+in his simplicity thought himself "the first that ever burst into that
+silent sea." When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled
+sound, he was in doubt how to place it.
+
+"Is it the clang of wild-geese?
+  Is it the Indian's yell,
+That lends to the voice of the North-wind
+  The tones of a far-off bell?"
+
+The Indian boatmen _said_ nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's
+parrot.
+
+"The voyageur smiles as he listens
+  To the sound that grows apace;
+Well he knows the vesper ringing
+  Of the bells of St. Boniface."
+
+Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in
+the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness
+
+"The bells of the Roman Mission,
+  That call from their turrets twain
+To the boatmen on the river,
+  To the hunter on the plain."
+
+That friend was a fellow-townsman of the "Quaker Poet." The story was
+told to Whittier and inspired the lines of _The Red River Voyageur_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+
+"To the far-flung fenceless prairie
+  Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,
+To our neighbor's barn in the offing
+  And the line of the new-cut rail;
+To the plough in her league-long furrow."
+
+--_Rudyard Kipling_.
+
+Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at
+Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it
+will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.
+
+From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and
+two railway lines are open to us,--the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
+Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the
+latter.
+
+Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand
+miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are
+pouring. "The sleeping nation beyond," is what General Sherman in a
+moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We
+are on the heels of the greatest economic trek this world has ever seen.
+The historian of to-morrow will rank it with the world migrations.
+
+The flourishing centres of Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its
+Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police,
+Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw
+towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand
+of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as
+these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp
+conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement
+warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it
+takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat
+elevator, red against the setting sun.
+
+The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo
+bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a
+sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude
+coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is
+the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the
+crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and
+fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to
+the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the
+transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.
+
+Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy,
+buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a
+busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many
+railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R.
+irrigation works, the largest on this continent. The area included in
+the irrigation block is twice as big as the Island of Porto Rico and
+one-eighth the size of England and Wales; and the ultimate expenditure
+on the undertaking will reach the five million mark.
+
+Calgary is the centre of a country literally flowing with milk and honey
+and fat things. The oil-fields of Pincher Creek, with their rich promise
+of becoming a second Pennsylvania, are contiguous to the city. The
+winter wheat grown in Southern Alberta was awarded first prize and gold
+medal at the World's Fair in Oregon in 1905. The hackney carriage horses
+which took first prize at the last Montreal and New York horse-fairs
+were foaled and raised near Calgary. If we were to continue going due
+west from this point, all the scenic glories of the Rocky Mountains
+would be ours--seventy Switzerlands in one. But that journey must stand
+over for another day, with the journey to Prince Rupert, the ocean
+terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific.
+
+Turning sharply to the north, we travel two hundred miles, and draw into
+where Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, sits smiling on the banks of her
+silver Saskatchewan. As he sees us digging out our tents and dunnage,
+the porter asks, "Then yer not comin' back?" "No." "You _are_ goin' to
+the North Pole, then, the place you wuz hollerin' fer!"
+
+With the exception of Victoria, Edmonton has the most charming location
+of all cities of Western Canada. High Hope stalks her streets. There is
+a spirit of initiative and assuredness in this virile town, a culture
+and thoughtfulness in her people, expectancy in the very air. It is the
+city of contrasts; the ox-cart dodges the automobile; in the track of
+French heel treads the moccasin; the silk hat salutes the Stetson.
+
+Edmonton is the end of steel. Three lines converge here: the Canadian
+Northern, the Canadian Pacific, and the Grand Trunk Pacific. The
+Canadian Northern arrived first, coming in four years ago. Now that
+Edmonton has arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that
+there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis,
+anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in
+commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before
+Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian
+Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals
+and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that
+sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into
+Edmonton, as little was known of the valley of the Saskatchewan as is
+known now of the valley of the Peace. Without exception, Canadian men of
+letters go to other countries for recognition, but not so all our men of
+deeds. Mackenzie and Mann, "the Brains of a Trans-Continental," stayed
+in Canada and put their genius to work here. The Canadian Northern is
+the product of Canadian minds and Canadian money.
+
+[Illustration: A Section of Edmonton]
+
+We walk Edmonton streets for ten days and see neither an old man nor an
+old woman. The government and the business interests are in the hands of
+young people who have adopted modern methods of doing things; single tax
+is the basis of taxation; the city owns its public utilities, including
+an interurban street railroad, electric lighting plant, water-works, and
+the automatic telephone. Mr. C.W. Cross, the Attorney-General of
+Alberta, is the youngest man in Canada to hold that high office. During
+the first session of the first legislature of this baby province less
+than three years ago, an enabling act was passed for a university.
+Nowhere else have I been sensible of such a feeling of united
+public-spiritedness as obtains here.
+
+Down in the river valley are hundreds of people living under canvas, not
+because they are poor but because building contractors cannot keep pace
+with the demand for homes. As we pass these tents, we are rude enough to
+look in. Most of them are furnished with telephones and the city water;
+here a bride bends over a chafing dish; another glance discloses an
+oil-painting that was once shown in the Royal Academy. From the next
+tent float the strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and, as we stop
+to listen, a gentleman and his wife step out. An auto picks them up and
+off they whirl to Jasper Avenue. The Lord o' the Tents of Shem
+disappears into his bank and Milady drives on to the Government house to
+read before the Literary Club a paper on Browning's _Saul_. To the
+tenderfoot from the South it is all delightfully disconcerting--oxen and
+autos and Browning on the Saskatchewan!
+
+The Sunday before we leave Edmonton I find another set of tents, put up
+by the Immigration Department, where East-End Londoners are housed
+pending their going out upon the land. In the first call I make I
+unearth a baby who rejoices in the name of Hester Beatrice Cran.
+"H.B.C.," I remark, "aren't you rather infringing on a right, taking
+that trade-mark?" Quick came the retort, "Ho! If she gets as good a 'old
+on the land as the 'Udson's Bay Company 'as, she'll do!"
+
+Another lady in the next tent proudly marshalled her olive branches.
+"D'isy and the baiby were born in the Heast Hend. They're Henglish;
+please God they'll make good Canaidians. They're tellin' me, miss,
+there'll be five 'undred more of us on the 'igh seas comin' out to
+Hedmonton from the Heast Hend, all poor people like ourselves. I often
+wonder w'y they don't bring out a few dukes to give the country a touch
+of 'igh life--it's very plain 'ere."
+
+By the first day of June we have our kit complete and are ready to
+leave. We have tried to cut everything down to the last ounce, but still
+the stuff makes a rather formidable array. What have we? Tent,
+tent-poles, typewriter, two cameras, two small steamer-trunks, bedding
+(a thin mattress with waterproof bottom and waterproof extension-flaps
+and within this our two blankets), a flour-bag or "Hudson's Bay
+suit-case" (containing tent-pegs, hatchet, and tin wash-basin), two
+raincoats, a tiny bag with brush and comb and soap--and last, but yet
+first, the kodak films wrapped in oilcloth and packed in biscuit-tins.
+The bits of impedimenta look unfamiliar as we take our first inventory,
+but we are to come to know them soon by their feel in the dark, to
+estimate to an ounce the weight of each on many a lonely portage.
+
+[Illustration: The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan]
+
+At seven in the morning the stage pulls up for us, and it rains--no
+gentle sizzle-sozzle, but a sod-soaker, yea a gully-washer! The
+accusing newness of those raincoats is to come off at once. Expansive
+Kennedy looks askance at the tenderfoots who climb over his wheel. His
+Majesty's Royal Mail Stage sifts through the town picking up the other
+victims. We are two big stage-loads, our baggage marked for every point
+between Edmonton and the Arctic Ocean. Every passenger but ourselves
+looks forward to indefinite periods of expatriation in the silent
+places. We alone are going for fun. Our one care is to keep those
+precious cameras dry. This is the beginning of a camera nightmare which
+lasts six months until we again reach Chicago.
+
+And the fellow-passengers? Law is represented, and medicine, and the
+all-powerful H.B. Co. With us is Mr. Angus Brabant going in on his
+initial official trip in charge of H.B. interests in the whole Mackenzie
+River District, and with him two cadets of The Company. On the seat
+behind us sit a Frenchman reading a French novel, a man from Dakota, and
+a third passenger complaining of a camera "which cost fifty pounds
+sterling" that somehow has fallen by the way. Sergeant Anderson,
+R.N.W.M.P., with his wife and two babies are in the other stage.
+
+Kennedy, the driver, is a character. Driving in and out and covering on
+this one trail twelve thousand miles every year, he is fairly soaked
+with stories of the North and Northmen. The other stage is driven by
+Kennedy's son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was
+just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man. Dwarfed in mind
+and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp.
+
+The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his
+camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and
+run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find
+the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat
+with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic
+Circle.
+
+[Illustration: Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta]
+
+The girlish figure of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in
+gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the
+little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward
+look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of "seven
+times nine," "the mountains of Asia," "the Tudor sovereigns with dates
+of accession," and other things appertaining to "that imperial palace
+whence I came." All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty
+and food scarce, a backward thought to this teacher making muddy tracks
+toward the well of English undefiled, brings pleased content.
+
+[Illustration: A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge]
+
+At noon it clears, and as we "make tea" at Sturgeon Creek (the Namao
+Sepee of the Indians), the first of the "stopping-places" or
+Waldorf-Astorias of the wilderness, the Doctor has his will and gathers
+violets, moccasin flowers, and the purple _dodecatheon_. As we pass Lily
+Lake he remarks, "This reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk's place at
+Arundel; it is just like this." South Dakoty returns, "I don't know
+him."
+
+Here and there we pass clusters of Galician huts. Instead of following
+the line of least resistance in the fertile plains to the south, these
+people, the Mark Tapleys of the prairies, choose cheap land up here for
+the pleasure of conquering it and "coming out strong." They are a frugal
+people, with a fondness for work, a wholesome horror of debt, and the
+religious instinct strongly insistent. Off on a hillside near each
+little settlement a naked cross extends its arms. These are their
+open-air churches, and in all weathers, men, women, and children gather
+at the foot of the cross to worship the God of their fathers. By and by,
+when the soil has yielded to their labours, with their own hands will
+they build a church and without debt it will be dedicated. The idea of
+raising an imposing church and presenting God with the mortgage does not
+appeal to the Galician.
+
+The clean sheets at "Eggie's," the second stopping-place, are
+attractive, and we sleep the sleep of the just. We acknowledge with
+inward shame that two years of city life have given us the soft muscles
+of the chee-chaco; we'll have to harden up a bit if we are to reach that
+far-away ocean.
+
+Next day, midway between Edmonton and Athabasca Landing, we water our
+horses at the Tautinau. We are standing at the Height of Land, the
+watershed between the Saskatchewan and the Athabasca. This little ridge
+where the harebells grow divides the drops of rain of the noon-day
+shower. Some of these drops, by way of the Saskatchewan, Lake Winnipeg,
+and Hudson Bay, will reach the Atlantic. Others, falling into the
+Athabasca, will form part of that yellow-tinged flood which, by way of
+Great Slave Lake and the mighty Mackenzie, carries its tribute to the
+Frozen Ocean. These last are the drops we follow.
+
+To save the horses we walk the hills, and I try to match giant steps
+with Sergeant Anderson. Kennedy, Junior, joins us and has a knotty point
+to settle regarding "the gentleman wot murdered the man." It is hard to
+induce a Mounted Policeman to talk. However, to be striding Athabasca
+Trail with the hero of the Hayward-King murder-trial is too good an
+opportunity to lose, and, reluctantly rendered, bit by bit the story
+comes out.
+
+Most people looking at a map of Northwest Canada would think it a safe
+wilderness for a live man or a dead man to disappear in with no
+questions asked. In reality, it is about the worst place in America in
+which to commit a crime and hope to go unpunished.
+
+In September, 1904, the Indians reported to the Mounted Police that they
+had seen two white men in the early summer, and that afterwards one man
+walked alone, and was now at Lesser Slave. An observant Cree boy added,
+"The dog won't follow that other white fellow any more." Sergeant
+Anderson, going to their last camp, turned over the ashes and found
+three hard lumps of flesh and a small piece of skull bone. Convinced
+that murder had been done, he arrested the suspected man and sent him to
+Fort Saskatchewan for trial. No one knew the identity of either the dead
+man or the living. In front of the old camp-fire was a little slough or
+lake, and this seemed a promising place to look for evidence. Sergeant
+Anderson hired Indian women to wade in the ooze, feeling with their toes
+for any hard substance. In this way were secured a sovereign-case and a
+stick-pin of unusual make. The lake was systematically drained and
+yielded a shoe with a broken-eyed needle sticking in it. Sifting the
+ashes of the camp-fire and examining them with a microscope, Anderson
+discovered the eye of the broken needle and thus established a
+connection between the camp with its burnt flesh and the exhibits from
+the lake. The maker of the stick-pin in London, England, was cabled to
+by the Canadian Government, and a Mr. Hayward summoned to come from
+there to identify the trinkets of his murdered brother. A cheque drawn
+by the dead Hayward in favour of King came to the surface in a British
+Columbia bank. Link by link the chain of evidence grew.
+
+It took eleven months for Sergeant Anderson to get his case in shape.
+Then he convoyed forty Indian witnesses two hundred and fifty miles from
+Lesser Slave to Edmonton to tell what they knew about the crime
+committed in the silent places. The evidence was placed before the jury,
+and the Indians returned to their homes. A legal technicality cropped up
+and the trial had to be repeated. Once more the forty Indians travelled
+from Lesser Slave to repeat their story. The result was that Charles
+King of Utah was found guilty of the murder of Edward Hayward and paid
+the death penalty.
+
+This trial cost the Canadian Government over $30,000,--all to avenge the
+death of one of the wandering units to be found in every corner of the
+frontier, one unknown prospector. Was it worth while? Did it pay? Yes,
+it paid. It is by such object-lessons that to Indian and white alike is
+forced home the truth that God's law, "Thou shalt not kill," is also the
+law of Britain and of Canada.
+
+We are still on foot, when a cry from the Kid hurries us to the
+hilltop. Reaching the crest, we catch our breaths. Down below lies the
+little village of "The Landing." That sparkling flood beyond proves the
+Athabasca to be a live, northward-trending river, a river capable of
+carrying us with it, and no mere wiggly line on a map.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ATHABASCA LANDING
+
+
+"I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;
+Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods;
+I wait for the men who will win me--and I will not be won in a day;
+And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,
+But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child."
+
+--_Robert Service_
+
+[Illustration: Athabasca Landing]
+
+Athabasca Landing, a funnel through which percolates the whole trade
+between the wheat-belt and the Arctic, is the true gateway of the North.
+Seeing our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union
+Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its
+edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an
+incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading
+itself with prodigality over the swift river.
+
+The Athabasca, after dipping to the south, here takes a sudden northward
+bend. Its source is in the crest of the continent far back in the
+Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river
+being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great
+tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to
+embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five
+miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps
+an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.
+
+We are in latitude 55 deg. North, and between us and the Arctic lies an
+unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and
+the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging
+like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south
+of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has
+stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a
+country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown
+and dubbed "barren" because unknown, will support its teeming millions.
+Chimerical? Why so?
+
+Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of
+55 deg. westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the
+Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map
+of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to
+follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year
+1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain,
+grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a
+half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one
+and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining
+in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are
+about to enter does not enjoy.
+
+Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by
+all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of
+moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing
+in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the
+little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large
+establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman
+Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted
+Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a
+blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of
+Cree-Scots half-breeds.
+
+Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a
+discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all
+sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the
+place,--tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike
+dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may
+be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the
+silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the
+language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, "What means a
+camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a
+needle's eye." The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and
+coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its
+coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that
+stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed
+by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only "for medicinal
+purposes." By an easy transferring of epithets, the term "permit" has
+come to signify the revivifying juice itself.
+
+[Illustration: Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca]
+
+One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the
+North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a
+rule they are not. There is no discussion of American banks and equally
+no mention of the wheat crop. The one conjecture round the bar and in
+the home is, "When will the rabbits run this year?" The rabbits in the
+North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark
+aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him.
+Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year
+means a scarcity of all kinds of fur. As surely as wheat stands for
+bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of
+the North.
+
+It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company
+making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in
+supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in
+barter during the previous winter. The big open scows, or
+"sturgeon-heads," which are to form our convoy have been built, the
+freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen
+drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the
+word which is the keynote of the Cree character,--"Kee-am," freely
+translated, "Never mind," "Don't get excited," "There's plenty of time,"
+"It's all right," "It will all come out in the wash."
+
+When the present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office
+he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a
+time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was
+shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing,
+old Duncan Tremble, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked
+admiringly at the printed slip and said, "Aye, aye; the Commissioner he
+makes laws, but the river he boss." It is only when ice is out and
+current serves that the brigade moves forward. Old Duncan knows seven
+languages,--English, French, Cree, Chipewyan, Beaver, Chinook,
+Montagnais,--he speaks seven languages, thinks in Cree, and
+prevaricates in them all.
+
+[Illustration: The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians]
+
+At the foot of the hill we visit the English parsonage, with its
+old-time sun-dial at the garden-gate. Within, we find what must surely
+be the farthest north printing-press. Here two devoted women have spent
+years of their lives printing in Cree on a hand-press syllabic hymns and
+portions of the Gospel for the enlightenment of the Indians. We wander
+into the school where a young teacher is explaining to his uneasy
+disciples the intricacies of Present Worth and Compound Interest. Idly
+we wonder to what use these bare-footed half-Cree urchins will put their
+exact banking knowledge.
+
+Everywhere around us the wild flowers are a great joy; we hail with the
+gladness of released children the posies that sweetened childhood
+meadows--the dwarf cornel (Cornel Canadensis), dandelions, strawberry
+blossoms, wild roses, the pale wood-violet on its long stem, and amid
+these familiars the saskatoon or service-berry bushes, with blueberry
+vines, and viburnums of many kinds. On the street the natty uniforms of
+the Mounted Police are in evidence, and baseball has penetrated as far
+north as this. In the post office we read,
+
+"It is decided to hold sports on the first day of July. The Committee
+promises a splendid programme,--horse-races, foot-races, football match,
+baseball game. There will also be prizes for the best piece of Indian
+fancy-work. Dancing will be in full swing in the evening. All welcome."
+
+Opposite the hotel is a reading-room built by a Methodist parson who
+also made the furniture with his own hands; magazines, books,
+writing-material, games are available to all. This practical work of one
+man who accepted the responsibility of being his brother's keeper
+appealed to us. In a store near the hotel we see a Cree boatman
+purchasing a farewell present for his sweetheart. As he turns over the
+fancy articles, we have bad form enough to observe his choice. He
+selects a fine-tooth comb, for which he pays fifty cents, or as he calls
+it, "two skins," and asks, as he tucks it into his jerkin, if he can
+change it "if she doesn't like it."
+
+In the evening it rains, and the room assigned us becomes a living
+illustration of the new word we have just learned,--"muskeg," a swamp.
+Putting the precious cameras on top of the bureau, we let the rest of
+the things swim at their pleasure. Starting with the rest of the
+unattached community of Athabasca Landing to go down to the pool-room,
+we catch sight of Dr. Sussex and the Cree priest, who have found a
+little oasis of their own around a big stove in the upper hall and, with
+chairs tilted back, are enjoying some portable hospitality from below.
+The doctor arises to escort us through the flood, and when I rally him
+about his liquid refreshment, he says, "Oh, I had lemonade."
+
+"I see. And the priest?"
+
+"He had--what he liked."
+
+If local colour and local smell is what we have come north for, we find
+it here. Mr. Brabant comes up with "I wonder if that bunch of nuns is
+going to get here in time to take scows with us," and we pass into the
+billiard-room and watch the game. The players gliding round in moccasins
+are all half-breeds. The exclamations are for the most part in Cree or
+bad French, and as I crowd in looking for some local terms all that I
+hear intelligible is, "That is damn close, I think me."
+
+For thirty-six hours on end it rains. That roof was full of surprises;
+you never knew where it would spring a fresh leak. One room is a little
+better than the rest, and we all gather there and make the best of
+it,--smoking, writing, telling yarns. A bumping noise from across the
+hall and the cry of a child startles us. It proves to be Sergeant
+Anderson's baby whose cradle has started afloat, and there is a general
+rush to rescue Moses from his bulrushes. Everybody is in good humour.
+
+As we calm the baby, South Dakota says "It reminds me of the Englishman
+and his musical bath." We demand the story. "Well, a rich American took
+a great liking to an Englishman he had been travelling with, and sent
+him for a birthday present a Yankee invention to set up in his
+country-house--a musical bath. As you turned on the spigot, the thing
+played a tune while you were washing, and sort of relieved the tee-deum.
+The two gents met next Christmas in New York, and the Yankee he sez,
+'And how did you like the bath?' 'Oh, thank you very much, it was kind
+of you indeed, but I found it a little irksome standing all the time,
+you know.' 'Standing, what the blazes do you mean?' asked the Yankee.
+'Well,' says the Britisher, 'the tune you furnished, you know, with the
+bawth, was _God Save the King_, and as soon as it began, you know, I had
+to stand, and it's rather tiresome taking your bawth standing, you
+know."
+
+Sergeant Joyce tells how at a Mounted Police dinner at Fort Saskatchewan
+a parson, who was a guest, in proposing a toast, facetiously advised his
+entertainers to have nothing to do with either a doctor or a lawyer. It
+was interesting to watch the parson's face when there arose to reply a
+lawyer and a doctor, each a constable in the rank and file.
+
+Mrs. Leslie Wood of Athabasca Landing adds her quota to the Tales of a
+Wayside Inn. We could have listened to her for a week and regretted
+neither the rain nor the waiting scows. As a girl she remembers being
+shocked at seeing men hold tin cups to the throats of newly-slaughtered
+buffalo, drinking with gusto the warm blood.
+
+"What are the two greatest things on earth?" Mrs. Wood, as a young girl,
+asked the dusky disciples of her Sunday School class. "The Queen and The
+Company," was the ready response. "And of these, which is the greater?"
+Little Marten-Tail rubbed one moccasin over the other, and the answer
+came thoughtfully in Cree, "The Company. The Queen sometimes dies, but
+The Company never dies."
+
+"The Company," of which the little girl spoke, "The Governor and Company
+of Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay," deriving its charter in 1670
+from the Second Charles of England, is the oldest chartered concern in
+the world, with a present-day sphere of influence as large as Great
+Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined. From lone Labrador to the
+Pacific littoral and from Winnipeg to the Frozen Ocean are scattered the
+two hundred and fifty fur-trading forts of this concern in charge of its
+two thousand strong silent servants. Last year it paid to its
+stockholders a profit of forty-five per cent on the invested capital,
+and for two hundred and thirty-nine consecutive years it has been
+declaring dividends. The motto of the Company, _Pro Pelle Cutein_, is
+prominently displayed at Athabasca Landing. Literally translated, the
+phrase means "Skin for skin"; but why the promoters should have chosen
+as war-cry the words which Satan used when fighting with the Lord for
+the soul of Job, is not so apparent.
+
+As we watch the trading goods being carried in the rain from warehouse
+to scows, we think how, weaving its cross-Atlantic way through the
+centuries and joining the periwigged days of the Stuarts to this day,
+the one man-made thing that has persisted is this commerce-shuttle of
+the H.B. Co.
+
+In the days when The Company had its birth, the blind Milton was
+dictating his message and the liberated Bunyan preached the spoken word,
+the iniquitous Cabal Ministry was forming in England, and Panama was
+sacked by Morgan the buccaneer. New York merchants of Manhattan met
+every Friday at noon on the bridge over the Broad Street Canal for
+barter, South Carolina was settled on the Ashley River, Virginia enacted
+that "all servants not being Christians, imported into this country by
+shipping shall be slaves," and her Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was
+inspired to exclaim piously, "I hope we shall have neither free schools
+nor printing these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience
+and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. God
+keep us from both!" It was not until two years later that Addison was
+born, and that Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi, even as
+we now are essaying the Athabasca.
+
+Unique in commercial annals is the Royal Charter which gave, with power
+of life and death, to the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, less than
+twenty in number, "forever hereafter" possession and jurisdiction over a
+country as large as Europe. Liberty here for utter despotism, the widest
+of excesses. We marvel that from the first Prince Rupert of the Rhine to
+the latest Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Governors of the
+Ancient Company have, with Duncan-like demeanour, borne themselves so
+meek in their great office.
+
+It has been fashionable to paint the H.B. Co. as an agrarian oligarchy.
+Organized for the purpose of "making fur" before the time of the Habeas
+Corpus, two decades ahead of the Bank of England, sixty-two years before
+Benjamin Franklin began publishing "Poor Richard's Almanac," and a
+century in advance of Watt's steam-engine, it is true that The Company,
+throughout the years, devoted itself to peltries and not to platting
+town sites. This was its business. From the beginning it has
+consistently kept faith with the Indians; the word of The Company has,
+for reward or for punishment, ever been worth its full face value. It
+was not an H.B. Scot who exclaimed feelingly, "Honesty _is_ the best
+policy, I've tried baith."
+
+The feeling of devotion to The Company is as strong today as it ever
+was. When the present Commissioner took office he penetrated the North
+on a tour of inspection. At Athabasca Landing, since it was not known
+just when the Head would arrive, the local official charged all his
+clerks and minions to be ready at the sound of a whistle to salute and
+fall into line for inspection. The call to arms came on Sunday morning
+during divine service. Every attache of The Company with one exception
+obeyed the signal. Young Tom Helly, the paid organist, stuck to his
+post; and next day he was called on the carpet. "It was a special
+service; I was in the middle of the anthem, sir, and didn't like to
+leave the House of God." "Couldn't you show some respect?" roared the
+local officer. Man was near in Athabasca Landing and God far away. Down
+in the big office at Winnipeg is a Doomsday Book where the life-record
+of every servant of The Company is kept, for no man who has ever served
+The Company is lost sight of. When there is a good fur-winter, every
+employe of The Company is handed an envelope which contains a
+bonus-cheque,--ten per cent of his yearly salary.
+
+[Illustration: C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.]
+
+The Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company and the head of one of
+Canada's big department stores were dining together at a Toronto Club.
+"After six o'clock I don't want to see or hear of an employe--he doesn't
+exist for me until eight o'clock next morning," said the head of the
+department store. "Well, I'm more curious than you," smiled the
+Commissioner of the H.B. Co., "I want to be reasonably assured of what
+every man-Jack of my people is doing all the time. I want to know what
+he reads, and if he treats his wife well, and how his last baby is
+getting along--you see, he's a working-partner of mine."
+
+There came out of Northern British Columbia last year the Indian wife
+and half-breed daughters of an H.B. Co. Factor. They were bound for
+Montreal and it was their first trip "outside." The Commissioner at
+Winnipeg contradicts the old saw, and surely has "a soul above a
+beaver-skin"; like Mulvaney, too, he "has bowels." Quickly went forward
+a letter to a tactful woman in the border-town through which the
+visiting ladies must pass--"Meet them, and see that they get the proper
+things to wear in society circles in Montreal. I don't want them to feel
+ill at ease when they get there." Stories like these give us glimpses of
+the kind of paternalism exercised by the Ancient Company, the one trust
+that has never ground the faces of the poor, and in whose people to-day
+appears the "constant service of the Old World."
+
+The big books of The Company a year or two ago in unmistakable
+round-hand declared that one Running Rabbit, lawful widow of Blueskin,
+was entitled to draw from the coffers clear-side bacon and a modicum of
+flour. But one quarterly paysheet, returned to Winnipeg from Fort
+Churchill, showed that Running Rabbit in addition to her food allowance
+had been handed out forty cents' worth of cotton. Stern enquiry, backed
+by red-tape and The Company's seal as big as a saucer, was sent up to
+the Churchill Factor. Why had the allowance of Mrs. Blueskin (nee
+Running Rabbit) been exceeded? By "return mail" nine months later the
+Factor reported,
+
+"The widow's gone,
+  Her tent's forsaken,
+No more she comes
+  For flour and bacon.
+N.B. The cotton was used for her shroud."
+
+The Ancient Company was penny-wise, but in spite of the copybook line,
+not pound-foolish, as its dividend paysheets conclusively prove.
+
+There is no desire to show forth these silent ones of the North as
+infallible men and immaculate. They make many mistakes; they were and
+are delightfully human, and we couldn't picture one of them with a
+saintly aureole. But in the past, as in the present, they were large
+men; they honoured their word, and you couldn't buy them. Men of action,
+whether inside fort walls, bartering in the tepee of the Indian, or off
+on silent trails alone,--it has been given to each of them to live life
+at firsthand. In every undertaking the determining factor of success is
+men, and not money or monopoly. And because the North still breeds men
+of the H.B. type, the eye of The Great Company is not dimmed, its force
+not abated.
+
+We spoke with no fewer than three men at The Landing who came into the
+North in the year of the Klondike rush, that is, just ten years ago.
+Into the human warp and woof of the Great Lone Land of Northern Canada
+the Klondike gold-rush intruded a new strand. The news of the strike on
+Yukon fields flashed round the world on wires invisible and visible,
+passed by word of mouth from chum to chum, and by moccasin telegraph was
+carried to remotest corners of the continent. Gold-fever is a disease
+without diagnosis or doctor--infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if
+its germ once stirs in a man's blood, till the day of his death he is
+not immune from an attack. The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent
+swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous
+horde,--gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet
+firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two
+continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.
+
+Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from 'Frisco, Seattle, and
+Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have
+some records. But of that vast army who from the east and from the south
+travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has
+ever been made. Singly they went, in groups, and by partnerships of two
+and three. There was no route marked out by which they were to reach the
+glittering streams of which they dreamed; the general direction of north
+and west was all that guided them. Athabasca Landing was the portal
+through which they passed, and by every northward stream they
+travelled,--down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca
+to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore. By
+raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways
+who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to
+you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police
+Station where Sergeant Anderson rescued a dozen tenderfoots from
+drowning.
+
+To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the
+whites was a revelation. Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had
+been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed
+Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the
+outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that
+only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern
+Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first
+lessons from the Klondike miners.
+
+And what of the men who followed the gleam? Some reached Dawson. These
+were few. Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still. In the old books
+of the H.B. Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is "a band of Indians
+_cast up_ from the east," "the Express from the North _cast up_ at a
+late hour last night." On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from
+that point, hundreds of gold-miners are "cast up" on every interior
+shore. Acting as attaches to Hudson's Bay posts, engaging as free
+traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic
+seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at
+least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us. Round
+the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still
+prays for her absent son. A silence like this once entered upon is hard
+to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about him the
+garment of the recluse. Outcropping from the strata in striking
+individuality, they belong to a different race to the plodding people of
+the Hudson's Bay posts, and are interesting men wherever you meet them.
+Keen of vision, slow of speech, and with that dreamy look which only
+those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet
+places,--they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and
+dropped here and there over the white map of the North.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
+
+
+"Set me in the urge and tide-drift
+Of the streaming hosts a-wing!
+Breast of scarlet, throat of yellow,
+Raucous challenge, wooings mellow--
+Every migrant is my fellow,
+Making northward with the Spring."
+
+--_Bliss Carman_.
+
+If you have to do with Indian or half-breed boatmen in the North you
+plan to begin your journey in the evening, even though you hope to run
+only a few miles before nightfall. This ensures a good start next
+morning, whereas it would be humanly impossible to tear men away from
+the flesh-pots (beer pots) of Athabasca Landing early in any day. It
+took these chaps all the afternoon to say good-bye, for each one in the
+village had to be shaken hands with, every dog apostrophized by name.
+
+The Athabasca Transport of which we form joyous part makes a formidable
+flotilla: seven specially-built scows or "sturgeon-heads." Each runs
+forty to fifty feet with a twelve-foot beam and carries ten tons. The
+oars are twenty feet long. It takes a strong man to handle the
+forty-foot steering-sweep which is mounted with an iron pivot on the
+stern.
+
+Our particular shallop is no different from the others, except that
+there is a slightly raised platform in the stern-sheets, evidently a
+dedication to the new Northern Manager of the H.B. Co. We share the
+pleasant company of a fourth passenger, Mrs. Harding, on her way home to
+Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. The second sturgeon-head carries
+seven members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, jolly laughing
+chaps, for are not they, too, like us, off duty? Inspector Pelletier and
+three men are to go with our Fur Transport as far as Resolution and then
+diverge to the east, essaying a cross-continent cut from there to salt
+water on Hudson Bay. For this purpose they ship two splendidly made
+Peterborough canoes. The other three members of the force are young
+chaps assigned to Smith's Landing on the Slave River, sent there to
+protect the wood bison of that region, the world's last wild buffalo.
+The third craft we observe with due respect as "the cook boat." The
+remaining four scows carry cargo only,--the trade term being "pieces,"
+each piece from eighty to a hundred pounds, a convenient weight for
+carrying on the portages.
+
+[Illustration: A "Sturgeon-head" at Athabasca]
+
+[Illustration: "Farewell, Nistow!"]
+
+June 6th at a quarter of seven saw the whole populace of Athabasca
+Landing on the river bank--dogs, babies, the officials of the Hudson's
+Bay, parson, priest, police, and even the barkeep,--and with the yelping
+of dogs and "Farewell, Nistow!" we are off. We are embarked on a
+2500-mile journey, the longest water route on the continent, down which
+floats each year the food, clothing, and frugal supplies of a country as
+big as Europe.
+
+The river is running five miles an hour and there is no need of the
+oars. The steersman is our admiration, as with that clumsy stern-sweep
+he dodges rocks, runs riffles, and makes bends. The scow is made of
+green wood, and its resilience stands it in good stead as, like a snake,
+it writhes through tight channels or over ugly bits of water. Everybody
+is in good humour; we are dreamers dreaming greatly. Why should we not
+be happy? Mrs. Harding is homeward-bound, Mr. Brabant on a new rung of
+the fur ladder of preferment, Inspector Pelletier and his associates
+starting on a quest of their own seeking. Sitting low among the "pieces"
+of the police boat, with only his head visible in the sunset glow, Dr.
+Sussex builds air-castles of that eleemosynary hospital of his on the
+Arctic Circle. The cook is whistling from the cook-boat. Five years ago
+he graduated from a business college, but the preparation of bannock and
+sow-belly appeals to the blood more insistently than trial balances and
+the petty cash book. As for ourselves, the Kid's smile is almost audible
+as she runs a loving hand over the oilskin cover of the camera. A
+favourite expression of mine in the latitudes below when the world
+smiled was, "Oh, I'm glad I'm alive and white!" On this exclamation I
+start now, but stop at the word "white." North of Athabasca Landing
+white gives place to a tint more tawny.
+
+A hundred yards out, the Policemen are boyish enough to launch those
+shiny Peterboroughs just to try them, and in and out among the big
+sturgeon-heads, debonair dolphins, they dart. Then comes the rain, and
+one by one the clumsy boats turn toward shore. There are some things
+that even the enquiring mind cannot run to ground, things that just
+happen out of the blue. For fifteen successive springs I have tried to
+discover the first boy who brought marbles to school when marble-season
+came in, and I have never yet been able to put my finger on that elusive
+history-maker. So on this voyage, the fleet is started and stopped,
+landings are made, camping-places decided upon, and no ear can detect
+the sound of command.
+
+The scows tie up, and without undressing we sleep on board, pulling a
+tarpaulin over us and letting the rain rain. At 5:30 next morning we
+hear the familiar "Nistow! Nistow!" of the awakened camp. This word
+literally means "brother-in-law," but it is the vocative used by the
+Cree in speaking to anybody he feels kindly toward. The cook makes a
+double entry with bacon and bannock, and there is exulting joy in our
+soul. Who would napkins bear, or finger-bowls? We had put them far
+behind, with the fardels.
+
+It is the season of lengthening days and fading nights. At seven o'clock
+we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first
+one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being
+shouted from boat to boat. Then, in one voice from three boats,
+"Mooswa!" and far beyond white man's vision the boatmen sight a moose.
+There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious
+Peterboroughs which were to make history on the map, and in the delay
+the moose wandered into pleasant pastures. The boatmen were very much
+disgruntled, as the moose is treasure-trove, the chief fresh meat that
+his world offers the Indian. From here to the Arctic are no domestic
+animals, the taste of beef or mutton or pork or chicken is unknown,
+bread gives place to bannock (with its consequent indigestion
+"bannockburn"), and coffee is a beverage discredited. Tobacco to smoke,
+strong, black, sweetened tea to drink from a copper kettle,--this is
+luxury's lap.
+
+The bowsman points to a rude cross on the right bank where a small
+runway makes in, "Gon-sta-wa-bit" (man who was drowned), he volunteers.
+Yesterday a Mounted Policeman buried there the body of an Indian man,
+his wife and his baby, who fell through the ice in a dog-sled this
+spring,--three in one grave, Lamartine's trinity, the Father, the
+Mother, and the Child.
+
+It is Sunday, and we have music from a li'l fiddle made by a squaw at
+Lac Ste. Anne. Lac la Biche River we pass, and Calling River, and at
+five in the evening are at Swift Current, Peachy Pruden's place, and
+then Red Mud. Sunday night is clear and beautiful, and we float all
+night. Making a pillow of a squat packing-case consigned to the
+missionary at Hay River, and idly wondering what it might contain, I
+draw up a canvas sheet. But it is too wonderful a night to sleep. Lying
+flat upon our backs and looking upward, we gaze at the low heaven full
+of stars, big, lustrous, hanging down so low that we can almost reach up
+and pluck them. Two feet away, holding in both hands the stern sweep, is
+the form of the Cree steersman, his thoughtful face a cameo against the
+shadow of the cut-banks. At his feet another half-breed is wrapped in
+his blanket, and from here to the bow the boat is strewn with these
+human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or
+two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from
+high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant
+blood--the "unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go." It is
+the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. In
+imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that
+long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back raucous encouragement to
+his long, sky-clinging V.
+
+Floating as we float, it is no longer a marvel to us that this North
+holds so many scientific men and finished scholars--colonial Esaus
+serving as cooks, dog-drivers, packers, trackers, oil-borers. The not
+knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new
+places and untrod ways,--who would exchange all this for the easy ways
+of fatted civilization!
+
+At five in the morning there is a drawing-in of the fleet to Pelican
+Portage. Before two hours have passed the grasshopper has become a
+burden, and it is 102 deg. in the shade, and no shade to be had. We are now
+a hundred miles from Athabasca Landing. On the left bank we come across
+a magnificent gas-well with a gush of flame twenty or thirty feet in
+height.
+
+It seems that eleven years ago, seeking for petroleum, the Dominion
+Government had a shaft sunk here; their boring apparatus was heavy, the
+plunger with its attachment weighing nearly a ton. At eight hundred feet
+the operator broke into an ocean of gas, and the pressure blew him with
+plunger and appliances into the air as a ball comes from a cannon-bore.
+The flow of gas was so heavy that it clogged his drills with maltha and
+sand, and from then to now the gas has been escaping. To-day the sound
+of the escape ricochets up and down the palisaded channel so that we
+cannot hear each other speak. There is gas enough here, if we could pipe
+it and bring it under control, to supply with free illumination every
+city of prairie Canada. It has destroyed all vegetation for a radius of
+twenty yards; but, oddly enough, outside this range of demarcation the
+growth is more luxuriant and comes earlier and stays later than that of
+the surrounding country. One redheaded Klondiker, ignorant of gas and
+its ways, ten years ago struck a match to this escaping stream, was
+blown into the bushes beyond, and came out minus hair, eye-brows and red
+beard--the quickest and closest shave he ever had. The shells of birds'
+eggs, tea-leaves from many a cheering copper-kettle, tufts of
+rabbit-hair, and cracked shin-bones of the moose, with here a greasy
+nine of diamonds, show, this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the
+gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or
+broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no
+thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a
+patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has
+consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills
+and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have
+eased the mind of poor Lo, around whose dying bunk we hear the relatives
+scrapping over his residuary estate of rusty rifle, much-mended
+fishing-net, and three gaunt dogs.
+
+We pass House River, and the devout cross themselves and murmur a
+prayer. The point is marked by a group of graves covered with canvas.
+Here years ago a family of four, travelling alone, contracted
+diphtheria, and died before help could reach them. There is another
+legend of which the boatmen unwillingly speak, the story of the
+_Wetigo_, or Indian turned cannibal, who murdered a priest on this
+lonely point, and ate the body of his victim. The taste for human flesh,
+Philip Atkinson assures us, grows with the using, and this lunatic of
+long ago went back to the camps, secured an Indian girl as bride,
+carried her to this point, took her life, and ate of her flesh. It is a
+gruesome story.
+
+[Illustration: Grand Rapids on the Athabasca River]
+
+Now begin the rapids, ninety miles of which we are to run. This rough
+water on the Athabasca is one of the only two impediments to navigation
+on the long course between Athabasca Landing and the Polar Ocean. These
+first rapids, frankly, are a disappointment. The water is high, higher
+than it has been for ten years, so the boiling over the boulders is not
+very noticeable. The Pelican Rapid and the Stony we shoot without
+turning a hair; the Joli Fou is a bit more insistent, but, as the cook
+says, "nothing to write home about."
+
+We drift in a drowsy dream of delight, and in the evening arrive at the
+head of Grand Rapids. If we had looked slightingly on the rough water
+passed, what we now see would satisfy the greediest. We tie up and get a
+good view of what lies ahead, and get also our first real introduction
+to the mosquito. In mid-stream he had not bothered us much, but after
+supper it rained a little, the day had been warm, and with cymbals,
+banners, and brass-bands, he comes in cohorts to greet us. The scows
+have their noses poked into the bank, the men have built smudge fires in
+front, but we decide that the best way to escape the mosquito is to go
+to bed. We lie down in the stern-sheets with our clothes on, make
+night-caps of our Stetson hats, pull the veils down over our necks, and
+try to sleep, but it is no avail. Each one of these mosquitoes is a
+Presbyterian mosquito and it has been ordained that this night he is to
+taste of white blood. It rains incessantly, and that hot hole in which
+we lie is one brown cloud of mosquitoes. The men on the bank have
+finally given it up as a bad job, and they set round the fires smoking
+and slapping different parts of their persons, swearing volubly in
+English. For the Cree language is devoid of invective. In the morning we
+are a sorry crowd, conversation is monosyllabic and very much to the
+point. It is the first serious trial to individual good-humour. When
+each one of your four million pores is an irritation-channel of
+mosquito-virus it would be a relief to growl at somebody about
+something. But the sun and smiles come out at the same time, and, having
+bled together, we cement bonds of friendship. What did Henry the Fifth
+say on the eve of Agincourt,--"For he to-day who sheds his blood with me
+shall be my brother"?
+
+Who would worry about mosquitoes with that splendid spectacular of the
+Grand Rapids at our feet? The great flood (Kitchee Abowstik) is divided
+into two channels by an island probably half a mile in length, with its
+long axis parallel to the flow of the river, and this island solves the
+question of progress. The main channel to the left is impassable; it is
+certain death that way. Between the island and the right shore is a
+passage which on its island side, with nice manipulation, is practicable
+for empty boats. Then the problem before us is to run the rough water at
+the near end of the island, tie up there, unload, transfer the pieces by
+hand-car over the island to its other end, let the empty scows down
+carefully through the channel by ropes, and reload at the other end.
+
+Between the bank where we are and the island ahead is a stretch of
+roaring water dangerous enough looking. We have learned ere this,
+however, to sit tight and watch for events. The careless Indians have
+straightened into keen-eyed, responsible voyageurs, each muscle taut,
+every sense alert. Our boat goes first, one half-breed with huge pole
+braces himself as bowsman, the most able man takes the stern sweep, the
+others stand at the oars. Fifteen minutes of good head-work brings us to
+the island and we step out with relief. The other boats follow and
+anchor, and we have opportunity at close range to inspect these worst
+rapids of the Athabascan chain. The current on the west side of the
+dividing island looks innocent, and we understand how the greenhorn
+would choose this passage-way, to his destruction.
+
+[Illustration: Portage at Grand Rapids Island]
+
+The transportation of pieces occupied four days, every moment of which
+we enjoyed. Grand Rapids Island is prodigal in wild flowers,--vetches,
+woodbine, purple and pink columbines, wild roses, several varieties of
+false Solomon's seal, our persisting friend dwarf cornel, and,
+treasure-trove, our first anemone,--that beautiful buttercup springing
+from its silvered sheath--
+
+"And where a tear has dropt a wind-flower blows."
+
+I measured a grass-stem and found it two feet three inches high, rising
+amid last year's prostrate growth.
+
+[Illustration: Our transport at Grand Rapids Island]
+
+At Grand Rapids Island we overtook two scows which had preceded us from
+The Landing and whose crews had waited here to assist in the transport.
+It gave us opportunity to observe these sixty representative half-breeds
+from Lac la Biche. Tall, strong, happy-go-lucky, with no sordid strain
+in their make-up, they are fellows that one cannot help feeling sympathy
+for. A natural link between the East and the West, the South of Canada
+and the North, they have bridged over the animosity and awkwardness
+with which the Red race elsewhere has approached the White.
+
+[Illustration: Cheese-shaped Nodules, Grand Rapids Island]
+
+In a glade our camp is made, inside our tents we arrange the
+mosquito-bar (a tent within a tent looking something like a good-sized
+dog-kennel), and here we lie in our blankets. The hum of the foiled
+mosquito is unction to our souls. It is a relief, too, to remove the
+day's clothing, the first time in ninety-six hours.
+
+The Athabasca here cuts through a cretaceous sandstone,--soft,
+yellowish, homogeneous. In passing Grand Rapids Island it has a fall of
+ninety feet. The river has weathered the banks into vertical cliffs four
+or five hundred feet high, imbedded in which are wonderful cheese-shaped
+nodules, some the size of baseballs, some as big as mill-stones. The
+river-bed is strewn thick with these concretions from which the swift
+current has worn the softer matrix away, and many of the stones are as
+spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite
+the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet
+thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil
+trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great
+wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this
+strange page of history in stone.
+
+Timber along the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we
+see is largely second growth,--Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and
+aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender,
+delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery
+branches seem to float in air.
+
+Across the roaring water swallows are nesting in the clayey cliffs:--
+
+"This guest of summer,
+The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
+By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
+Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
+Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
+Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:
+Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
+The air is delicate."
+
+We learn that half-breeds share the Scottish superstition that it is
+unlucky to disturb bank-swallows.
+
+Others of the migrant host travel in upper air more quickly than we on
+water, and have left us far behind,--swans, the Canada goose, great
+flocks of brant, waveys by the millions, followed by their cousins of
+the duck tribe,--spoon-bill, canvas-back, mallard, pin-tail, ring-neck,
+wood duck, and merganser. The geese will not stop until they have passed
+the Arctic Circle. Why people use the word "goose" as synonym for
+stupidity is beyond the ken of the ordinary observer. The text-books
+tell us tritely that the goose lives to be a hundred years. If she does,
+she may exclaim with the Churchmen, "Yet are my years but labour and
+sorrow." The little chaps who have their birthday parties among
+sub-Arctic reeds are surrounded with enemies from the first day they
+crack their baby shells. Lynx and raccoon prey upon them by land, eagles
+and owls swoop upon them as they swim; and as with one eye they scan the
+sky above them, a greedy pike is apt to snap their web-feet from under
+them and draw them to a watery grave.
+
+The cadets of the Hudson's Bay Company exchange courtesies with the
+Mounted Police, each considering himself a distinct cut above the other.
+One Mounted Policeman, whose duty it had been to escort the crazed
+Russian Doukhobortsi on one of their "altogether" pilgrimages, is hailed
+across the circle, "Here, lend us your knife, you nursemaid to the
+Douks." "Who spoke?" yawned the Policeman. "Was it that fur-pup of the
+Hudson's Bay?" "Yes," retorted the first, "and I'm glad I'm it; you
+couldn't pay me to wear a red coat and say 'Sir' to a damned little
+Frenchman, even if you are going to blaze a trail to Hudson Bay."
+
+Some one asks Sergeant Joyce to tell his Bible story. He says, "Oh,
+about Coal-Oil Johnnie! It was the cub's first year in the service, and
+he got off with some civilians and was drunk for a week. When he was in
+the Guard Room awaiting court-martial he had lots of time 'to sit in
+clink, admirin' 'ow the world was made.' Likewise he was very dry. There
+was nothing for him to amuse himself with but a paper of pins. He took
+the pillow of his cot and used the whole bunch of pins in working on it
+the one word 'Hagar,' in letters six inches high. The inspecting officer
+came in and the pin sign caught his eye. He spelled it out letter by
+letter, 'H-a-g-a-r,--what was the matter with him?' Johnnie retorted,
+'The him was a her, and she died of thirst in the wilderness.' The
+inspecting officer says to Johnnie, 'Well, that would never happen to
+you.'"
+
+A peculiar drumming wafts from the shore-line. "Pa-pas-ku," says one of
+the Cree lads, pulling his pipe from his mouth and listening. Young
+Hudson's Bay to my enquiring look returns, "The Canadian ruffed grouse,"
+which Sussex elucidated, "_Bonasa umbellus logata_," at which we all
+feel very much relieved.
+
+The Kid was pressing specimens, and, holding up a branch, the Mounted
+Policeman next her said, "Young jackpine, I think." "It belongs to the
+Conifer family," corrects the Doctor. "Oh!" says the Mounted Policeman,
+with a sniff, "then we'll give it back to 'em the next time one of the
+Conifer boys comes round." The man of the river and the woods hates a
+Latin name, and any stray classic knowledge you have is best hidden
+under a napkin. The descriptive terms men use here are crisp and to the
+point. The vicious habit of giving birds bad names is one that grows,
+and you never know when the scientific have come to a finality. For
+instance, little Robin Red-Breast _("the pious bird with scarlet
+breast_" whose nest with four eggs the Kid discovered to-day), has
+successively lived through three tags, "_Turdus migratorius_,"
+"_Planesticus migratorius_," and "_Turdus canadensis_." If he had not
+been an especially plucky little beggar he would have died under the
+libels long ago. For my own part I cannot conceive how a man with good
+red blood in his veins could look a chirky little robin in the eye and
+call him to his face a "_Planesticus migratorius_," when as chubby
+youngster he had known the bird and loved him as Robin Red-Breast. One
+is inclined to ask with suspicion, "Is naming a lost art?" Any new
+flower discovered these days, every clever invention in the realm of
+machinery, is forthwith saddled with an impossible name. If it had not
+been easy to clip the term "automobile" down to the working stub "auto,"
+the machine would never have run our streets. Again, the decimal system
+is conceded to be far ahead of the asinine "five and one-half yards make
+one rod, pole or perch"; the only reason why the commonsense thing does
+not supersede the foolish one is that the sensible measurement has the
+fool tag on it. Who could imagine ever going into a store and asking for
+seven decimetres and nine centimetres of picture-moulding, or dropping
+into the corner grocery to buy a hectolitre of green onions? When man
+dug gold and iron and tin out of the earth he made things with them. Now
+when we discover a new mineral we dub it "molybdenum" and let it rust in
+innocuous ease. When man loses the art of nervous speech, his power of
+action goes with it. And as we ruminate, the _Bonasa umbellus togata_
+drums on.
+
+When we pass the parallel of 55 deg.N. we come into a very wealth of new
+words, a vocabulary that has found its way into no dictionary but which
+is accepted of all men. The steep bank opposite us is a "cut bank," an
+island or sandbar in a river is a "batture." A narrow channel is called
+a "she-ny," evidently a corruption of the French _chenal_. When it leads
+nowhere and you have to back down to get out, you have encountered a
+"blind she-ny." The land we have come from is known as "Outside" or "_Le
+Grand Pays_." Anywhere other than where we sit is "that side," evidently
+originating from the viewpoint of a man to whom all the world lay either
+on this side or that side of the river that stretched before him. When
+you obtain credit from a Hudson's Bay store, you "get debt." A Factor's
+unwillingness to advance you goods on credit would be expressed thus,
+"The Company will give me no debt this winter." From here northward the
+terms "dollars" and "cents" are unheard. An article is valued at "three
+skins" or "eight skins" or "five skins," harking back to the time when a
+beaver-skin was the unit of money. The rate of exchange to-day is from
+four skins to two skins for a dollar. Trapping animals is "making fur."
+"I made no fur last winter and The Company would give me no debt," is a
+painful picture of hard times. Whenever an Indian has a scanty larder,
+he is "starving," and you may be "starving" many moons without dying or
+thinking of dying. "Babiche" in the North is the tie that binds, and
+"sinew" is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or
+caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of
+the spinal column of the same animals.
+
+[Illustration: Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police]
+
+There is but one thing on this planet longer than the equator, and that
+is the arm of British justice, and the Mounted Police, these chaps
+sprawling at our feet, are the men who enforce it. The history of other
+lands shows a determined fight for the frontier, inch by inch
+advancement where an older civilization pushes back the native,--there
+are wars and feuds and bloody raids. Not so here. When the homesteader
+comes down the river we are threading and, in a flood, colonization
+follows him, he will find British law established and his home ready.
+The most compelling factor making for dignity and decency in this
+border-country is the little band of red-coated riders, scarcely a
+thousand in number. Spurring singly across the plains that we have
+traversed since leaving Winnipeg, they turn up on lone riverway or
+lakeside in the North just when most wanted.
+
+Varied indeed is this man's duty,--"nursemaid to the Doukhobor" was a
+thrust literally true. His, too, was the task on the plains of seeing
+that the Mormon doesn't marry overmuch. He brands stray cattle,
+interrogates each new arrival in a prairie-waggon, dips every doubtful
+head of stock, prevents forest-fires, keeps weather records, escorts a
+lunatic to an asylum eight hundred miles away, herds wood bison on the
+Slave, makes a cross-continent dash from Great Slave Lake to Hudson Bay,
+preserves the balance of power between American whaler and Eskimo on the
+Arctic edge!
+
+At one time the roll-call of one troup of Mounted Police included in its
+rank and file three men who had held commissions in the British service,
+an ex-midshipman, a son of a Colonial Governor, a grandson of a
+Major-General, a medical student from Dublin, two troopers of the Life
+Guards, an Oxford M.A., and half a dozen ubiquitous Scots. Recently an
+ex-despatch-bearer from De Wet joined the force at Regina, and although
+the cold shoulder was turned on him for a day or two, he soon made good.
+One of the young fellows stretched before us, now going to Fort Smith to
+round up wood bison, was born in Tasmania, ran away from school at
+fourteen, sheared sheep and hunted the wallaby, stoked a steamer from
+Australia to England and from England to Africa, and in the early days
+of bicycles was a professional racer.
+
+Constable Walker, lying lazily on his back blowing blue spirals into
+the air, has in the long winter night made more than once, with dogs,
+that perilous journey from the Yukon to the Mackenzie mouth (one
+thousand miles over an unknown trail), carrying to the shut-in whalers
+their winter mail. On one of these overland journeys he cut off the tips
+of his four toes. His guide fainted, but Walker took babiche and,
+without a needle, sewed up the wound. On this trip he was fifty-seven
+days on the trail, during five days of which the thermometer hovered
+between sixty-two and sixty-eight degrees below.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
+
+
+"On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,
+  De win' she blow, blow, blow,
+An' de crew of de wood scow '_Julie Plante_'
+  Got scar't an' run below--
+For de win' she blow lak hurricane
+  Bimeby she blow some more,
+An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre
+  Wan arpent from de shore."
+
+--_Dr. Drummond_.
+
+This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The
+daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten
+underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to
+thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes
+behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive laundry. At
+dusk we had seen an empty scow floating down river, adrift from
+Athabasca Landing. In the middle of Grand Rapids she broke amidships,
+but held together until in the darkness she floated beyond our ken.
+
+Trouble of our own awaits us. With no one noting, an adventurous scow,
+with all her precious cargo, has pulled loose from her moorings. By the
+time the Cree watchman discovers that the "_Go-Quick-Her_" has taken the
+bit in her teeth, the runaway with tail-sweep set has turned the next
+corner of the Athabasca. Great excitement! Billy Loutit and Emile
+Fosseneuve borrow the Police canoe and go in chase. It is such a rough
+bit of water that we hold our breaths, for a false stroke means death to
+both; but that false stroke does not come. Billy Loutit knows this river
+as we know the borders and shrubs in our garden-bed.
+
+[Illustration: Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore]
+
+This accident causes everyone to look grave. The Edmonton value of the
+cargo is over two thousand dollars, but it is a loss that cannot be
+measured in dollars and cents. These wrecked goods, gaily sailing down
+the Athabasca, cannot be duplicated at some convenient grocery around
+the corner.
+
+We have learned that any untoward happening means a half day's delay.
+Philip Atkinson calls me to one side to suggest that it would be a
+"clear waste" to leave behind the eggs of "that duck's nest I showed you
+the day we came." Atkinson is a half-breed with a Hercules-build who
+looks forty-five and owns up to sixty. He and I chatted over the mallard
+eggs and my collection of wild flowers, he respecting the preservative
+art and I in full awe of that art gastronomic of his which gulps the
+Mallards-in-embryo, sans fourchette, sans salt, sans ceremony.
+
+They are an interesting study, these half-breeds; it means much to each
+on which side of the English Channel his father had birth. When a
+Frenchman marries an Indian woman he reverts to her scale of
+civilization; when a Scot takes a native to wife he draws her up to his.
+Our crew live at Lac la Biche and were engaged last winter for their
+season's work at from twenty to forty dollars a month, with board and
+moccasins. They walked a hundred miles to Athabasca Landing to connect
+with their summer's job, and the absolute certainty of regular meals
+just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and
+four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual
+happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic
+term "the law of heredity" works out with these people, cut off from the
+lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the
+pre-civilization Indian.
+
+Philip, duck-stuffed but untroubled by "that full feeling after eating,"
+lights his pipe and looks back through the years. "My father belonged to
+The Company, my mother was an Ojibway from the Lake of the Woods
+country. My father went back to the Old Country when I was seven,
+leaving me to an uncle to be educated, and I don't know 'B' from a
+bull's foot. He put me to work on the woodpile from morning till night.
+When my father came back after twelve years and found me ignorant, he
+cried like a baby. I have no education, but," with a contemplative
+puff, "I have friends wherever I go." Philip is good to look at and he
+is a linguist, speaking Cree, French, and excellent English with a
+delightful Scotch accent. He is an ardent admirer of the H.B. Company.
+"They always kept their word with a man, and when they had done with
+him, returned him without cost to his old home." Philip and his two sons
+were the first to shoot the Grand Rapids, and he tells us that this
+stretch of the Athabasca River has been used only twenty years. Before
+that time people from the North reached Winnipeg by the Clearwater.
+Philip is a Loyalist. During the half-breed rebellion of 1885 he carried
+dispatches to Middleton and Otter, going seventy-five miles one day on
+foot. He had his horse, "a draught-horse as black as a crow," taken from
+him twice, got through the lines and stole another, and tells proudly
+how for his deed of valor he was presented with an Assomption belt.
+
+At last we are off, keeping sharp look-out for the lost scow. Buffalo
+River, where we pull up for the night, is a recognized camping-place.
+The men know where to put their hands on old-time tent-poles, the boys
+dig out shin-bones of the moose,--the relics of some former
+feast,--which they gnaw as a puppy mumbles an old bone.
+
+Another manifestation of gas is here. It bubbles up on the shore and
+through the water at the boat's bow, and as we strike a match the whole
+surface flames like the brandy on a Christmas plum-pudding. On the
+opposite side of the river are "lobsticks," a new word to us and a new
+thing. To stand as a living totem-pole, the Indians select on a striking
+promontory a tall spruce and from a section of the trunk lop all the
+branches except two, which are left as wings. If the lobstick is to
+stand a monument to a certain man or party, the names of those to be
+honored are written in Cree on an attached slab. We were to notice
+lobsticks from point to point along the rest of our journey, some of
+them indicating good hunting-grounds or fishing-places back from the
+shore, but most of them memorials of happenings on the river.
+
+The Little Buffalo carries to the Athabasca its noisy current between
+two high escarpments, and on the shelf leading back from the banks of
+the main stream is a far-reaching plateau of splendidly-fertile land. In
+the scow next us the two young Crees who are preparing the food for our
+evening "meat-su" carry on a religious controversy as they slice the
+sow-belly. We gather that one has been taken into the Protestant fold
+and that the other follows the priests. Duncan Tremble comes down and
+cuffs them both soundly, putting an end to the argument with, "It's all
+the same as the other, just like the Hudson's Bay Company and the free
+trader. Each one tells you his goods is the best and the other is
+_nee-moy-yuh mee-wah-sin_ (no good). It's that way with the God-goods of
+the white men. Each church tells you that his is the best, but they all
+come down to us in the same scow, both the priest and the missionary."
+
+Next morning we are all keyed-up for the rapids, and about six miles
+down we encounter the Brule, the first one, and take it square in
+mid-channel. We ship a little water, but pass through it all too soon,
+for the compelling grandeur of the Brule grips one. The river here is
+held between vertical walls of the reddest of red sandstone against
+which the lush greenery makes a striking contrast. Twenty miles below is
+the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but
+because the boiler of the steamer _Wrigley_ was lost here and still
+remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as
+clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The
+tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes
+the Long Rapid _(Kawkinwalk Abowstick_), which we run close to its right
+bank.
+
+From the distance sounds the ominous roar of the Big Cascade. At quarter
+past four we reach the head of the swirling fall. The underlying cause
+of the Big Cascade is a limestone ledge which cuts the channel
+diagonally and makes ugly-looking water. We plan to run the rapid one
+boat at a time. The crews are doubled. Our steersman is alert,
+expectant, and as agile as a cat, his black hair switching in the wind.
+Sitting in the centre of the scow, as we do, the sensation is very
+different to that which one experiences in running rapids in a canoe.
+Then it is all swiftness and dexterity, for your craft is light, and, in
+expert hands, easily dirigible with one clever turn of the wrist. With a
+ten-ton scow the conditions change and you feel correspondingly more
+helpless.
+
+The great rapid stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer.
+With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to
+him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up
+for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a
+water-fence. For all we own in the world we wouldn't be anywhere but
+just where we sit. If it is going to be our last minute, well, Kismet!
+let it come. At least it will not be a tame way of going out. For the
+life of me I cannot forbear a cry of exultation. Then there is the
+feeling below one's feet which you experienced when you were a kiddie
+lying flat on your stomach coasting down a side-hill and your little red
+sled struck a stone. We, too, have struck something, but do not stop to
+ask what the obstruction is.
+
+[Illustration: The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills]
+
+At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to
+photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good
+vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just
+time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr.
+Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as
+we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it
+was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.
+
+The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Tremble, the pilot, dances in the
+sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the
+top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the
+men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way
+through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The
+Inspector says, "Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste." The
+native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis,
+"After you, Inspector." Then Pelletier says, sharply, "Jump, I tell you,
+jump; there's no time for--Gaston-and-Alphonse business here."
+
+As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly
+things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows
+discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged
+goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has
+been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on
+the bank,--five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three
+minutes!
+
+A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward
+McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an
+hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden
+alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening
+swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along
+the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before
+we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the
+enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.
+
+The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks
+into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded
+island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in;
+so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back
+forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and
+Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful
+site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of
+Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.
+
+Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would
+expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their
+world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of
+the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition
+of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr.
+Brabant says, "Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for
+you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?" "Never mind,"
+says Bob, "I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?"
+
+It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the
+water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation.
+Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her "special
+orders" are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North
+not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of
+the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for
+hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes.
+Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of
+the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting,
+and, turning it over, says bravely, "I think it will dry." Mathematical
+and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic
+edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are
+miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and
+Hudson's Bay blankets!
+
+In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the
+Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding
+to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put
+up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little
+pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of
+effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted
+together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly
+Sand-boys "all in one delicious gravy." The Doctor is dazed, and offers
+to white and brown alike a tin box with "Have a pastile, do." He wanders
+among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they
+accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially
+appreciates,--something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the
+Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on
+each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. "Here are some
+authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and
+I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian
+Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I
+shall never be able to tell which it is." One by one the Doctor digs out
+from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,--a presentation "Life of the
+Countess of Munster," also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved
+holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be "as old as the
+Conqueror." There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which
+carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows
+the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under
+a side of bacon, is a print of "my great-grandfather who discovered a
+cure for scurvy." A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in
+Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead
+along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.
+
+[Illustration: Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader]
+
+Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad
+one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort
+McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and
+a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition
+to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a
+five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years
+with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their
+migrations and tribal feasts. We question, "Are you not lonely,
+especially in the winter?" But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as
+heroic. "Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians
+are always coming and going, and they are full of interest."
+
+We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees
+when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness
+consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is
+divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the
+black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox
+would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but
+varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral
+alpacas, all of us,--something between a sheep and a goat. But no less
+are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of
+his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the
+self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.
+
+As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home.
+The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind
+Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow
+from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that
+she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and
+depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an
+assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due
+to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss
+Gordon translates. "I am delighted that ladies have come such a long
+distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all
+white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to
+old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water,
+the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children," and
+the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. "Be
+glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it." It is the
+advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the
+Winnipeg Hospital.
+
+We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair
+of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle--merely for effect,
+for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In
+one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church
+to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the
+hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured
+hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that
+twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store
+to go across and dress this wound.
+
+When a schoolboy takes to his bosom a _fidus Achates_, the first thing
+he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces
+us to her find,--nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of
+a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.
+
+During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as
+they had "made little fur," entertaining them as courteously as you
+would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink
+thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden,
+bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman
+passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a
+Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just
+about three days.
+
+A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,--the reading of the
+rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a
+peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the
+latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern
+contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full
+fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the
+future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort
+McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the
+mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said,
+"Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn
+medicine so that I could help these poor creatures." Her tone of
+unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the
+scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden,
+radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.
+
+Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of
+pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for--a
+Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any
+one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of
+the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another
+guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a
+stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the
+potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally
+an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the
+wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of
+growing things.
+
+[Illustration: The Steamer _Grahame_]
+
+Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay
+Company's steamer _Grahame_ meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going
+passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort
+McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the
+easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers
+are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats,
+weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen
+scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden
+craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written
+word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out
+to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The _Grahame_
+has its advantages,--clean beds, white men's meals served in real
+dishes, and best of all, a bath!
+
+On the _Grahame_ we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus
+far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it.
+Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of
+Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have
+ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to
+rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole
+chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a
+resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as
+faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr.
+Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to
+shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see
+only the surface and have to guess the depths.
+
+As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56 deg.
+40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, "where we
+are at." In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far
+north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and
+the lone Pribilof, "where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and
+the seals they breed for themselves." Crossing the junction of the
+Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of
+Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789
+traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its
+confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters
+of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat
+contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in
+latitude 58 deg. 36' North.
+
+[Illustration: An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca]
+
+In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that
+upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of
+fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank,
+out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein,
+building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much
+time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those
+ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and
+determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant
+derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may
+reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of
+striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while "punching" one of
+his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of
+limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine,
+poplar, and spruce.
+
+[Illustration: Tar Banks on the Athabasca]
+
+At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is
+exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for
+blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these
+banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while
+extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the
+river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are
+medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.
+
+Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at
+every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a
+twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically
+may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is
+a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of
+over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a
+section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and
+twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed
+through the sands.
+
+Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two
+miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles
+up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable
+odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said,
+"Smells are surer than sounds or sights."
+
+We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down
+this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the
+coming of the railroad can bring to light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
+Their humble joys and destiny obscure."
+
+--_Gray's Elegy_.
+
+At seven in the morning of Sunday, June 21st, we enter Lake Athabasca,
+and catch our first glimpse of Fort Chipewyan. An acceptance of the
+invitation, "Come, shake your leg," has kept the men busy half the night
+over a hot sequence of Red River jigs among "pieces" on the lower deck,
+and we have this superb sweep almost to ourselves.
+
+The great lake-scape is blue and green and grey and opaline as the sun
+strikes it and the surface breaks to a south wind. Ours is the one craft
+on this inland sea, but overhead a whole navy of clouds manoeuvres, the
+ships of the ghostly argosy doubling themselves in the lake. As we draw
+in, the village takes shape. What haunts us as we look at the white
+houses, that crescent beach of pinkest sand? We have it! It is a print,
+an old woodcut of "Russian America" that we used to pore over in the
+days when one wore "pinnies" of flour-sacking, and "hankies" were made
+from meal-bags.
+
+At one end of the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay
+Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the
+other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples
+and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of
+Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little Church of England, and higher
+up and farther back the Barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
+The white-washed homes of the employes of The Company, little
+match-boxes dazzling in the sun, stretch from one end of the beach to
+the other. In among the half-breed populace stalk policeman and priest,
+red jacket keeping the dark-skinned people straight in this world and
+black robe laying out conditions for the world to come. So is Chipewyan
+fate chequered with the _rouge et noir_ of compulsion and expediency.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca]
+
+Fort Chipewyan is the oldest post in the North, and every boulder of red
+gneissic rock, if we could interrogate it, has a story to tell. Peter
+Pond, of the North-West Company, in 1778 built a post on the Athabasca
+River thirty miles to the south of the lake. The far-seeing Alexander
+Mackenzie, in the interests of the same company, sent his cousin
+Roderick ten years later to build Fort Chipewyan on the lake, and for
+over a century this was the entrepot and emporium of the whole North.
+The Hudson's Bay Company meanwhile were maintaining a post, Fort
+Wedderburne, not far away on Potato Island, and upon the amalgamation of
+the Companies in 1821 they took possession of the present Fort
+Chipewyan.
+
+This metropolis is one hundred and twenty years old. Chipewyan was doing
+business at the same old stand before Toronto was the capital of Upper
+Canada, while Ottawa was still unheard of, and when of Chicago not even
+the Fort Dearborn nucleus had been built. 1788! We wonder if the old ox
+that conveys our "cassette" and "pieces" up to the big gateway of The
+Company's quadrangle was a drawer of wood and drinker of water at that
+date. He looks as if he might have been. George III was reigning in
+England when Fort Chipewyan was built, Arkwright was making his spinning
+jenny, and Watts experimenting with the steam-engine. Sir Joshua
+Reynolds painted his pictures, Burns, a young man of twenty-nine, was
+busy with his ballads. In London a little baby saw the light of day,
+whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron. Three British boys might
+have been seen with arms thrown over each other's shoulders, "dreaming
+greatly"--Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and
+Wordsworth just eighteen. Across the Channel the French Revolution was
+at its height. Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Down on the
+Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had
+gone through the birth-throes of nationhood. It is a far call.
+
+Scraping the yellow lichens off the old sun-dial, we adjust our
+bearings. We are 111 deg. West of Greenwich and in latitude 58 deg. 45' North.
+Our parallel carried eastward would strike the Orkneyan skerries and
+pass through Stromness. All untouched by the development of that busy
+continent to the south which has grown up within its lifetime, Chipewyan
+is a little pearl of the periwigged days of the early Georges. From its
+red sands, tamarack swamps, and mossy muskeg one almost expects to see
+arise the forms of those great of old who outfitted here, making
+Chipewyan the base of their northward explorations. The ghostly company
+is a goodly one--Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Simpson, and Sir
+John Franklin (their honorary prefixes coming to them in the after days
+as reward of their labors), Back and Richardson and Rae, and in later
+days that young stripling curate who was afterwards to be known
+throughout the world of letters as Bishop Bompas, the "Apostle of the
+North." Then there is the great unnamed horde who rested tired limbs at
+Chipewyan on their northward journeys, each on his own
+mission--fur-traders and hunters of big game, devoted nuns and silent
+priests, the infrequent scientist, and the hundreds of Klondikers, their
+hearts hot with the greed for gold. These all through the century have
+enjoyed as we now enjoy the spontaneous hospitality of this little bit
+of Britain which floats the Union Jack from its fort walls, and whose
+people, brown and white, when the belated news of the passing of
+Victoria the Great reached this her northern outpost, gathered on the
+beach and bewailed aloud their personal loss. We seem to hear again the
+far-flung cry "The Queen is dead! The Queen is dead!" from the
+half-breed runners coming in that Christmas Day across the winter ice.
+
+Mackenzie made Chipewyan his headquarters for eight years. It was from
+here he started on his voyage to the Arctic Sea in 1789, and three years
+later on that other history-making journey to the far Pacific. Sir John
+Franklin outfitted here for his two land-journeys--in July, 1820, with
+Dr. Richardson, and again in 1825. Chipewyan is a mine of interest. We
+almost begrudge time given to the dainty meals of our hostess, Mrs.
+William Johnson, and the hours spent between her lavender-scented
+sheets.
+
+In the loft above the office of the H.B. Company, in among old
+flintlock rifles and discarded ox-yokes, we browse through the daily
+records of The Company, old journals written by the Factors at the close
+of their day's work through the years and here preserved for our
+inquisitive eyes. Sitting on the floor, making extracts from these
+tomes, one has the half-guilty feeling of being caught poking into a
+tomb.
+
+On this page the ink is thin and one can see the old writer thawing out
+his frozen ink-pot of stone at the end of a tired day and sitting down
+to write his simple tale. Here are finger-marks where the blood of a
+buffalo gives a marginal note. The journalist had been called away from
+his writing to weigh and pay for some fresh meat. Drops from a tallow
+candle show the light of other days. A pressed mosquito of the vintage
+of 1790 is very suggestive. We picture the trivial round and common task
+of the man who writes, see him exchanging fathoms of tobacco for
+beaver-pelts in those long, cold winters, and eagerly hunger with him
+for the signs presaging the going-out of the ice and the coming-in of
+Spring. We follow out the short Summer with him and revel in its
+perpetual daylight. With him we make the fall fishery and shoot our
+winter's supply of waveys and southward-flying cranes. We wonder, as he
+wondered, what news the next packet will bring from the old folks in the
+Orkneys or the Hebrides. We study, as he studied, the problem of
+governing his servants, placating the Indians, and making enough fur to
+satisfy that inexorable Board of Directors back in London whose motto is
+"Skin for skin."
+
+It has been a grim enough life as the author of this journal records it.
+He is far from those who direct his fate, and recognition and reward are
+slow in coming. Companionship and the gentle arts of "outside" are
+denied him. He must make his own world and rear within it his dusky
+brood, that they in honourable service may follow his round of "work
+done squarely and unwasted days." What made the charm of this life to
+these men? It is hard to see. The master of the post was also master of
+the situation, and an autocrat in his community, a little Fur King, a
+Captain of Industry. A thing was law because he said it. And isn't it
+Caesar himself who declares, "Better be first in a little Iberian
+village than second in Rome?"
+
+We get a delightful picture in an entry under the date of Wednesday,
+23rd May, 1827, when Sir John Franklin was on his way back to England at
+the end of his second journey.
+
+"To-day William McGillivary and Katherine Stewart, daughter
+of Alexander Stewart, Chief Factor, were joined in holy wedlock
+by Captain John Franklin, R.N., Commander of the Land Arctic
+Expedition."
+
+Great is the force of example, for five days later appears the entry
+
+"This evening the ceremonial of marriage took place between
+Robert McVicar, Esq., and Christy McBeath. Captain Franklin
+acted on the occasion as clergyman. The ceremony o'er, the
+evening was agreeably spent in a family assembly."
+
+Looking at these records, we are reminded of a not-very-well-known story
+of international courtesy which connects itself with the third and
+ill-fated journey of Franklin. Old Sir John, then in his sixtieth year,
+had sailed from England in an attempt at the Northwest Passage. Years
+passed and no word came from the explorer, and in 1852 the ice-desert
+was still mute.
+
+In this year, Sir Edward Belcher in the _Resolute_ headed one of the
+many Arctic Relief Expeditions, subsequently abandoning his boat in the
+ice off Melville Island. Next year the American whaler _Henry George_
+met the deserted _Resolute_ in sound condition about forty miles from
+Cape Mercy; she must have drifted through Barrow Strait, Lancaster
+Sound, and Baffin Bay. She was recovered, the Government of the United
+States bought her and with international compliments presented her in
+perfect condition to Queen Victoria in 1856. The old ship was broken up
+about thirty years ago, and from the soundest of her timbers a solid
+desk was made by direction of Queen Victoria, who presented it to the
+then President of the United States. This is the desk which stands in
+President Taft's reception room to-day, and on it the papers of eight
+administrations have been written.
+
+There is living as well as buried history in Chipewyan. A stroll from
+one end of its lacustrine street to the other is lush with interest. We
+call upon Colin Fraser, whose father was piper to Sir George Simpson.
+Colin treats us to a skirl of the very pipes which announced the
+approach of Simpson whenever that little Northern autocrat, during his
+triumphal progress through a bailiwick as big as Europe, made his way
+into a new fort.
+
+With the echo of the "_Gay Gordons_" in our ears we pass into the
+largest convent in the North country, managed by the Grey Nuns of
+Montreal. Sister Brunelle came into the North in 1866. Forty-two years
+in a convent-school of the Northland! It makes one gasp.
+
+These Indian schools, assisted by the Canadian Government, catch the
+little Indians in the camps and hold their prey on school-benches from
+the age of four to fourteen. One boy is dumb, another a hunchback. In a
+corner we came upon a poor old derelict of the camps, a Cree woman,
+paralysed and mentally deranged, who within these quiet walls has found
+harbour. The kiddies are taught one clay in French and the next day in
+English; but when they hide behind their spellers to talk about the
+white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan. What do they learn?
+Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes,
+grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in
+Southern schools. When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their
+skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep
+(young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish
+meals for a twelve-month to come. If fish be brain food, then should
+this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards,
+capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarships _ad lib_.
+
+[Illustration: Three of a Kind]
+
+Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was
+from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their proteges, that the
+sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
+in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This
+wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.
+
+We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and
+immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot,
+with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty
+bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a
+recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these
+good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six
+o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light
+is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. "What in the world do you
+do after six?" I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not
+content to rest in idle laps. "Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to
+give us light." Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through
+the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft
+a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their
+candles like Alfred of old.
+
+Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a
+stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations. At the Church
+of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from
+the leg of an injured Indian. Afterward we learn that the peripatetic
+patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in
+the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome.
+Poor chap, he died in the process! But while he lived he stimulated
+trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale. If
+there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have
+comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably
+fore-ordained.
+
+An interesting family lives next to the English Mission--the Loutits.
+The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company,
+and "for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a
+rabbit-track." There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old
+journals reach. The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree
+and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day's generation is a family of
+striking young people--the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work
+and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding
+the strong men's records of the North.
+
+George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from
+Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids. His
+brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran
+with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in
+three days--a distance of two hundred miles at least. Once, when the
+river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow
+to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling
+upward in the night. The rivermen tell of George Loutit's quarreling
+with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his
+adversary out of the window. When he heard him slump, George immediately
+thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for
+Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away. He arrived there in time for
+noon luncheon next day.
+
+At the H.B. Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge. A
+French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is
+peltries and not souls that Pierre is after. His forebears were Irish
+McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of
+French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs
+it.
+
+Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such
+entries as these:--"Wyllie at the forge," "Wyllie making nails," "Wyllie
+straightening the fowling-pieces," "Wyllie making sled-runners," "This
+day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian." We step into the old man's
+smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a "Good
+mornin'," in richest Doric. The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation
+of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan. He was born
+in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World. Coming out
+to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he
+threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without
+seeing a city in America. Torontonians think the hub of the universe is
+their capital on Lake Ontario. A smart young man from Toronto filtered
+in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, "Came from the
+Old Country, didn't you? What did you think of Toronto?" "Naething, I
+didna see the place."
+
+Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a
+two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone. In the
+forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of
+his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north,
+Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west. To him
+these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into
+luxuriousness with all its weakening influence. "It was much better in
+the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil. Nowadays, when we
+have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are
+coming out!"
+
+No one feels like smiling a smile of superiority in talking with old Mr.
+Wyllie. He has taught himself the gentle arts of gunsmithing and
+blacksmithing. The tools that we see all around us are marvels of
+mechanical skill and would be the joy of a modern Arts and Crafts
+Exhibition. His sledges and augurs, planes and chisels have been made by
+the old man out of pig iron which came as ballast in the holds of those
+old sailing ships which beat their way into Fort Churchill through
+Hudson Strait. The hand-made tools are set into convenient handles of
+moose-horn and bone. Clever indeed is the workmanship that Wyllie has
+done with them. The last triumph from this unique forge was the welding
+of the broken shaft of the little tug _Primrose_. The steamer _Grahame_
+was built at Chipewyan of whipsawn lumber, and much of her steel and
+ironwork was wrought on Wyllie's forge.
+
+Wyllie left the Scottish Isles when a mere lad, but they are still
+"Home" to him and he tells us that this autumn he is going back on a
+visit. It was a prototype of Wyllie's
+
+"From the lone sheiling and the misty island,
+  Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
+But still the heart, the heart is Highland,
+  And we in _dreams_ behold the Hebrides,"
+
+who prayed "O, Lord, we beseech Thee, send down Thy covenanted blessin'
+on the Muckle Hebrides, the Lesser Hebrides, and the adjacent islands
+of Great Britain and Ireland." Talking with the old gentleman, you are
+conscious of the innate moral strength rather than the mechanical skill
+of the craftsman. Instinctively you feel the splendid power of his
+presence and come out from his forge murmuring, "Thank God I have seen a
+_man_ this day." Wyllie belongs to the age of the old journals, to the
+days that bred Joe Gargerys and old Adams in whom appeared "the constant
+service of the antique world."
+
+[Illustration: Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North.
+
+EXPLANATION OF PLATE
+
+A and C--_Muski-moots_, or bags used by the duck-hunter for his game.
+Made by Dog-Rib women, of _babiche_, or rawhide of the moose or caribou.
+
+B--Velvet leggings richly embroidered in violet-coloured bead-work, made
+by Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald, a full-blooded Loucheaux woman.
+
+D--Wall-pocket of white deerskin embroidered in silk. Made by a
+Rabbit-Skin woman at Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.
+
+E--Wall-pocket ornamented with porcupine-quill work, made by a
+Yellow-Knife Indian woman at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.
+
+F--_Fire-bag_, or tobacco-pouch, made of two claws of the black bear.
+The work of a Beaver Indian woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+G--_Fire-bag_ of velvet ornamented with silk-work, made by Chipewyan
+woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.
+
+H--Velvet watch-bag embroidered in silk, made by Slavi Indian woman at
+Fort Providence, at the head of Mackenzie River.
+
+I--Watch-pocket of smoked moose-skin, embroidered in silk-work, made by
+a Cree girl at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca.
+
+J--Armlets ornamented in porcupine quills, made by a half-breed woman on
+the Liard River (a feeder of the Mackenzie).
+
+K--Three hat bands--the first two ornamented with porcupine quills, and
+the last in silk embroidery--made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac,
+Lake Athabasca.
+
+L--Beautiful belt of porcupine work, made by a half-breed woman at Fort
+Nelson on the Liard (a feeder of the Mackenzie).
+
+M--Armlets of porcupine-quill work, made by half-breed girl at Fort
+Chipewyan.]
+
+Mr. and Mrs. William Johnson, with generous courtesy, have made us
+their guests while we stay, and their refined home is a clear delight.
+Mr. Johnson is as clever a man as Mr. Wyllie, but in other lines.
+Without ever having seen an electric light, he learned by study and
+research more about electricity than nine men out of ten know who go
+through Electrical Training Schools. With the knowledge thus gained he
+constructed and put into working use an electric-light plant at Fort
+Simpson on the Mackenzie. Far up here on the map, too, the "Judge," as
+he is lovingly called, taught himself all about watches, and he is now
+Father Time for the whole Mackenzie District, regulating and mending
+every timepiece in the country. The corrected watches are carried to
+their owners by the next obliging person who passes the post, where the
+owner is notching off the days on a piece of stick while he waits. A
+watch, the works of which were extracted from three old ones and
+assembled within one case by this Burbank of Watchdom, found its way
+down to Chicago. The jeweller into whose hands it fell declared that
+among all his workmen there was not one who could have duplicated the
+job.
+
+Chipewyan is a bird paradise; the whole woods are vocal to-day. In the
+autumn, wonderful hunts are made of the southward-flying cranes, geese,
+and waveys, thousands of these great birds being killed and salted and
+put in ice chambers for winter use. If the mosquitoes were not so bad we
+would spend hours in the woods here with "God's jocund little fowls."
+These sweet songsters seem to have left far behind them to the south all
+suspicion of bigger bipeds. We hear the note of the ruby-crowned kinglet
+(_regulus calendula_) which some one says sounds like "Chappie, chappie,
+jackfish." The American red-start comes to our very feet, the yellow
+warbler, the Tennessee warbler, the red-eyed vireo, and the magnolia
+warbler, which last, a young Cree tells us, is
+"High-Chief-of-all-the-small-birds." Rusty blackbirds are here with
+slate-coloured junco, and we see a pair of purple finches. We are
+fortunate in getting a picture of the nest of the Gambel sparrow and two
+of the nesting white-throated, sparrow. They are ferreted out for us by
+the sharp eyes of a girl who says her Cree name is
+"A-wandering-bolt-of-night-lightning!" At our feet blossom cinquefoil,
+immortelles, the dainty flowers of the bed-straw.
+
+It has been a full day, and by the way the "permits" are opening up in
+the settlement when we come back, promises to be a full night. These men
+have waited a whole year for a drink, and now the lids can't come off
+quick enough. "Come, hurry up, Flynn, we're all as dry as wooden gods,
+we're so dry that we're brittle--we'd break if you hit us." "Well, I'm
+hurrying; I'm as much in a rush as any of you; I'm so warped the hoops
+are falling off."
+
+It doesn't take long to polish off the permits proper (or improper). By
+morning all this liquor, imported for "medicinal purposes," is gone.
+Whoever in Chipewyan is thoughtless enough to get ill during the next
+twelve months must fall back on the medicine-chest of the English
+Mission or of the Grey Nuns. Anything strong will do for the creation of
+joyousness during the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days of the
+year--Jamaica ginger, lavender-water, flavouring extracts.
+
+Next morning the bon vivants of Chipewyan are down to essences of lemon,
+vanilla, and ginger, which have been specially imported as stimulating
+beverages. We ask if they are any good. "Good? I should say so, and one
+bottle just makes a drink. Can I offer" (politely) "to exhilarate you
+ladies with vanilla?" The most jovial of the celebrants tells of his
+early imbibition of red ink. "I used to get a gallon of red ink with my
+outfit every year, and it gives you the good feel, but when this new
+Commissioner comes in he writes, 'I don't see how you can use a gallon
+of red ink at your post in one year,' and I writes back, 'What we don't
+use we abuse,' and next year he writes to me, 'It's the abuse we
+complain of,' and, with regretful reminiscence, "I got no more red ink."
+The substitution of red tape for the carmine fluid that inebriates is an
+innovation not appreciated.
+
+The old records fascinate us. We spend every spare moment before the
+coming of the treaty party in transcribing choice bits from them. There
+were drinks and drinkers in these old days.
+
+"_1830, Friday 1st. January_. All hands came as is customary to wish us
+the compliments of the season, and they were treated with cakes each, a
+pipe, and two feet tobacco. In the evening they have the use of the hall
+to dance, and are regaled with a beverage."
+
+"_1830, April 30. Poitras_, a Chipewyan half-breed, arrived, and
+delivered 81 made beavers in prime furs, though he says he has been
+sickly all winter. I therefore presented him with a complete clothing
+and a Feather."
+
+"_1830, May 16th_. One of our Indians having been in company with
+Indians from Isle a la Crosse got married to one of their young women,
+consequently has followed the father-in-law and taken his hunt away from
+us."
+
+"_1830, August 13th_. One Indian, _The Rat_, passed us on the Portage,
+he was treated with a dram for 'Old Acquaintance' sake."
+
+On New Year's Eve the old chronicler drops into verse. In tall thin
+letters in faded ink we read,
+
+"If New Year's Eve the wind blow south,
+It betokeneth warmth and growth;
+If west, much milk, and fish in the sea;
+If north, much storms and cold will be;
+If east, the trees will bear much fruit;
+If northeast, flee it man and beast."
+
+"_1831, January 1_. The thermometer this morning was 29 below cypher."
+
+_1831, May 22_. They bring intelligence that _Mousi-toosese-capo_ is at
+their tent, having lately joined them, without his family of two women
+and two children, who perished during the winter. From his frequent
+prevarication when questioned by the other Crees, they suspect he has
+murdered and eaten them."
+
+"_1831, May 30th._ The fellow has got too large a family for a Fort
+Hunter, he cannot feed them with unlimited Indulgence and supply us at
+the same time." [Would Mr. Roosevelt second this?]
+
+"_1831, June 19th_. Two Chipewyans came from the Long Point informing us
+that _Big Head's_ son is dead, that _Big Head_ has thrown away his
+property in consequence of the loss of his boy, and that he told them to
+beg a shirt and tobacco. The shirt, of course, I did not send, the
+scoundrel is not worthy of it. I merely sent him six inches of tobacco
+with reluctance. That cursed family is a perfect pest to the place, and
+it is my humble opinion that the hand of Providence sends them the
+present calamity for their ill deeds."[!]
+
+"_1834, November 27th._ A party of the Isle a la Crosse Indians with old
+_Nulooh_ and _Gauche_ cast up. They have not come in this direction for
+the sake of running about, some of their relations is dead, and in their
+own words they are travelling on strange lands to kill grief, not an
+unusual custom among the Northern Indians."
+
+"_1865, October 23rd_. We were surprised yesterday at the arrival of a
+Protestant missionary, a Mr. Bompas from England; he came in a canoe
+from the Portage with Sylvestre and _Vadnoit_."
+
+"_1866, January 1st_. The whole Establishment breakfasted in the Hall
+and in the evening a Ball came off with great eclat. Two marriages also
+to-day, Francis Villebrun to Marie Cyre, and Baptiste St. Cyre, Jr., to
+Justine McKay--so that all things considered the New Year was ushered
+in with a tremendous row! Verily, times are improving in the North."
+
+"_1866, January 2nd_. The men are rather seedy to-day after their
+tremendous kick-up of yesterday."
+
+"_1840, January 25th._ The object of sending _Lafleur_ to the Little
+Island is that he may procure a kind of willow that the Canadians call
+'Courmier,' the bark of which scraped and boiled in water has healing
+qualities which they think will be of great service for Hassel's
+complaint. Confidence in anything is half the cure."[!]
+
+"_1840, February 1st_. Hassel is still without much appearance for the
+better, and at his earnest request was bled."
+
+"_1841, December 31st_. The men from the Fishery made their appearance
+as usual at this time, and as usual, too, the best we had (which
+by-the-by is not great as will be seen by this journal) was served out
+to them. The other men had the time to themselves to prepare for the
+holiday of to-morrow, for the _Jour de Tan_ is the greatest day of the
+Canadians in these distant Northern posts. To finish things properly
+there is still wanting the famous aqua vitae, which we are sorry to
+state is not in our means to furnish. Adieu the year one thousand eight
+hundred and forty-one!"
+
+"_1842, February 13th_. The Rev. Mr. Evans proposing to take his
+departure to-morrow for Isle a la Crosse edified us with a farewell
+service, several of the women and children were baptized, and Flett and
+Hassel were married to their wives."
+
+From the records we compile this Chipewyan calendar:--
+
+March 17th, House-flies. April 8th, Grey goose seen. April 11th,
+Catkins. April 12th, Barking crows. April 19th, Blackbirds and
+mosquitoes. April 21st, Plover, two hawks, and a butterfly. April 22nd,
+Gulls, white waveys, robins. April 28th, White cranes. April 30th,
+Frogs, most of snow gone. May 2nd, Dark butterfly, four purple crocuses.
+May 4th, Frogs noisy, bumble bees. May 5th, Nearly clear of ice. May
+8th, Water from Peace River flowing into lake. An Eagle. May 10th, Sand
+martins. Ice drifting in channel in front of fort. May 20th, Swans
+passing north. May 21st, Trees bursting into leaf. July 11th,
+Strawberries and raspberries. August 18th, Cranes passing south. October
+11th, Small birds passing south. October 12th, First ptarmigan seen
+about the fort. October 24th, Lake in front closed up this morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
+
+
+"Afar from stir of streets,
+  The city's dust and din,
+What healing silence meets
+  And greets us gliding in!
+
+"The noisy strife
+  And bitter carpings cease.
+Here is the lap of life,
+  Here are the lips of peace."
+
+--_C.G.D. Roberts_.
+
+For fresh woods and pastures new this Friday, June 26th! Our little
+"bunch" breaks up. Mr. Brabant and Mrs. Harding, of the Hudson's Bay
+Company contingent, go on in the _Grahame_ to Smith's Landing, and with
+them the two detachments of the R.N.W.M.P. As we shake hands with the
+police party, we wonder what Fate has in store for each of us. Breaking
+off at Fort Resolution, Great Slave Lake, and trending eastward by canoe
+over unchartered ways, will they reach salt water on Hudson Bay as they
+hope?
+
+For our two selves, great good fortune is ours. The Canadian Government
+Indian Treaty party, consisting of Mr. Conroy in command, Mr. Laird as
+secretary, Dr. Donald, and Mr. Mooney in charge of the commissariat,
+with Constable Gairdner, R.N.W.M.P., as Escort, has just come down the
+Peace. To-day they pay treaty in Chipewyan, and this afternoon start
+for far Fond du Lac, at the eastern extremity of Lake Athabasca. The
+little H.B. tug _Primrose_ will tow them and their outfit in a York-boat
+and a scow, and the captain has been persuaded to allow us, too, to take
+our blankets and come along, sleeping on the deck. The _Primrose_ from
+stem to stern is not big enough to swing a cat in, but who wants to
+swing a cat? It is blue Lake Athabasca that we long to see; no white
+woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity and we would go if
+we had to work our passage at the sweeps of the scow.
+
+[Illustration: Lake Athabasca in Winter]
+
+Athabasca Lake (whose name means "In Muskeg Abounding"), is two hundred
+miles long, with thirty-five miles at its greatest width. It lies in a
+general easterly and westerly direction. No survey has been made of the
+lake; its height above ocean level is seven hundred feet, and it covers
+perhaps three thousand square miles. Its chief feeder is the Athabasca
+River, down which we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by
+the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake
+Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts
+of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse
+wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation
+being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for
+six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable
+blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace and Athabasca Rivers
+open their icy mouths about May-day, parts ot the lake are not free for
+travel until mid-May. The lake freezes fast at Fort Chipewyan some time
+in November. Lying on the deck of the tug, we look down and take
+inventory of our odd tow. Just behind comes the scow. It holds wood for
+the engine, a long sled, a canoe, a "skift," all this year's trading
+supplies for Fond du Lac, and half a dozen chained husky dogs. Trailing
+the scow is a York-boat carrying the treaty party and Mr. Harris.
+
+It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun
+is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock
+Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at
+the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well
+stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little
+deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the
+typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us
+from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for
+slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican
+Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them
+until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many,
+many hundreds of miles.
+
+[Illustration: Bishop Grouard]
+
+Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On
+board the _Primrose_ the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the
+wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch
+with him. "I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to
+have neither chart nor compass."
+
+"No," assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, "we just go by
+the power o' man," and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches
+us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in
+the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered
+adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.
+
+By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day.
+At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the
+scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five
+dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on
+the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In
+front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended
+midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of
+baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so
+far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of
+reindeer moss (_cladonia rangiferina_?), the _tripe de roche_ of the
+North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its
+gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the
+odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian
+lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and
+acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and
+tonic.
+
+No orders are given when we land, and we study countenances and actions
+to guess the time-limit of our tether. For twenty-four hours we have
+wondered if there were trout in Lake Athabasca and if they would rise to
+the fly. With a borrowed rod we take a canoe and off the shadow of a
+cottonwood point try a cast at random. The gut carries three flies--a
+brown hackle, a coachman, with a Jock Scott at the tail--a rainbow
+aggregation. To the coachman we get a rise and it takes three of us to
+land him. There are no scales; so his weight must forever be unrecorded,
+but as we lay him out he measures just a trifle over twenty-three
+inches, as beautiful a lake trout as ever sent thrill up and down a
+sympathetic spine. Bye-and-bye this road we travel is going to be
+listed on the sporting routes of the world, and tired souls from the
+Seven Seas with rod and gun will here find Nepenthe.
+
+[Illustration: The Modern Note-book]
+
+Clutching our catch, we step gingerly along an outstretched oar and
+climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and
+suggest turf rather than surf. "Kick her up, Mac!" "Give her a kick
+ahead!" "Who-o-oa!" On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac,
+clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All
+unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet us,--bent
+old crones, strong men, and black-eyed babies. For is not the coming of
+the treaty party the one event of the Fond du Lac year?
+
+Half way along the traverse of the lake we had crossed the
+inter-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern
+limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's
+Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak
+English,--Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler
+who would fain shepherd their souls.
+
+These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only
+at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the
+_moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers_ (July) they will press back
+east and north to the land of the caribou. September,
+_the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns_, will find them camping on
+the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the
+_hour-frost-moon,_ or the _ice-moon,_ they will be laying lines of
+traps.
+
+We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians
+by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in
+its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned
+the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of
+Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present
+has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction,
+by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection
+had been loud and eloquent.
+
+[Illustration: Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian]
+
+We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman
+whom he addresses as "Josette." Their three girls are being educated in
+the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the
+grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with
+thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the
+latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter
+nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of
+the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with
+the great world of thought outside. "Stone walls do not a prison make
+nor iron bars a cage." Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under
+birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of
+ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and
+Labrador tea _(Ledum latifolium_), we reach the H.B. garden where the
+potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little
+graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The
+inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father
+Beihler, who comes across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years
+the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in
+the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit
+hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was
+out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself
+wept. White women are a _rara avis_. Father Beihler wants to know how
+old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing
+wisely to the Kid, he assures me, "They are not an-gell (angel) at that
+age," and says, "I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a _woman
+chercher_." The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him,
+and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we
+have in common,--the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond
+du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so
+far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned
+warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.
+
+[Illustration: A Bit of Fond du Lac]
+
+These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the
+trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The
+father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money
+to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served
+The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in
+England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here
+Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the
+tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.
+
+To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more
+interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form
+silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the
+Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and
+makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a
+contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass,
+become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string
+tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who
+used to "make fur" in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the
+extinct product of a past race that never existed.
+
+The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce
+of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the animal's skull
+to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and
+musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on
+sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in
+the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the
+animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her
+side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp
+she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.
+
+The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and
+they are perhaps the least unspoiled of "civilisation," as their range
+is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie.
+To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled
+down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on
+the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have
+not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and
+sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the
+germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in
+the graves by the wayside.
+
+[Illustration: Birch-barks at Fond du Lac]
+
+Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two
+canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs
+following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary
+weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence
+the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind
+of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for
+moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are _cached_, and the trail strikes into
+the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and
+eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge
+wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his
+journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting
+incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps
+flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie
+Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.
+
+Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart
+of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral
+fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are
+lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his
+traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line
+of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an
+accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of
+the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small
+hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights
+come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far
+trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent streams, the
+Chipewyan trudges from trap to trap; if he finds fifty dollars worth of
+fur along the whole line he is content. It is not this lonely man who
+gets the high price, madame, for your marten stole or opera-cloak of
+ermine.
+
+On the trail the hunter may go hungry for two days and no word of
+complaint, just a tightening of the lips and L'Assumption belt, and a
+firm set to the jaw; but when a moose is killed life is one long supper.
+A jolly priest whispers of this confession from a son of the Church, a
+recent brand from the burning, "O Father, I know that Christianity is
+true, the great, the strong religion. When I was a heathen Chipewyan and
+trapped with my mother's tribe I ate ten rabbits a day. But now I am a
+Christian, a good Catholic, seven rabbits are enough for me--I will eat
+no more!"
+
+In the early days the H.B. Company allowed its men _en voyage_ five
+pounds of meat a day, and each kiddie three pounds. In British Columbia
+and the Yukon the ration was one salmon; up here on the Athabasca one
+wild goose or three big whitefish; on the Arctic foreshore two fish and
+three pounds of reindeer meat. This was the scheduled fare, but the
+grimness of the joke appears in the fact that each man had to run his
+breakfast to earth before he ate it.
+
+Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when
+the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt. The
+whole thing is a Louisiana lottery. The very next trap may hold a
+silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and
+a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr.
+Harris. As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the
+starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so
+long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond
+du Lac. In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating
+caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake. Caribou skins are in
+prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh
+or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk.
+About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance
+from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs
+with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother
+Church. Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear,
+and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty
+money and annual reunion in July.
+
+Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou
+(_rangifer articus_), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the
+bands of the dead and gone buffalo. Caribou go north in spring and south
+in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou
+form the advance line. They drop their young far out toward the seacoast
+in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow.
+The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make
+the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July. From this time they
+stay together till the rutting season is over late in October. Then the
+great herds of caribou,--"la foule,"--gather on the edge of the woods
+and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food
+afforded by the country of the larger pine trees. A month later the
+females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the
+uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the
+end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.
+
+This is the general rule. Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca
+Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the
+Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and
+westward branches of the caribou family. But the trend of this mighty
+migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and
+the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and
+divert them from their line of march. Individuals and scattered bands,
+indeed, have been known not to migrate at all. Fifteen years ago in the
+last days of July, in latitude 62 deg. 15' North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a
+herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand
+individuals. In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near
+Fort Rae on the ice. It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in
+the words of an eye-witness, "daylight could not be seen through the
+column."
+
+A priest, on the winter trail between Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a
+few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail
+crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till
+they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass
+through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat
+bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.
+
+Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, "At
+Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't
+think they will ever die out." Rae was the old meat-station for the Far
+North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three
+thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a
+caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without
+any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the
+wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.
+
+When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink
+teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will
+cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would
+be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish
+(_coregonus clupeiformis_) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to
+spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern
+waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are
+always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying
+with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the
+Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good
+fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some
+of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their
+chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The
+whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it
+is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live
+for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual
+mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is
+the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes
+daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our
+sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of _de
+gustibus_, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon
+the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping
+the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one
+would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear
+dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after
+all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had
+overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they
+broached cargo. "Do you like these?" "Yes." "You're a liar!" On the
+Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his
+first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of
+Kennedy. He coveted one of the "plums" from our lunch-basket, and was
+much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. "What are them?"
+"Olives," we elucidated; "they come from Southern Europe by steamer."
+"Do they?" (slightingly). "The one I et must have come steerage."
+
+We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern
+delicacies,--beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys,
+caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of
+these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest
+here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery,
+whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and
+freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish
+hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh
+firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the
+fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly
+gamy. This is the "Fall Fishery." Winter fishing is done through holes
+in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The
+handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.
+
+As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the
+United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in
+Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an
+Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada
+from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was
+$1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its
+Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or
+ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game
+off his own bat.
+
+Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look,
+seeking in vain any trace of "the wild Red Man." The _raison d'etre_ of
+these annual "treaty-payment parties" is merely the acknowledgment on
+one side and the recognition on the other that the Northern Indian is a
+British subject protected by and amenable to British law. In addition to
+the present of five dollars per head each year, the Canadian Government
+sends in by the Indian Agent presents of fishing twine and ammunition,
+with eleemosynary bacon for the indigent and old. The chiefs strut
+around in official coats enriched with yellow braid, wearing medals as
+big as dinner-plates.
+
+From Edmonton northward to Fort Chipewyan the Indians are all Crees. At
+Fort Chipewyan the northern limit of the Crees impinges on the southern
+limit of the Chipewyan, but here at Fond du Lac the Indians are all true
+Chipewyans. The Chipewyan wife is the New Red Woman. We see in her the
+essential head of the household. No fur is sold to the trader, no yard
+or pound of goods bought, without her expressed consent. Indeed, the
+traders refuse to make a bargain of any kind with a Chipewyan man
+without the active approbation of the wife. When a Chipewyan family
+moves camp, it is Mrs. Chipewyan who directs the line of march. How did
+she happen to break away from the bonds that limit and restrain most Red
+brides? This is the question that has troubled ethnologists since the
+North was first invaded by the, scientific. We think we have found the
+answer. Along the shores of Fond du Lac we descry a long-legged wader,
+the phalarope. This is the militant suffragette of all bird-dom. Madame
+Phalarope lays her own eggs (this depository act could scarcely be done
+by proxy), but in this culminates and terminates all her
+responsibilities connubial and maternal,--"this, no more." Father
+Phalarope builds the house, the one hen-pecked husband of all feathered
+families who does. He alone incubates the eggs, and when the little
+Phalaropes are ushered into the vale, it is Papa who tucks their bibs
+under their chins and teaches them to peep their morning grace and to
+eat nicely. Mamma, meanwhile, contrary to all laws of the game, wears
+the brilliant plumage. When evening shadows fall where rolls the
+Athabasca, she struts long-leggedly with other female phalaropes, and
+together they discuss the upward struggles toward freedom of their
+unfeathered prototypes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
+
+
+"On we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
+  And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as swinging heel and toe,
+We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to anywhere,
+  The tragic road to Anywhere but one dear year ago."
+
+--_Service_.
+
+Everybody is to say farewell to Fond du Lac to-day, June 29th, so there
+is a hurried finishing up of loose ends. A loud yowl as of a lost soul
+letting go of life starts the lake echoes! No hand is staining itself in
+brother's blood. The treaty doctor, who visits these people, to use
+their own word, "as a bird on the wing," has just succeeded in
+extracting a tooth for a Chipewyan bride, Misere Bonnet Rouge. Misere
+looks ashamed of her howl when the operation is over, and lisping,
+"Merci very," bears off in expansive triumph the detached molar.
+
+[Illustration: Fond du Lac]
+
+Down at the lake edge, belly prone, men and women lap the water as dogs
+do, while the festive small boy from the Government bags of poor-house
+bacon is slyly licking the oozing fat. Of the taste of red-cheeked
+apples and chewing-gum he is guiltless; popcorn, bananas, and the
+succulent peanut are alike alien. This _pee-mee_ or oil of bacon is
+delicious morsel enough for his red palate. We trade a brier pipe with
+young McDonald, a full-blood, for his beautiful hat-band of porcupine
+quills, and in the French of the North he confides to us, "I have two
+boys. The mother can have the younger one to help her in the house, and
+the priest can teach him to be a white man if he likes; but the other
+one goes with me, no school for him. I will make him a hunter like
+myself." Last year McDonald went into the woods on New Year's Day and
+didn't return until June, when he came back with three hundred caribou.
+
+Father Beibler is carrying a cup of water up to a tepee where an old
+Indian lies dying, to whom he is giving extreme unction. The slanting
+sun strikes the tin cup and the big crucifix of the good Father, and so
+we leave Fond du Lac.
+
+[Illustration: Father Beihler Carrying Water to a Dying Indian]
+
+The man who tells the story crosses himself piously and immediately
+begins a bit of rag-time of the vintage of '08. We ask him where he
+heard the tune. "O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the
+Mission." Canned culture even here! It is light enough to read on the
+deck at quarter past eleven. We chunk along through a lake of amethyst
+and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep. On the
+scow astern, sprawled on the season's output of fur, the men smoke and
+argue. In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast
+about their dogs, and discuss food. Two kindred souls may hark back to
+boyhood days and quote a page of Virgil or demonstrate on a bit of
+birchbark the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, but you overheard no
+discussion of elections or ward-politics, no chatter of the marketplace.
+That is all "long ago and far away." To-night it is "You know there are
+fellows in here who can run like hell. The world's record is beaten
+every winter." "The world's record in lying, do you mean?" "No,
+running--a man can run one hundred miles a day in this country." "Well,
+what makes a day?" "Twelve hours,--that is what I learned at school."
+"No: there's twenty-four hours in a day." "Well, a day, _I_ take it, is
+as far as you can go without stoppin'--it never gets dark, so how is a
+man to know what's a day?"
+
+We reach Chipewyan Wednesday, July 1st, and there is no soul who cares a
+whitefish for the fact that this is Dominion Day, Canada's national
+holiday. For our dinner Mrs. Johnson gives us home-grown parsley,
+radishes, lettuce, and green onions; the potatoes are eight or ten
+inches high, and rhubarb stalks an inch and a half in diameter. Wild
+gooseberries are big enough to make delectable "gooseberry fool." Who
+hungers for whitefish-stomachs or liver of the loche?
+
+Early in the morning we start north in the _Primrose_, cross Athabasca
+Lake, and enter the Rocher River. Thirty miles from Fort Chipewyan the
+Rocher, uniting with the main channel of the Peace, makes a resultant
+stream known as the Slave, down which we pass in an incomparable summer
+day, our hearts dancing within us for the clear joy of living. Poplars
+and willows alternate with white spruce (_Picea canadensis_) fully one
+hundred and fifty feet high and three feet in diameter. It is an ideal
+run,--this hundred miles between Fort Chipewyan and Smith's Landing, and
+we make it in twelve hours.
+
+[Illustration: Smith's Landing]
+
+"How did Smith's Landing get its name?" I ask the _Primrose_ Captain.
+"Some ould fish o' the Hudson's Bay," from the tightly-bitten black pipe
+leaves one wondering if Lord Strathcona (Sir Donald Smith) was meant. At
+Smith's Landing we encounter the only obstacle to steamboat navigation
+in the magnificent stretch of sixteen hundred miles between Fort
+McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith
+the Slave River presents sixteen miles of churning rapids with a total
+drop of two hundred and forty feet. Until within a few years every ounce
+of freight for the lower Mackenzie River posts had to negotiate this
+turbulent waterway, making seven portages and many decharges. The "free
+trader" still takes his scows down this Rapid of the Damned, but the
+H.B. Company (thanks be!) has provided a cross-country portage.
+
+We land on the heels of a tragedy. Some days before, in this surging
+swirl of waters two priests pushed out in a canoe. The older man had
+been in the North for years and was "going out," the other had come from
+Europe to take his place; the Father would show to his successor all the
+beauties of the rapids. In their enthusiasm they ventured too near the
+"Rapid of the Drowned," and canoe and men went down. An old Indian
+woman, the only eye-witness, said to me, "One arm lifted out of the
+river, the paddle pointing to the sky--a cry came over the water, and
+that was all." Our thought jumps to that peasant's home in far France
+where the mother waits and wearies for news from America. We see the
+unsteady fingers tearing open the first letter that comes out of that
+remote land where devotion and duty had called her son. We wonder who
+wrote that letter to her, and, turning away, wonder too at the destiny
+which suddenly breaks off the thread of lives like these and leaves
+dotards dozing in the sun.
+
+At Smith's Landing we join our Athabasca friends and meet new ones,
+among the latter Mr. Max Hamilton, who will tell you more of the North
+and its little ways in a forenoon than you could glean from books in a
+winter's study. Corporal Mellor and Constables Johnson and Bates,
+R.N.W.M.P., no longer gay birds of travel, have gotten down to brass
+tacks. With gay visions of striding blooded mounts, herding bison, and
+making history, they find themselves employed at present in making a
+barracks, making it out of logs and sweat with the lonely ox as
+coadjutor. Johnson, who has broken horses in the ring at Regina, is head
+of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck,
+an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since.
+Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a
+prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to
+take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the
+Mosquito Portage and we do not.
+
+We thought we had met mosquitoes on the Athabasca. The Athabasca
+mosquito is gentle, ineffective, compared with his cousin of Smith's
+Portage. Dr. Sussex sits on the wagon-seat behind and explains the
+mosquito. He tells us that they are "of the order _Diptera_," "sub-order
+_Nemocera_," and chiefly "of the family _Culicidae_," and he also goes
+so far as to tell us that they "annoy man." As we bump along in the
+muskeg and the creatures surround us in a smother, he ventures to assert
+that "the life of the adult insect is very short" and that it is the
+female who stings. The Doctor is a born instructor. We learn that "the
+natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant."
+We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on "Mosquito" out of some convent
+dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac. He is like the parson
+introduced by his friend of the cloth. "Brother Jones will now give an
+address on Satan. I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the
+reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes
+to you _full of his subject."_
+
+The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full
+of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a
+pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their
+digestion on an unnatural commissariat. And if the female mosquitoes do
+all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on
+Smith's portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into
+her own. We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a
+Slave River priest had said to us, "These have not delicate
+sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper
+appreciation of _material things_."
+
+Opposition is the life of trade. For every vantage-point as big as a
+match-head on our face and hands the "bull-dog" contests with the
+mosquito. An interesting study is the "bull-dog." He looks like a cross
+between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we
+went along to examine the different parts of his person under a
+microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm. The head of the
+insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he
+makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman
+enough to keep his tools always well sharpened. The Doctor was not
+"long" on the "bull-dog." He told us that his Sunday name was
+"_Tabanus_," and that was about all he could impart. The rest we could
+learn for ourselves by direct contact.
+
+Personally I have very little rancour against the "bull-dog." He looks
+worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel
+him. Four-legged brutes find it different. On the Bloody Portage we
+overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying
+to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites.
+Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from
+Fort Smith. Moose in the North, maddened by the "bull-dogs," often jump
+over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when _they_
+were possessed of devils.
+
+Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, "The
+deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs," ruminates audibly,
+"Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs! How interesting! Jolly
+resourceful beggars, these Colonials." A literary scientist sending out
+copy from the North wrote, "My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and
+bull-dogs," which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, "My two
+greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs."
+
+Bringing in our daily treasure-trove of flowers we can scarcely realise
+that at Fort Smith we are in latitude 60 deg. North, the northern boundary
+of the Province of Alberta and in the same latitude as St. Petersburg.
+One day we gathered careopsis, pretty painted-cups, the dandelion in
+seed, shinleaf (_Pyrola elliptica_), our old friend yarrow, and
+golden-rod. Another day brought to the blotting-pads great bunches of
+goldenrod, a pink anemone, harebells of a more delicate blue than we had
+ever seen before, the flower of the wolf-berry, fireweed, and
+ladies'-tresses. The third day we identified the bear-berry or
+kinnikinic-tobacco (_Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)_ with its astringent
+leaves, and that dear friend of lower latitudes and far-away days, the
+pink lady-slipper. The last time we had seen it was in a school-room in
+far-off Vancouver Island where in early April the children had brought
+it in, drooping in their hot little fists. This same evening, watching a
+night-hawk careering in mid-air by the rapids of the Slave and enjoying
+its easy grace in twisting and doubling as with hoarse cry it fell and
+rose again, we were fortunate in literally running to ground its nest.
+
+[Illustration: A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing]
+
+[Illustration: Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company]
+
+Fort Smith, as places go in this country, is an infant in age, having
+been established only thirty-four years. Resting on the edge of the high
+bank of the Slave, it enjoys an eternal outlook on those wonderful
+rapids. The river here is a mile wide. The sweep and eddy-wash of ages
+have cut out a deep bay, on the inner shore of which stand the buildings
+of The Company, the little Roman Church, the houses of the priests. Back
+of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of
+the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the
+hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being
+more "dead" than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great
+things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort
+Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality
+will soon send unction into the dry bones of the valley.
+
+At the foot of the high hill looms a monument to the initiative and
+commercial enterprise of the H.B. Company,--a modern steamship in the
+waters of a wilderness-country. Ours is to be the honor of making in her
+the initial journey to the Mackenzie mouth. It is impossible coming from
+the South to navigate the Slave River rapids by steam. Any boat
+ambitious to ply on the waters lying northward between Fort Smith and
+the Arctic must be either taken in in sections or built on the ground.
+With enterprise and pluck, the Hudson's Bay Company has just completed
+the construction at Fort Smith of the steamship, _The Mackenzie River_.
+Its great boilers and engines made in far factories of the south came in
+over the Athabasca trail on sleighs in winter. Down that whole distance
+of ninety miles of Athabascan rapids they floated on scows as we
+floated, and while human ingenuity is bringing north the iron bowels,
+skilful hands out of native timber are framing the staunch body to
+receive them.
+
+The builders of the big boat have had disasters which would have daunted
+any but the dogged Company of Fur-Traders. Two land-slides threatened to
+slice off and carry into the river the partially-made boat, a fire
+burned up the blacksmith shop and with it all the imported doors,
+window-sashes and interior finishings, so that she sails to-morrow with
+carpenters still at work. While the hull of this carefully modelled
+vessel is necessarily of light construction, with special steel to
+enable her to navigate safely the waters of the Mackenzie River,
+longitudinal strength has been adequately provided in the form of five
+lattice girders and by numerous hog-posts and ties, and the diagonal
+bracing of the bulkheads will provide ample transverse strength. The bow
+also has been made especially strong to resist the impact of ice, snags,
+etc. The hull is one hundred and twenty-five feet in length, twenty-six
+feet broad at the water-line, and five and one-third feet deep to the
+structural deck. The strength and safety of the hull are increased by
+five water-tight compartments. Propulsion is effected by a pair of
+modern stern paddle-wheel engines capable of being worked up to over two
+hundred and fifty horse power, giving her a speed of ten miles an hour.
+She has stateroom accommodation for twenty-two passengers, draws three
+and a half feet of water aft, and eats up half a cord of wood an hour.
+She will carry to the northern posts their trading-goods for the year.
+
+Within a day's ride of Fort Smith grazes a herd of four to five hundred
+wood bison, the last unconfined herd of buffalo in the world. Doubtless
+the wood buffalo were originally buffalo of the plains. Their wandering
+northward from the scoured and hunted prairies has not only saved them
+from extinction but has developed in them resistance and robust
+vitality. These bison appear darker and larger than their pictured
+cousins of the past. Probably the inner hair of these is finer and of
+thicker texture, a difference which the change of habitat to more
+northern latitudes would easily account for. The bison have two
+enemies: the grey wolf and the Indian, one an enemy _in esse_, the other
+_in posse_. The Government of Canada has prohibited the killing of the
+buffalo, and my opinion is that this law, as all other Canadian laws, is
+obeyed in the North. I questioned every one I talked with who lives on
+the rim of the buffalo-habitat, and the concensus of testimony of
+priests, H.B. men, settlers, traders, and Mounted Police, is that the
+Indians do not molest these animals. The arch-enemy of the wood buffalo
+is the timber wolf.
+
+[Illustration: The World's Last Buffalo]
+
+Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to
+laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable
+mosquito-infested muskeg. An untoward frost is more to be feared by
+these great brutes than the attacks of any insect. Thirty-eight years
+ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a
+subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do
+not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated.
+In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North
+country. In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River
+and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay
+Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them
+for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort
+hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.
+
+In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past
+were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's
+first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake
+"observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the
+river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind."
+In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance
+into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on
+the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated
+by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which
+occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.
+
+One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd
+of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has
+shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the
+buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now
+ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well
+as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning,
+conclusively prove.
+
+Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his
+magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of
+Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the
+flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he
+assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
+pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout
+to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the
+timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the
+native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's
+belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole
+season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but
+if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although
+always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith
+while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, "There, it
+had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more." Shortly
+afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was
+held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a
+litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in
+both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.
+It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama
+as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison
+host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of
+the wolf. Archbishop Tache tells of the persevering fortitude of a big
+wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle a la Crosse. Thirty days
+afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with
+trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through
+the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those
+weary miles.
+
+With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and
+a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are
+extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the
+stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise.
+There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no
+means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find
+their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap.
+Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as
+manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in
+1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the
+same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than
+doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to
+France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173
+worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.
+
+More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox
+and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver,
+seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw
+furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother
+Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred
+thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that
+number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured
+article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur
+clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole
+or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by
+snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half
+round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and
+pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who
+declared, "I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow
+proud," would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this
+age.
+
+In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the
+fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are
+carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the
+scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the
+undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the
+nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big
+enough to market, it is "heads I win, tails you lose." The United
+States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild
+animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on
+coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.
+
+What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the
+harmless fur-bearers. Several causes make against the extermination of
+these in Canada. The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the
+animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures.
+Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and
+putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of
+active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The
+fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of
+personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur
+popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its
+original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.
+
+What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in
+showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of
+the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function,
+and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a
+wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to
+the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little
+minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the
+last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end
+no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The
+exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This
+truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of
+reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove
+to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.
+
+The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away
+with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables
+inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape
+the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For
+lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk
+rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the
+horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with
+cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and
+incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and
+Northern travellers drink boiled tea _au natural_. Cows are the eternal
+feminine and will not be explained by logic.
+
+But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most
+valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is
+the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the
+bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies.
+"How old is Ann?" pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves
+patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes
+and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip
+or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits
+often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a
+cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his
+shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to
+the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox
+for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at
+Isle a la Crosse in latitude 55 deg. 30', about twenty years ago, an
+experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary--Burbanks
+got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were
+mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and
+black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was
+son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!
+
+We are told that Messrs. McDougall & Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the
+distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt
+ever paid on the London market,--$1700, that it was one of the most
+beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to
+the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state,
+"Of the American silver-fox (_Canis vulpes argentatus_) black skins have
+a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and
+by the nobles."
+
+[Illustration: Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage]
+
+And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter
+he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the
+London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased
+finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one
+cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds
+with keen discriminating sight, "Black's not so black nor white so very
+white." Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, "The silver-fox is but a
+phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a
+difference--!" Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we
+must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms,
+and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises
+greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative,
+the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat,
+Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.
+
+I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by
+the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the
+Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the
+river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game.
+He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without
+moving an eye-brow.
+
+At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican
+_(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)_ which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave
+finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of
+continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came
+across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in
+the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island
+in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we
+were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found
+something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The
+plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are
+slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid
+matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so
+far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the
+illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without
+shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight
+sepulture and was not "darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our
+bayonets turning." There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with
+conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and
+his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist
+robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on
+Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and
+neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified
+silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River
+pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest
+attempt to "open to her young her tender breast." It is rank libel for
+Byron to state
+
+"Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream
+To still her famished nestling's scream."
+
+And, when Keats states so sententiously in _Endymion_, "We are nurtured
+like a pelican brood," he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
+
+
+"Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use
+  Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,
+Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,
+  And the weird magic of old Indian tales."
+
+--_Archibald Lampman_.
+
+A double cabin is assigned us on _The Mackenzie River_ and the nightmare
+that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films
+vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water.
+Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg,
+still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction
+stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues
+into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the
+bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of
+sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the
+fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged
+race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated,
+and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having
+no popcorn, fizz, or Coney-Island red-hots to distribute, we did the
+next best thing,--became barkers and gave the calls that go with
+festivities. So now, as the boat swings out from the soft bank, it is a
+gay company of urchins who wave their caps and yell, "R-r-r-red
+lemol-lade, everybody drinks it!"
+
+There is only one Fort Smith! Established for three decades, it has as
+yet seen no wells dug. The people still climb that steep bank, carrying
+in pendant buckets from wooden shoulder-yokes water for the daily
+drinking and ablutions. At four o'clock in the afternoon, should you
+visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily
+procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,--the Aquarius sign of
+the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, "Why should they
+bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats
+from Scotland to tote their water up the banks."
+
+[Illustration: The "Red Lemol-lade" Boys]
+
+At noon we reach the Salt River, twenty-two miles up, which is one of
+the most marvellous salt deposits in the world. The Salt River winds in
+crescent curves through a valley wooded with aspen and spruce, and the
+Salt Plains six miles in extent stretch at the base of hills six or
+seven hundred feet high. The salt lies all over the ground in beautiful
+cubes,--pure crystal salt. It is anybody's salt plain; you can come here
+when you will and scoop up all you want. These plains have supplied the
+North country with salt since first white men penetrated the country. At
+the mouth of the Salt River are the shacks of the present
+representatives of the Beaulieus,--a family which has acted as guides
+for all the great men who ever trended northward. They have been
+interesting characters always, and as we look in upon them to-day
+neither Beaulieu nor salt has lost his savour.
+
+[Illustration: Salt Beds]
+
+The Slave River from where it leaves Fort Smith to its embouchure in
+Great Slave Lake is about two hundred miles long, with an average width
+of half a mile, except where it expands in its course to enclose
+islands. The big boat behaves beautifully in the water, and on we slip
+with no excitement until about five o'clock, when a moose and her calf
+are espied, well out of range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the
+sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The
+captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at
+the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of
+Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach Fort Resolution.
+
+To Samuel Hearne, the Mungo Park of Canada, belongs the double honour of
+tracing the Coppermine River and discovering Great Slave Lake. Just one
+hundred and thirty-seven years ago on Christmas Eve, Hearne got his
+first glimpse of this magnificent inland sea which is cut through the
+centre by the parallel of 62 deg., and which lies east and west between the
+meridians of 109 deg. and 117 deg.. No survey of Great Slave Lake has been made,
+but it is estimated to have a superficial area of 10,500 square
+miles--just one-third the size of troubled Ireland, and as great as
+Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.
+
+Great Slave Lake, lying wholly within the forested region, is three
+hundred miles long, and its width at one point exceeds sixty miles. At
+every place on its banks where the fur-traders have their stations
+ordinary farm-crops are grown. Barley sown at Fort Resolution in mid-May
+reaches maturity in a hundred days; potatoes planted at the same time
+are dug in mid-September. The gardens of Fort Rae on the North Arm of
+the Lake produce beets, peas, cabbages, onions, carrots, and turnips. As
+Fort Rae is built on a rocky island with a bleak exposure, this would
+seem to promise in some future day generous harvests for the more
+favoured lands on the south and west.
+
+The names given by the old fur-traders to their posts make the
+traveller think that in these North lands he, a second Christian, is
+essaying a new Pilgrim's Progress. At the south entry to the Lake we are
+at Resolution; when we cross it we arrive at Providence; away off at the
+eastern extremity is Reliance; Confidence takes us to Great Bear Lake;
+and Good Hope stretches far ahead down the lower reaches of the
+Mackenzie. Fort Resolution on the south side of Great Slave Lake, a
+little west of the mouth of the Slave, lies back of an island-sheltered
+entrance.
+
+[Illustration: Unloading at Fort Resolution]
+
+The striking feature as we enter is an immense Roman Catholic Mission
+school in process of construction, to supplement the existing church and
+school of that faith. There is neither station of the Mounted Police nor
+Church of England here; their places are taken by two independent
+fur-trading concerns operating in opposition to the Ancient Company.
+
+We had been told that the children down North had the kiddies at Fort
+Smith and Chipewyan "all skinned" for politeness, and we find it even
+so. The good nuns are trying to make reputable citizens of the young
+scions of the Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife nations and are succeeding
+admirably as far as surface indications go. We approach a group of
+smiling boys arrayed in their Sunday clothes, awaiting a visit of the
+Bishop. With one accord come off their Glengarry bonnets, smoking caps,
+and Christie stiffs, and a row of brown hands is extended to greet us.
+Very trim the laddies look in their convent-made cadet-uniforms, as,
+standing at "'Shun!" they answered our every question with, "Yes,
+missus," "No, missus." When we ask their names, without tittering or
+looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens. Here
+they have once more their white brothers "skinned"; no civilised man,
+woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal
+name in an audible tone without feeling a fool. I have seen grizzled
+judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses,
+squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed
+them "Archer Martin" or "Peter Secord" or whatever it might be.
+
+It is certainly Old Worldish. We speak with Father Laity who, all
+unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail
+and reads his breviary. He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age
+that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war. The Father
+came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.
+
+Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of
+the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow. The
+Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel.
+The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and
+shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole
+family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the
+pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this
+tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come
+across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. Afterward
+we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien
+Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to
+live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him
+by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means "_A
+man born_."
+
+Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the
+five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of
+His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh. The Yellow-Knives were so named
+by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons
+of native copper. Each head of a family is issued an
+identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to
+year. A father "draws treaty" for his olive-skinned branches until each
+marries and erects a tepee for himself. Government Agent Conroy, big
+bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and
+gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book.
+Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun. There
+are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation. The _Fiddler Anns,
+Waggon-box Julias_, and _Mrs. Turkeylegs_ of the Plains country are
+absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither
+waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.
+
+[Illustration: Coming to "Take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake]
+
+_Mary Catholic_ comes along hand-in-hand with _Samuel the Worm_. Full of
+animal spirits is a group of four--_Antoine Gullsmouth,
+Tongue-of-the-Jackfish, Baptiste Wolftail,_ and _The Cat's Son_. A
+little chap who announces himself as _T'tum_ turns out to be _Petite
+Homme_, the squat mate of _The Beloved_. It would be interesting to know
+just how each of the next couple acquired his name, for neither
+_Trois-Pouces_ and _Owl-Plucked-Out-His-Eye_ bears evidence of abnormal
+conditions. On a whole the names are more striking than our John Smiths;
+Richard Roes, and Tom Browns, as for instance the next three--_Le Pere
+des Carriboux, Geroux the Eldest, Alixi To-rong-jo.
+The-man-who-stands-still_ is evidently a stand-patter, while one wonders
+if it would be right to call _The-Man-Who-Walks-With-The-Red-Hair,_ a
+Crimson Rambler.
+
+_Carry-the-Kettle_ appears with _Star Blanket_ and _The Mosquito,_ and
+the next man in line, who has the tongs from a bon-bon box stuck in the
+band of his hat, rejoices in the name of _Strike-Him-on-the-Back,_ which
+somehow suggests the match-box in the hotel hall-way. As the dignified
+father, _Having-Passed-Many-Birthdays,_ claims five dollars each for his
+four daughters, _Smiling Martin, My-Wigwam-is-White,_ and the twins
+_Make-Daylight-Appear_ and _Red-Sky-of-the-Morning,_ we acknowledge that
+here again, in the art of naming, the Yellow-Knife has his white brother
+"skinned."
+
+Birth, dowry, divorce, death, each must be noted on the treaty ticket,
+with a corresponding adjustment of the number of dollar-bills to be
+drawn from the coffer. If a man between treaty-paying and treaty-paying
+marries a widow with a family, he draws five dollars each for the new
+people he has annexed. If there is an exchange of wives (a
+not-infrequent thing), the babies have to be newly parcelled out.
+Through all the family intricacies Mr. Conroy follows the interpreter
+with infinite patience and bonhomie. To the listener it sounds startling
+as the interpreter, presenting two tickets says, "He married these three
+people--this fellow." "O, he give dat baby away to Charles." When we
+hear in a dazed way that "_Mary Catholic's_ son married his dead woman's
+sister who was the widow of _Anton Larucom_ and the mother of two boys,"
+we take a long breath and murmur, "If the angle ACB is not equal to the
+angle ABC, then how can the angle DEF be equal to the angle DFE?" A
+young couple, looking neither of them more than sixteen or seventeen,
+return with a shake of the head five of the fifteen dollars proffered
+them, and the interpreter explains, "Their little boy died--there's only
+two of them."
+
+Gregory Daniels in a Scottish voice, which cannot quite hide its
+triumphant ring, pushes back his five dollars and demands forty-five. "I
+got a wife and siven since last year, she's a Cree wumman." Another
+half-breed asks anxiously if he would be allowed to send for a "permit"
+like a white man if he refused to take treaty.
+
+One man with long black hair and a cheese-cutter cap creates
+consternation at the tent-door by claiming treaty for two wives and
+seventeen children. Mr. Conroy, scenting an attempt to stuff the
+ballot-box, produces seventeen matches, lays them at my feet on the
+tent-floor and asks _The-Lean-Man_ to name them. He starts in all right.
+We hear, "_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish, Birdtail, Little Bone,
+Sweet Grass, Ermine Skin_," and then in a monotone he begins over again,
+"_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish_," and finally gives it up, eagerly
+asking the interpreter to wait "a-little-sun." The drama of paying and
+recording has gone on for half an hour and we have quite forgotten
+_The-Lean-Man_, when back he comes with _Mrs. Lean-Man, Sr._, and _Mrs.
+Lean-Man, Jr_. Each spouse leads her own progeny. Seeing is believing,
+and off _Lean-Man_ goes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to
+see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at
+a box of stogies, and the clerk says, "He can afford to blow in his wad
+on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter."
+They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put
+his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year
+because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he
+wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.
+
+Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly
+the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two
+young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton
+with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed
+figures at ten shies for a quarter. "Every time you hit 'em, you get a
+see-gar!" They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it
+took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break
+the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, "Them
+chaps pinked them dolls every time."
+
+As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a
+glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy's head. It is
+the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or "De-deed." The
+lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kisses her
+gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The
+whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother
+at the open door.
+
+Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves
+down for an hour's rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light
+effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting
+sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued
+night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness.
+Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high
+point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts.
+The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over
+all a measureless silence. At three o'clock in the morning we haul into
+the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at
+the landing.
+
+[Illustration: On the Slave]
+
+This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole
+North--although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay
+River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls
+and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission,
+learning how to play the white man's game--jolly and clean little bodies
+they are. It looks like Christmas time. Parcels are being done up, there
+is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black
+eyes. Would you like to see the letters that _The Teaser, The Twin,
+Johnny Little Hunter_, and _Mary Blue Quill_ are sending out to their
+parents? For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented
+soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are
+writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father's and
+mother's name. The soap has been bought with the children's pennies
+earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights.
+The parcels will be passed from one trapper's jerkin to another, and
+when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or
+lodge of the deerskin, _Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-Foam_ and _Mr.
+Kee-noo-shay-o_, or _The Fish_, will know their boys and girls "still
+remember."
+
+One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten
+years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his
+quest here, and lived happily ever after. Their children are the most
+fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint
+at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and
+sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness,
+letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover
+the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in
+evergreen boughs for their summer bedding--a delightful Ostermoor
+mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in
+summer, and in the winter they haul hay. The hay causes our enquiry, and
+we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by
+some glacial drift of the long ago. And thereby hangs a tale. Charlie,
+an attache of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day. As
+man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked,
+"Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?" "Bill balked," was the laconic
+reply. Tuesday's question would bring the same response, "Bill balked."
+And "Bill balked," on Wednesday. Thursday it is--"Bill didn't balk"; and
+so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter
+days.
+
+[Illustration: Dogs Cultivating Potatoes]
+
+The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60 deg. Fahrenheit, and the
+monthly mean for January, 18 deg. below zero. Vegetables of their own
+growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food
+supply of this thrifty Mission, one season's harvest giving them a
+thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of
+beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten
+thousand whitefish.
+
+Hay River has never been explored. It is supposed to head near the
+source of the Nelson and to flow northeast for three hundred miles
+before emptying, as we see it, into Great Slave Lake. This river marks
+the limit of those grassy plains which extend at intervals all the way
+from Mexico northward. Bishop Bompas, years ago, descended a long
+stretch of the river, discovering not far back from where we stand a
+majestic cataract, which he named the "Alexandra Falls" after the then
+Princess of Wales. He describes it as a perpendicular fall one hundred
+feet high, five hundred feet wide, and of surpassing beauty. "The amber
+colour of the falling water gives the appearance of golden tresses
+twined with pearls."
+
+Crossing Great Slave Lake, we think of Chant-la, Chief of the Slavis at
+Hay River. Bishop Reeves was anxious to convert him to the Christian
+faith, but had great difficulty in giving Chant-la a proper conception
+of the Trinity. The old man would not say he believed or understood what
+was inexplicable to him. Setting out once on a long journey, the cleric
+adjured the Chief to struggle with the problem during his absence. The
+Bishop returning, Chant-la came out in his canoe to meet him, eagerly
+reporting that all now was clear. "It is like Great Slave Lake," said
+the old man. "It is all water now, just like the Father. When winter
+comes it will be frozen over, but Great Slave Lake just the same; that
+is like the Son. In the spring when the ice breaks and the rain makes
+the snow into slush, it is still Great Slave Lake; and that is like the
+Holy Ghost."
+
+Beyond Great Slave Lake, forty-five miles down the Mackenzie, we reach
+Fort Providence, as strongly French in its atmosphere as Hay River is
+British. Our coming is a gala day. The hamlet flies three flags, the
+free trader sports his own initials "H.N.," the Hudson's Bay Company
+loyally runs the Union Jack to the masthead, over the convent floats the
+tri-colour of France. Fort Providence is hot. We walk to the convent and
+are hospitably received by the nuns. They call their Red flock together
+for us to inspect and show us marvellous handwork of silk embroidery on
+white deerskin. The daintiest of dainty slippers calls forth the
+question, "Where are you going to find the Cinderella for these?" A
+blank look is my answer, for no one in Providence Convent has ever heard
+of Cinderella! But then, convents are not supposed to be the
+repositories of man-knowledge (although a half-breed, on our passage
+across the lake, did whisper a romantic story of a Klondiker who
+assailed this very fortress and tried to carry off the prettiest nun of
+the north). The garden of the Sisters is a bower of all the
+old-fashioned flowers--hollyhocks, wall-flower, Canterbury bells, and
+sweet-William--and down in the corner a young girl of the Dog-Ribs
+discovers to us a nest of fledgling chipping sparrows.
+
+As we landed from the boat, Tenny Gouley dressed in his Sunday best had
+beamed, "Nice day--go veesit." And "veesit" we did. Mrs. Herron, of the
+H.B. Company, has spent many years at Old Fort Rae, and her thoughts
+hark back to one severe winter spent there. She turns to the wife of our
+good Captain with, "Hard living, Mrs. Mills, dry suckers." It is a short
+speech, but fraught with meaning. I honestly think a dry sucker (well
+sanded) the least succulent of all the impossible fish-dishes of the
+North. There are many young Herrons all as neat as new pins, the
+last--no, the latest, enshrined in a moss-bag. Tradition tells that
+once, when they were fewer in number, the father took the flock out to
+Winnipeg to school. The children cried so at the parting that Mr. Herron
+turned and brought them all back with him to the Mackenzie!
+
+[Illustration: David Villeneuve]
+
+The most interesting man in all Fort Providence is David Villeneuve, one
+of the Company's Old Guard. He was anxious to be "tooken" with his wife
+and grandchild, and over the camera we chatted. David goes through life
+on one leg--fishes through the ice in winter, traps, mends nets, drives
+dogs, and does it all with the dexterity and cheerfulness of a young
+strong man. He tells of his accident. "I was young fellow, me, when a
+fish-stage fell on me. I didn't pay no notice to my leg until it began
+to go bad, den I take it to the English Church to Bishop Bompas. He tole
+me de leg must come off, an' ax me to get a letter from de priest (I'm
+Cat-o-lic, me) telling it was all right to cut him. I get de letter and
+bring my leg to Bompas. He cut 'im off wid meat-saw. No, I tak' not'in',
+me. I chew tobacco and tak' one big drink of Pain-killer. Yas, it hurt
+wen he strike de marrow."
+
+"Heavens! Didn't you faint with the awful pain?"
+
+"What? Faint, me? No. I say, 'Get me my fire-bag, I want to have a
+smok'.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
+
+
+"Never the Spirit was born: the Spirit shall cease to be never.
+  Never was time, it was not; end and beginning are dreams.
+Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the Spirit,
+  Death hath not touched it at all, though dead the house of it seems."
+
+We have just finished supper and are sitting reading on the upper deck
+about seven o'clock, when a cry comes from below, followed by the
+rushing back and forth of moccasined feet. In a flash Bunny Langford,
+one of the engineers, has grabbed a lifebuoy, runs past us to the stern,
+and throws it well out toward a floating figure.
+
+It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution
+just twenty-four hours before. Finishing his turn at stoking, he had
+gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen,
+carrying the hatch with him. At first we think nothing of the incident,
+as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him. As soon as the
+startled people realise what has happened the steamer's engines are
+reversed and a boat is lowered. We call out to De-deed to swim to the
+buoy, but he doesn't see it or doesn't understand. The black head gets
+smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again. Down it goes
+for the second time. A strange, constricted feeling comes into our
+throats as we cry out, "Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming! They are
+almost up to you!" The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but
+a dozen yards away. Will he hold up? As we look, the head sinks, _and it
+does not come up_. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of
+De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with
+grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles
+down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before
+us--the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the
+rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is
+well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the
+Mackenzie, goes out with the current.
+
+The Mackenzie River, "La Grande Riviere en Bas," as the people of
+Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the
+greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers
+the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of
+either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the
+Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little
+Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight
+miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion
+of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from
+source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep
+to two and a half to three miles.
+
+From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom
+exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as
+"The Head of the Line." Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie,
+when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was
+at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains
+bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with
+muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of
+water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second.
+No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard
+a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for
+commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough "white coal"
+rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The
+Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range.
+The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the
+Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main
+river through passes in that range.
+
+At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated
+on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on
+their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course
+the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.
+
+We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River
+and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o'clock we are at
+Fort Simpson in latitude 62 deg., the old metropolis of the North. Fort
+Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie,
+the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of
+the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it
+was known in fur annals as "The Forks of the Mackenzie."
+
+Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its
+quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and
+try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In
+those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were
+received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes
+with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold
+stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front
+of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums
+have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in
+fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall
+unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a
+rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across
+the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the
+life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry
+feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and
+exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while
+the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history
+so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of
+the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent
+to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,
+
+[Illustration: Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson]
+
+"I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice,
+bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or
+reptiles would be acceptable. They may either be skinned or placed in
+rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of
+the body to admit the spirits to the intestines."
+
+Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most
+tickles my fancy.
+
+I think of the little group that we had forgathered with at Chipewyan,
+driven even in this year of grace to lavender-water and red ink, when
+permits run dry. One turns back the clock to the time of the Chartists
+and the year of the nuptials of the young Queen in England. We see up
+here on the fringe of things the dour and canny but exceedingly humorous
+Adam McBeaths, John Lee Lewises, and George Simpsons, the outer vedette
+of the British Empire; and, seeing them, get some half-way adequate
+conception of what a modicum of rum or "strong spirits of any kind"
+meant in the way of cheer at old Fort Simpson in those days. When we try
+to get a picture of one of these Hudson's Bay men gravely opening a
+shrew-mouse, mole, or "other small quadruped," while his chum pours in
+the _aqua vitae_ or precious conversation water, we declare that science
+asks too much.
+
+An outer stairway leading to the second story of a big building invites
+us. Opening the door, we find ourselves in the midst of an old library,
+and moth and rust, too, here corrupt. We close the door softly behind us
+and try to realise what it meant to bring a library from England to Fort
+Simpson a generation ago. First, there arose the desire in the mind of
+some man for something beyond dried meat and bales of fur. He had to
+persuade the authorities in England to send out the books.
+Leather-covered books cost something six or seven decades ago, and the
+London shareholders liked better to get money than to spend it. We see
+the precious volumes finally coming across the Atlantic in wooden
+sailing-ships to Hudson Bay, follow them on the long portages, watch
+them shoot rapids and make journeys by winter dog-sled, to reach Simpson
+at last on the backs of men. The old journals reveal stories of the
+discussion evoked by the reading of these books afterward as, along with
+the dried fish, deer-meat, and other inter-fort courtesies, they passed
+from post to post. Was never a circulating library like this one. And
+now the old books, broken-backed and disembowelled, lie under foot, and
+none so poor to do them reverence. Everything is so old in this North
+that there is no veneration for old things.
+
+It is but a few years since the founder of this library died, and his
+son now sits in his saddle at Fort Simpson. If you were to wander across
+the court, as I did to-day, and look into the Sales Shop, you would see
+the presentation sword of this last-generation Carnegie, ignobly slicing
+bacon for an Indian customer. _Sic transit gloria mundi_!
+
+What are the books which this sub-Arctic library sent out? We get down
+on the floor and gently touch the historic old things. Isn't it Johnson
+who says, "I love to browse in a library"? Judging by the dust and
+cobwebs, there hasn't been much browsing done among these volumes for
+years. Present-day Simpson has seldom "fed on the dainties that are bred
+in a book." Here is a first edition of _The Spectator_, and next it a
+_Life of Garrick_, with copies of _Virgil_, and all _Voltaire_ and
+_Corneille_ in the original. A set of Shakespeare with exquisite line
+drawings by Howard shows signs of hard reading, and so does the _Apology
+for the Life of Mr. Colly Cibber_. One wonders how a man embedded in
+Fort Simpson, as a fly in amber, would ever think of sending to the
+_Grand Pays_ for _Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy_, yet we find it here,
+cheek by jowl with _The Philosophy of Living or the Way to Enjoy Life
+and Its Comforts. The Annual Register of History, Politics, and
+Literature of the Year 1764_ looks plummy, but we have to forego it. The
+lengthy titles of the books of this vintage, as for instance, _Death-Bed
+Triumphs of Eminent Christians, Exemplifying the Power of Religion in a
+Dying Hour_, bring to mind the small boy's definition of
+porridge--"fillin', but not satis-fyin'." Two more little books with big
+titles are _Actors' Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of
+Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues_, and _The London Prisons, with an
+Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in
+Them_.
+
+But the book that most tempts our cupidity is _Memoirs of Miss A---- n,
+Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars_. We want
+that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the
+Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its
+silver mouths. We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we
+hunger to steal it. Jekyll struggles with Hyde. At last the Shorter
+Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it
+down and softly close the door behind us. And ever since we have
+regretted our Presbyterian training.
+
+At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an
+old cathedral. Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their
+kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic. We walk along the
+shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in
+washing clothes with washboards--the old order and the new. A little
+dive into the mosquito-ridden woods discloses a wonderful patch of
+Pyrola and a nest of Traills' flycatcher, and makes us wish that the
+minutes were longer and the mosquitoes fewer. What a beautiful tiling
+this Pyrola is, with its inverted anthers and the cobwebby margins of
+its capsule! Its bracted, nodding flowers run through all shades of
+white, pale yellow, and dark yellow.
+
+Down on the beach we chat with a prospector and his son, a lad of
+fifteen, who are building a skiff in which to ascend the Liard, hunting
+gold. Yesterday a Mr. and Mrs. Carl and a Mr. and Mrs. Hall passed us on
+the river. Outfitted for two years, they will prospect for gold in the
+Nahanni Mountains and toward the headwaters of the Liard. One of the
+couples has just come out from Glasgow and this is their honeymoon. We
+half envy them their journey. Can anything compare with the dear
+delights of travelling when you do not know and nobody knows just what
+lies round the next corner?
+
+[Illustration: A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson]
+
+The dogs at Simpson are "wicked." Picking our way among them, I
+particularly approve this term of the natives, attributing as it does a
+human conception and malice aforethought to these long-legged wraiths.
+The first articulate sound an Indian child of the Mackenzie learns to
+make is "Mash!" an evident corruption of the French "_Marche_." This is
+what Shakespeare meant when he speaks of "a word to throw at a dog." A
+brown baby just emerged from the cocoon stage of the moss-bag toddles
+with uplifted pole into a bunch of these hungry mongrels and disperses
+them with a whack of the stick and the lordly "Mash!" of the superior
+animal. For our own part we are "scared stiff," but follow along in the
+wake of our infant protector to a wee wooden church which staggers under
+the official title, "The Cathedral of St. David."
+
+[Illustration: A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson]
+
+We have had occasion to speak of the splendid service rendered to
+Northern and Western Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company and by the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police. A third factor through the years has been
+building Empire with these. Are we not as a people too prone to minimise
+the great nation-building work performed by the scattered missionaries
+in the lone lands beyond the railway? Ostensibly engaged in the work of
+saving souls, Canadian missionaries, both Roman and English, have opened
+the gates of commerce, prosecuted geographical discovery, tried to
+correct social evils, and added materially to our store of exact
+science. Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools
+established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to
+deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman,
+the last thing you ask is, "To what church does he belong?"
+Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running
+through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no
+Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton.
+The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide
+the field between them.
+
+The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure
+than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had
+two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade
+Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the
+wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan
+scribe merely as "a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the
+Portage." In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between
+his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago,
+only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is
+literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world's map has
+ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his
+sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we
+might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from
+London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson's
+Bay forts, and substituting for Europe's vineyards and pleasant vales an
+unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.
+
+We are told that Bishop Bompas's father was Dicken's prototype for
+Sergeant Buzfuz. A new vista would open up to the counsel for Mrs.
+Bardell could he turn from his chops and tomato-sauce to follow the
+forty-years' wandering in the wilderness of this splendid man of God,
+who succeeded, if ever man succeeds, in following Paul's advice of
+keeping his body under.
+
+Bishops Bompas was one of the greatest linguists the Mother Country ever
+produced. Steeped in Hebrew and the classics when he entered the
+Northland, he immediately set himself to studying the various native
+languages, becoming thoroughly master of the Slavi, Beaver, Dog-Rib, and
+Tukudk dialects. When Mrs. Bompas sent him a Syriac testament and
+lexicon, he threw himself with characteristic energy into the study of
+that tongue. There is something in the picture of this devoted man
+writing Gospels in Slavi, primers in Dog-Rib, and a Prayer Book in
+syllabic Chipewyan, which brings to mind the figure of Caxton bending
+his silvered head over the blocks of the first printing-press in the old
+Almonry so many years before. What were the "libraries" in which this
+Arctic Apostle did his work? The floor of a scow on the Peace, a hole in
+the snow, a fetid corner of an Eskimo hut. His "Bishop's Palace," when
+he was not afloat, consisted of a bare room twelve feet by eight, in
+which he studied, cooked, slept, and taught the Indians.
+
+They tell you stories up here of seeing the good Bishop come back from a
+distant journey to some isolated tribe, followed at heel by a dozen
+little Indian babies, his disciples for the days to come. Bishop Bompas
+lived in one continent, but manifested in two, keeping himself closely
+in touch with the religious and Church growth of the Old World. When the
+British press had been given over to any particular
+religious-controversial subject, and the savants had finally disposed of
+the matter to their own satisfaction, travelling out by summer traverse
+or winter dog-sled would come a convincing pamphlet by Bishop Bompas, to
+upset altogether the conclusions of the wranglers.
+
+There is one tale of this man which only those can appreciate who travel
+his trail. An Indian lad confides to us, "Yes, my name is William
+Carpenter--Bishop Bompas gave me my name, he was a good man. He wouldn't
+hurt anybody, he never hit a dog, he wouldn't kill a mosquito. He had
+not much hair on his head, and when it was _meetsu_, when the Bishop eat
+his fish, he shoo that mosquito away and he say, 'Room for you, my
+little friend, and room for me, but this is not your place: go.'"
+
+We call upon the present incumbents of the little church of St. David.
+They are young people, the Rev. and Mrs. Day, putting in their first
+year in this Northern charge. Their home with its spotless floors and
+walls papered with old copies of _The Graphic_ and _Illustrated London
+News_ is restful and attractive. The garden of the parsonage shows an
+amount of patient work on the part of some one. Potatoes eighteen
+inches high and peas twice the height of this, with turnips and cabbages
+and cauliflower are good to look at. There are records to show that,
+years ago, Fort Simpson produced tomatoes and decent crops of barley.
+
+[Illustration: Interior of St. David's Cathedral]
+
+Entering the little church we see the neat font sent here by Mrs.
+Bompas, "In dear memory of Lucy May Owindia, baptised in this Church,
+January, 1879." Owindia was one of the many red waifs that the good
+Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took into their big hearts. Her story is a sad
+one. Along the beach at Simpson, _Friday_, an Indian, in a burst of
+ungovernable temper murdered his wife and fled, leaving their one baby
+to perish. It was not until next day that the little one was found,
+unconscious and dying. The Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took the child into
+their loving care. To the name Owindia, which means _The Weeping One_,
+was added the modern Lucy May, and the little girlie twined herself
+closely round the hearts of her protectors. When the time seemed ripe,
+Owindia was taken back to England to school, but the wee red plant would
+not flourish in that soil. She sickened and died. Hence the memorial and
+the inscription we read this July day. Much history of militant energy,
+much of endurance, and countless chapters of benevolence did the good
+Bishop write into the history of the North before, off on the Yukon side
+in 1906, "God's finger touched him and he slept."
+
+Missionaries of the present day are not without their troubles. Mrs. Day
+tells of potato-whiskey making in some illicit still back in the
+mosquito-woods, the results of which she fears; and, even as we speak,
+an Indian lunatic pokes his head through the palings of the
+potato-patch. From far back in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and from
+Fort Liard, the Hudson's Bay men have come to make their reports to Mr.
+Brabant at Simpson. They brought their wives and babies with them,
+brought also a quantity of beautiful porcupine-quill work, Fort Liard
+being one of the few places in the North where this art flourishes.
+Tomorrow they will start back, tacking against the stream, as the
+imported brides are doing before them.
+
+To dive into the journals of the past, of which the loft above the
+offices here at Simpson is full, is even more interesting than talking
+with the people of the present. We take 1837, the year which saw the
+accession in England of the young and well-beloved Queen, and from
+these musty books unearth a running commentary of what is doing in Fort
+Simpson in that year.
+
+"_1837, January 1_. The people were brought into the Hall, and enjoyed
+their meal with great appetites, being also treated to a glass of wine
+and a fathom of tobacco and a pipe. Wind East."
+
+"_1837, February 11_. Rabbits are numerous, but the ladies of the
+Establishment make no great effort in snaring them."
+
+"_1837, February 14_. Late last night arrived a woman, _Thawyase_, and a
+boy, the family of the late _Thoesty_. They have all come to take refuge
+here as they are starving. The woman at dusk decoyed old Jack away to
+camp in the woods--and the old fellow has found a mate."
+
+One wonders if either _Thawyase_, the decoyed Jack, or the old
+chronicler was conscious of the fact that this was St. Valentine's Day.
+
+"_1837, March 27_. Two geese have been seen to-day, the first this
+season."
+
+"_1837, May 2_. _Marcel_ sowed some oats. Mosquitoes begin to become
+annoying."
+
+"_1837, May 5_. Wild fowl are beginning to frequent the small lakes of
+the neighbourhood. The willows and young trees are now budding forth
+beautifully."
+
+"_1837, May 18_. _Hope_ began to plough this morning with the bull, but
+as this is the first time he has been yoked, the day's work is found to
+be but poor."
+
+"_1837, May 19_. Felix and Roderick McLeod made twelve bags of pemmican
+to-day."
+
+_1837, May 21_. The Mackenzie River broke up to-day, and continued
+drifting pretty thick till evening."
+
+"_1837, June 18_. Some of the Indians killed a bear before the door and
+it supplied us with a little fresh meat."
+
+"_1837, June 19_. Flies so numerous that we are under the necessity of
+putting our cattle into the stable, otherwise they will fall victims to
+the cruel insects."
+
+"_1837, June 20_. Weather very suffocating, thermometer 85 above at
+three p.m., not as much as a cloud to be seen in the firmament and not
+the least air to afford any refreshment; this along with the solitude of
+the time is enough to make people dull. No Indian from any quarter: well
+supplied with ammunition last spring, they forget us when they can get
+their own mouths satisfied. Ashley grinding barley in the steel mill."
+
+"_1837, June 21_. _Le Mari_ has just brought in some fish and a little
+bearskin in order to get a chemise, he says he is not able to hunt
+without a chemise, as there are so many flies just now. I have taken it
+upon myself to give him the shirt on credit."
+
+Here a new hand writes the records, untrammelled by any orthographic
+rules.
+
+"_1837, June 24_. Flys very numerus and trublsome to the Cattel."
+
+"_1837, July 11_. Starvan Indians going and coming ourly."
+
+"_1837, July 13_. Six squas arrived with plenty Bearrys--that's all they
+subsist on in this part of the River."
+
+"_1837, July 26_. Barley is getting ripe. But small birds nip off the
+ends of the stalks as fast as it ripens."
+
+"_1837, August 23_. Last night the bull broke into one of the gardens
+where oats was sown and eat the whole up."
+
+"_1837, September 18_. An Express arrived from Fort Norman with
+despatches from the Gentlemen of the Arctic Discovery Expedition, and it
+is most satisfying to learn that the first object of the Expedition was
+successfully accomplished: on the 4th August the Company's flag was
+planted on Point Barrow."
+
+"_1837, September 19th_. _Louson_ put parchment in the window-frames."
+
+"_1837, October 11_. Ice is forming since yesterday along the beach."
+
+"_1837, November 1_. This being the holiday for All Saints, the men
+though no saints celebrated it off duty. The weather cold but fine."
+
+"_1837, November 2_. I have been these two days occupied with the
+blacksmith in making an oven, and this evening it being finished we give
+it a fair trial by placing a large trout in it for supper and it is
+found to answer most excellently."
+
+"_1837, November 3_. Strong northwest wind with drift and cold. About
+one o'clock of last night the Aurora had a most unusual appearance,
+seemingly black in place of the white commonly observed and forming an
+arch from east to west, consisting of five streaks, here and there
+broken off."
+
+"_1827, November 5_. Blacksmith making iron runners for our traineaux
+from old gun-barrels."
+
+"_1837, November 30_. This being the anniversary of the Tutelar Saint of
+Scotland, we had in addition to our usual dinner a roasted swan and a
+moose-nose, a rice pudding, a cranberry tart, and a glass of wine."
+
+"_1837, December 1_. I was obliged to give four pounds of dried meat to
+the dogs for there are some that are almost dead and they et all the
+windows of the Forge."
+
+"_1837, December 2_. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of
+insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and prevent
+them devouring themselves."
+
+_December 25_. Thermometer 35 below the cypher this morning, this being
+Christmas no labour done. Wind N.W."
+
+"_1838, January 1_. The morning was ushered in by a salute fired by our
+people at the windows and doors, after which they came to wish us a
+Happy New Year--and in return, in conformity to the custom of the
+country they were treated, the men with half a glass of brandy each, and
+the women with a kiss, and the whole of them with as many cakes as they
+choose to take and some raisins. One of our gentlemen who had a bottle
+of shrub treated them to a glass, and after some chit-chat conversation
+they retired, firing a salute on going out. In the evening they played
+at Blind-man's-buff, concluding the fete by a supper in the Hall. I also
+gave each of the men a fathom of twist tobacco and a clay pipe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
+
+
+"With souls grown clear
+  In this sweet atmosphere,
+With influences serene,
+  Our blood and brain washed clean,
+We've idled down the breast
+  Of broadening tides."
+
+--_Chas. G.D. Roberts_.
+
+About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we
+push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and
+parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen
+present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.
+We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed
+into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet
+photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the
+Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we
+proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due
+northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the
+pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the
+river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so
+low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we
+impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the
+Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course
+for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora]
+
+At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal
+mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow
+the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake
+Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A
+ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the
+pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed
+view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who
+understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have
+that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to
+attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when
+many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so
+blatantly dub "progress."
+
+It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence
+we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road
+to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to
+the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons
+passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the
+silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.
+
+Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded,
+and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's
+development and acceptance--banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings
+of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and
+unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the
+Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into
+its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the
+Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the
+Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams
+hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to
+the _inconnu_ and the Indian.
+
+It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream
+to its mouth, "discovering" a river along whose shores centuries before
+had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race,
+wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or
+chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age
+follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time
+these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed "the red men" and "the American
+Indian."
+
+We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply
+turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl--gulls in great
+variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny
+laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers
+and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are
+to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the
+banks--the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid
+golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss
+dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash
+breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the
+swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of
+upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being
+modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.
+
+Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters
+begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly
+south to kinder skies, the _inconnu_ hurry northward seeking the sea.
+Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's "_Le convert du bon
+Dieu_," silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and
+ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering
+Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated
+fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the
+six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or
+unwitting of shelter.
+
+According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the
+ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds
+the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for
+him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut
+etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest
+it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his
+man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys
+upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues
+a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great
+hunter, man.
+
+In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the
+intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the
+Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke
+not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice
+of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power--the
+Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his
+children.
+
+Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is
+saying "Spring," full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the
+open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the
+honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and
+darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary
+streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting
+ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and
+all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.
+
+Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and
+wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into
+a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever
+hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has
+always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along
+her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of
+life; their unvoiced prayer is, "Give us our fish in due season." From
+the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and
+dipped and seined their sustenance--inconnu, jack-fish, grayling,
+white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice
+or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway--a trail worn
+smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast
+in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.
+
+Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and
+lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of
+recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the
+great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along
+these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph,
+self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the
+noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the
+keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife,
+Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand
+despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise
+was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the
+Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game
+of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a
+man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.
+
+About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and
+Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size.
+One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is "just
+like a town." Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough
+record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will
+always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered
+the fringed gentian (_Gentiana crinata_) with its lance-shaped leaves,
+delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian
+is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and
+it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63 deg.. Purple
+asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse
+or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled
+flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and
+purple columbines already forming seed.
+
+Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance
+from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche
+Trempe-l'eau or "The Rock by the Riverside," an outcrop of Devonian
+limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above
+the river. We come into view of the "boucans" or beds of lignite coal
+which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in
+1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his
+journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back,
+for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it
+would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would
+come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter
+monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there
+were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the
+Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their
+eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of "small white buffalo" which they
+hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the
+_Sass-sei-yeuneh_ or "Foolish Bear" of the Slavis.
+
+[Illustration: Indians at Fort Norman]
+
+It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast
+of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes
+into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in
+a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been
+in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the
+current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor
+against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is
+a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by
+the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.
+
+The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole
+of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the
+outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established
+winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water,
+probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave
+Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual
+shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and
+fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are
+surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very
+late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.
+
+March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three
+feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier
+water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs
+are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings
+blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September
+is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last
+of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre
+of the lake freezes over.
+
+When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one
+going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle "Boyne
+Water." The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across
+the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the "Nest of
+the Wind" of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this
+great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in
+thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that
+the Great Spirit, "in the beginning," spread out there to dry. We find
+Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning,
+the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and
+Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat
+coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to
+his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library,
+and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas,
+beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman
+lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the
+outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and
+pink-teas.
+
+[Illustration: Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman]
+
+[Illustration: The Ramparts of the Mackenzie]
+
+Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path
+leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It
+is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of
+children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and
+awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb
+flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at
+lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.
+
+Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the
+peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float
+between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass
+Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for.
+The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection.
+If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they
+have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a
+wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache
+of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when
+ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky
+replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.
+
+It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest
+spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,--the Ramparts. The
+great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here
+narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles
+forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred
+feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers,
+and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, "turned on edge," flows,
+maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of
+the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring,
+the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a
+skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the
+cliffs above.
+
+As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian
+artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with
+the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted,
+our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of
+this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the
+picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn
+and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and
+envelopes the earth as with a garment,--the light that never was on sea
+or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to
+pass the portal into the Arctic World.
+
+[Illustration: Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth]
+
+A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians
+has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting
+for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big
+steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their
+old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock,
+ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower
+down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed
+from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river;
+and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at
+midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
+Circle.
+
+The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say
+our "joggafy" lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar
+bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in
+America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the
+Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen
+silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there?
+Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his
+daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,--Mrs. Pierre la Hache.
+Tenny wears his "other clothes" and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for
+this is his home. "It looks like a swan on the water," he says, when the
+first white houses come into view. "You like it, do you not?" "Like it?
+Good Hope is God's Country!" There is no place like home, even when it
+is the Arctic Circle!
+
+The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the
+dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the
+big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr.
+C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand
+servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the
+greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has
+continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition
+is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employes a pension
+after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely
+deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old
+gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to
+his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the
+younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up
+the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr.
+Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope
+Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.
+
+Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses,
+and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.
+Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back
+from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women
+call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to
+rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is
+hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list
+of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the
+unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss
+Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide
+world.
+
+We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of
+pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your
+throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine
+and _galettes_, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the
+window-ledge and look around the walls of the "homey" room we wonder if
+this really can be the "Arctic Circle, 23-1/2 deg. from the North Pole,
+which marks the distance that the sun's rays," etc., etc., as the little
+geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday
+School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women,
+earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and
+girls--the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a
+pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there
+a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned
+hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend
+runs,--"Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a
+bottle and a little loaf of bread."
+
+Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first
+Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the
+first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: "And
+how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?" Quick came the
+girlie's reply, "They had to leave The Company's service!"
+
+Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. "We get a mail every
+year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail." This is to her
+the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A
+letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope
+crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it
+travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the
+Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by
+dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence
+the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good
+Hope on the Arctic Circle.
+
+We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and
+devotion to The Company,--these are the two key-notes of her character.
+Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made "outside"
+to Montreal when she was a young mother--it was just fifty years
+ago,--measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died,
+"_Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants_!" Some years after
+this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies,
+snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until
+it was torn from her by force.
+
+We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the
+whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable
+gardens are in evidence here,--potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages.
+Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's
+Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the
+store of the "free-trader," he says, "Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman,
+kindly, and dear, but she doesn't approve of me. She makes a point of
+not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church."
+
+"Why?" we ask, much surprised.
+
+"Oh," with a laugh, "you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B.
+Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns
+and a tail!"
+
+We step into the "Little Church of the Open Door," and sit down and
+think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the
+mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see
+across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a
+transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a
+saint,--St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery
+outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts
+will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, "Our Lady of
+Good Hope," the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri
+Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
+
+
+"Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,
+And out of my full heart,
+Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold
+The Infinite thou art.
+What matter all the creeds that come and go,
+The many gods of men?
+My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow."
+
+--_A Pagan Hymn_.
+
+"The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber," said
+text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We
+didn't find him.
+
+It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel
+since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the
+true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a
+master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were,
+men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for
+tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing,
+and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of
+the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and
+this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is
+always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his
+dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is
+a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he
+is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing
+with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little
+half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of
+good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly
+round the neck with, "Everybody are my friend."
+
+One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode
+on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to
+trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco,
+looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with
+him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures
+between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began.
+"What for this fellow, huh?" and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a
+little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or
+the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap,
+the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which
+looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each
+bargain sealed with a handshake.
+
+Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of
+animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours,
+the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a
+Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did
+when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same
+place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the
+claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.
+
+[Illustration: A Kogmollye Family]
+
+Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats
+while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to
+do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their
+names and to ask ours. "Major Jabussy," "Missa Blown," they got the
+names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into
+roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no
+one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this
+Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one
+exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair,
+the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in
+physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and
+Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six
+feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage
+and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has "arrived"; he has an
+air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms "Outside" you seldom see.
+
+The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to
+the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the
+Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for
+the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from
+the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for
+the American whalers.
+
+One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the
+Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two
+wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did
+she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak
+the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big
+seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years
+followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of
+walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet
+sinks in a well.
+
+One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord
+the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot
+consistency which was his taste, she said, "I'm not as young as I was,
+you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get
+another wife to help me with the work." Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon
+the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak,
+dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and
+as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a
+rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.
+
+How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire
+trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North
+family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but
+never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a menage of nicer
+adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of
+life, waggish and keen, "quick at the uptak'," as the Scotch say,
+presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing
+her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior
+economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet,
+dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and
+plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of
+height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a
+man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception
+where men of the world forgather.
+
+Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the
+Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet,
+the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple
+dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking
+back to Old World culture and distinction.
+
+[Illustration: Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family]
+
+How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for
+her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy
+and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family
+fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps
+with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of
+her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the
+exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had
+brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the
+matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two
+school-girls.
+
+The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in
+vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were
+all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking
+Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If
+no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony
+there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?
+
+Kipling declares, "There's never a law of God or man runs north of
+fifty-three." The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent
+quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He
+is his own man.
+
+In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of "One
+man, One wife," allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and
+elsewhere, so that it may read, "One man, one wife at a time." Are we so
+sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the
+Eskimo?
+
+Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread,
+in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On
+the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples;
+here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill
+as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of
+seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In
+many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women
+outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and
+provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo
+is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large
+families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now,
+the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and
+provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a
+floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and
+generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can
+comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from
+extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the
+Nunatalmutes?
+
+The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo
+equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a
+significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either
+the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment
+to the latitude of 68 deg. North and take cognizance of the fact that no
+seductive "Want Columns" in the daily press here offer a niche whereby
+unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as
+chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To
+keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own
+proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind
+is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all
+must have in order to live.
+
+Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a
+man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each
+partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness
+fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of
+human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle
+perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it
+seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?
+
+I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always
+content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit,
+nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a
+reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of
+seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely,
+but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the
+Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three
+winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her
+feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.
+
+In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate
+to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her
+brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast
+consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The
+ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests
+present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one
+needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as "odours of Edom and
+offerings Divine."
+
+The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a
+retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight
+suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands
+above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a
+gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in
+the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the
+air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice
+repeated,
+
+"Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya--yae!"
+
+Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory
+and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride,
+pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.
+
+By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most
+admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most
+misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The
+Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known
+but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is
+an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line
+between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty
+miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four
+peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
+and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of
+Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days
+brought their most precious medium of exchange,--a peculiar blue jade,
+one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a
+tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so
+the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's
+ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.
+
+This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and
+merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old
+men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious
+oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and
+courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these
+Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of
+delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no
+red-hots nor "fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled
+and f-five a bag!", but the Arctic concomitants of these,--boiled
+beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that
+smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in
+the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the
+counters that are different.
+
+Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down
+into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and
+fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the
+world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south
+were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that
+disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great
+Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771,
+followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives
+their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at
+Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band
+of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in
+1820 was more happy. He says, "The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands
+in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile
+intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making
+bows." Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this
+tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, "I called out '_Tima_'
+(Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out
+'_Tima_.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily
+by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white
+man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and
+they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up
+a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would
+eat it."
+
+Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian
+missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of
+such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited
+the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but
+rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John
+Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen,
+the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them,
+and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and
+his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo
+is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid
+moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.
+
+Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated
+religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to
+turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell
+to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, "Goodbye, my
+dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never
+reach you."
+
+The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north,
+"keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole." But the Eskimo
+has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and
+it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what
+it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast
+it doesn't drop below 55.
+
+The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,--the land and the sea,
+with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his,
+that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the
+Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most
+insistent one would be, "Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but
+hang on to your fish-net."
+
+Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo
+and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the
+contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The
+Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together
+the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of
+revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the
+blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts
+Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but
+with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies,
+and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In
+the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of
+one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against
+misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo
+stays on the coast to-day because it is to him "God's country" and not
+because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.
+
+For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed
+the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different
+bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the
+Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the
+ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the
+season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the
+intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the
+Eskimo?
+
+Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta
+region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of
+that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever,
+consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling
+decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though
+consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian,
+measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal
+than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.
+
+What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them
+making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic,
+so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole
+horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but
+call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates
+once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and
+molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side
+of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the
+Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.
+
+The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by
+marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the
+whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its
+changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of
+the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the
+Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo
+mothers, and, for "floating fathers," marking their escutcheon with
+every nationality under the sun,--American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,
+Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all
+miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is
+different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a
+Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or
+Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.
+There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo
+"wives" outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.
+One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken
+"outside" by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or
+eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south
+to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the
+marriage-contract is "good for this season only," and the wife and
+children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him
+with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.
+
+What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her
+people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of
+Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the
+erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she
+is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and
+capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man
+of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her
+second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she
+shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she
+again essays Hymen's lottery.
+
+Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share
+that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a
+child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the
+half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness
+forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall
+below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the
+ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity
+plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the
+blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see
+and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied
+and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in
+this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, "The
+sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and
+fourth generation;" it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own
+inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally
+descend in direct line.
+
+We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he
+approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of
+hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft,
+his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But,
+most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children.
+"A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure," is a pretty theory,
+but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own
+footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the
+igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in
+and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe
+air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.
+
+The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but
+there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive.
+He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his
+place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent
+entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no
+power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of
+doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden
+Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily
+even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered
+into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is
+but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be
+born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day
+meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the
+clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born
+while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from
+the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at,
+much less fuss over, the little stranger.
+
+Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown
+man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy
+to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the
+newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers
+around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes
+possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in
+twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to
+influence the character and destiny of the growing child.
+
+We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The
+summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its
+earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's
+back under her _artikki_, or upper garment, which has been made
+voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King
+Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a
+bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is
+wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother
+who first crooned in love and literalness,
+
+"By-o, Baby Bunting,
+Daddy's gone a-hunting,
+To get a little rabbit-skin,
+To wrap his Baby Bunting in."
+
+Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet.
+While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer
+enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a
+beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins
+pendant,--rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the
+floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and
+jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of
+hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young
+hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the
+culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in
+one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.
+
+A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns
+to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon
+the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as
+the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the
+Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being
+inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.
+
+The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not
+unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for
+twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a
+little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out
+every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At
+eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line
+on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an
+air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not
+think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with
+the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam,
+and says, "The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so."
+
+These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their
+play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North,
+as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their
+vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no
+molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a
+walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was
+neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of
+tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball,
+down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft
+parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under
+dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."
+
+The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.
+It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated
+difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on
+each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his
+adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound
+by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to
+him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.
+All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a
+row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind,
+for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted
+discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the
+ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball
+diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line
+of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and
+out among the camps of the Eskimo,--"Self-reverence, self-knowledge,
+self-control."
+
+[Illustration: Farthest North Football]
+
+What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude
+imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and
+"visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas;
+but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up
+in her mother's long dresses.
+
+[Illustration: Two Spectators at the Game]
+
+When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in
+spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative
+of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time
+that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle
+are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the
+meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and
+south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the
+anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game,
+help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six
+months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever.
+The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any
+suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are
+finished and the new hunts not yet begun. "I'll eat my hat" is an empty
+threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing
+pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.
+
+At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me
+this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie
+Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and
+cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again
+indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken
+violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one
+little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained,
+alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young
+Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the
+silent camp.
+
+One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that
+little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing,
+waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies
+of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as
+its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went
+in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that
+A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too,
+and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have
+been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly
+compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.
+
+[Illustration: An Eskimo Exhibit
+
+A--Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.
+
+B--Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the
+missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word "Lamb" having no
+meaning to an Eskimo.
+
+C--Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.
+
+D--Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.
+
+E--Model of Eskimo paddle.
+
+F--Skin model of the _Oomiak_ or Eskimo woman's boat.
+
+G and H--Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half
+a thimbleful of tobacco.]
+
+As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of
+loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had
+never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry
+admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he
+is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with _after_ the fit of
+passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools,
+with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their
+wise papers on the training of "the child," the Eskimo children we saw
+were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense
+of the word, more truly "educated" than many of our children are.
+Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained
+admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern
+conditions.
+
+Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint
+of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the
+family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very
+nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the
+mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the
+fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national
+greatness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
+
+
+"I have drunk the Sea's good wine,
+Was ever step so light as mine,
+Was ever heart so gay?
+O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee,
+For this old joy renewed,
+For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued
+With sunlight and with sea."
+
+--_A Pagan Hymn_.
+
+On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow
+passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the
+steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants
+is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of
+running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial
+banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in
+the scow may sleep in peace.
+
+At Point Separation, 67 deg. 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the
+east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles,
+the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden
+sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred
+miles east and west.
+
+The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It
+was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and
+Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in
+their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later,
+Richardson, this time concerned with the _Plover_ Relief Expedition of
+the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,
+
+"July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my instructions,
+a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug a pit at a distance
+of ten feet from the best grown tree on the Point, and placed in it,
+along with the pemmican, a bottle containing a memorandum of the
+Expedition, and such information respecting the Company's post as I
+judged would be useful to the boat party of the _Plover_ should they
+reach this river. The lower branches of the tree were lopped off, a part
+of its trunk denuded of bark, and a broad arrow painted thereon with red
+paint. In performing these duties at this place, I could not but recall
+to mind the evening of July 3rd, 1826, passed on the very same spot with
+Sir John Franklin. We were then full of joyous anticipation."
+
+As we look at these enduring lobsticks, we recollect that Commander
+Pullen, with two boats from the _Plover_ in 1849, visited the depot and
+found the precious pemmican. We leave the Mackenzie proper for the
+present and enter the easternmost channel of its farthest north
+tributary, the Peel, and follow this considerable stream thirty-three
+miles to Fort Macpherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay
+Company.
+
+Fort Macpherson has a striking site. To the east, spreads a rolling
+wooded plain of alluvial origin, containing thousands of lakes. The west
+aspect gives us an uninterrupted view of the wooded valley of the Peel,
+backed by a heathery slope with the northern Rockies on the far horizon.
+Due north, upstarts a peak of the Rockies known locally as Black
+Mountain--a dark barren spur two thousand feet in height. A winter trail
+from Macpherson to Arctic Red River cuts no fewer than thirty-three
+small lakes.
+
+[Illustration: Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs]
+
+On the beach to meet us are Mounted Police and Eskimo from Herschel
+Island, Church of England missionaries, traders of the H.B. Co., and
+Loucheux Indians. But here, as at Arctic Red River, it is that Polar
+gentleman the Eskimo who claims our attention. Let Sergeant Fitzgerald,
+R.N.W.M.P., stationed at Herschel Island, speak for the Kogmollye and
+Nunatalmute Eskimo. In his departmental report this officer states, "I
+have found these natives honest all the time I have been at Herschel
+Island. I never heard of a case of stealing among them." He has been
+there five years. Up here on the Arctic the bare word of an Eskimo is
+accepted of all men. If he states to an H.B. Co. factor that he has an
+order from a whaling captain to get certain goods for himself, that
+unwritten order is honoured though it may date back two or even three
+years, whereas an order presented by a white man must be in writing and
+certified.
+
+Why should I enter the lists and take up icy spear for my Eskimo fellow
+British subject? Because he is so very worth while. Because through the
+years the world has conspired to libel him. Because within a decade or
+two he will have passed utterly off the map. And because it is so very
+much pleasanter to write appreciations than epitaphs. This man wins you
+at once by his frank directness; his bearing is that of a fearless
+child. The Indian, like Ossian's hero, scorns to tell his name, and on
+occasion will dodge the camera, but the Eskimo likes to be photographed.
+Young and old, they press to our side like friendly boys and girls round
+a "chummy" teacher, volunteering information of age, sex, and previous
+condition, with all sorts of covetable bits of intimate family history.
+You love the Eskimo because he is kind to his dogs and gentle to little
+children. His entire willingness to take you on credit is contagious,
+trust begets trust even in walrus latitudes.
+
+[Illustration: Two Wise Ones]
+
+The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a clever chap. With no school-teacher, no
+school, no modern appliances, he does many things and does each
+admirably. He is a hunter by land and sea, a fearless traveller, a
+furrier, a fisherman, a carver, a metal-smith, and he takes in every
+task the pride of a master mechanic,--"the gods see everywhere." The
+duties of the man and the woman are well-defined. The head of the
+Kogmollyc household is the blood-and-flesh-winner, the navigator of the
+kayak, the driver of dogs. It is he who builds the houses on the march,
+and when occasion requires he does not consider it _infra dig._ to get
+the breakfast or mind the baby. The wife dresses the skins, prepares
+the food, makes all the clothing, and the lord of the igloo demands from
+her the same perfect work that he turns out himself.
+
+[Illustration: A Nunatalmute Eskimo Family]
+
+When an Eskimo wife has finished making her spouse a pair of waterproof
+boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up. If there is one
+little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her,
+and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways. Either she
+must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word,
+or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker.
+We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was
+no recrimination. No word was spoken on either side, the exacting
+husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.
+
+With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin. Her
+tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a
+repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden
+dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs. The whole performance
+was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.
+
+If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo
+foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many
+surprises would await her. Instead of asking for references from her
+last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her
+teeth. In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as
+important a factor as your hands. The reporter for the funeral column of
+an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of
+speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little
+ones, would call pathetic attention to, "the tired and patient teeth
+worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household." A young
+wife's cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that
+shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the
+seagull and chew these into shape. You see, after the boots are wet
+each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with
+oil and chewed into shape. We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at
+this wifely duty. Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands,
+incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way
+round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking
+like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make.
+Solomon's eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70 deg.
+North would read, "She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh
+willingly with her hands; she riseth also while it is yet night and
+cheweth the boots of her household."
+
+Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove.
+The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of
+the woman are brought into requisition. The raw sealskins or hides of
+the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up
+and dried thoroughly. Before this stiff material can be worked up into
+garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically
+chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task. Creasing the hide along
+its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way
+along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way
+back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of
+the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.
+
+It falls to the lot of the woman, too, to do her share of boat-making.
+The men deftly fashion the frames of kayak and oomiak, using in their
+construction not a single nail or piece of iron, but fastening the wood
+together by pegs and thongs of skin. Then the women come on the scene,
+measure the frame, and sew green hides of the proper shape to fit,
+making wonderful overlapping seams that are absolutely watertight. As it
+is necessary to put the skin covering on while the hides are raw, the
+whole job has to be completed at one sitting. So a bee is held of the
+women of the communal camp.
+
+[Illustration: Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks
+
+The scenes etched in the larger represent the events of one year of the
+carver.]
+
+Where did the Eskimo get his versatile ability? Only the walrus knows.
+The whalers have inducted the Eskimo into the art of making
+cribbage-boards. They use for each board a complete tusk of
+walrus-ivory, covering the whole with a wealth of descriptive carvings
+illustrative of all that comes into the yearly round of an Eskimo's
+life,--ice-fishing, bear-hunting, walrus-sticking. So far as we could
+find out, the Husky's connection with cribbage ceased with his making
+these _edition de luxe_ boards. He seemed himself to have gathered no
+inkling of the fine points of that game which one instinctively
+associates with Dick Swiveller as tutor and as pupil the little
+Marchioness, "that very extraordinary person, surrounded by mysteries,
+ignorant of the taste of beer, and taking a limited view of society
+through the key-holes of doors." In the world outside, far from igloos
+and ice-floes, where people gather round cheery Christmas fires with
+"one for his nob," "two for his heels," and "a double run of three,"
+these ivory crib-boards are sold for from seventy-five to one hundred
+dollars each. We have two among our most treasured trophies, and with
+them an ivory ring beautifully formed which we saw made. Set in the ring
+is a blue stone of irregular shape which was fitted into its ivory niche
+with a nicety of workmanship that few jewellers could attain. I had
+fashioned for me also a gavel in the shape of a sleeping seal, made of
+fossil ivory from the Little Diomedes. The contrast of the weathered
+brown of the outside of the ivory with the pure white of the inner
+layers, when worked up into a carved design, gives the effect of cameo
+and intaglio combined.
+
+We tasted many new Eskimo dishes. When, on our return, we confessed that
+the brain of the seal served here is a delicious dish, we ran against
+the sensibilities of refined natures. But why is it cruder to enjoy
+seal's brains _a la vinaigrette_, than to tickle our taste with brains
+of the frolicking calf? The seal furnished a more equivocal dinner than
+this, nothing less than entrails _au naturel_, which our hostess draws
+through her fingers yard by yard in pure anticipative delight, each
+guest being presented with two or three feet of the ribbon-like _piece
+de resistance_. The scene that jumps to our memory as we watch this
+feast of fat things is connected with food-manipulations in Chicago. It
+was down at Armour's in the stockyards that we had seen Polacks and
+Scandinavian girls preparing in the succulent sausage a comestible that
+bore strange family semblance to that which our friends are now eating
+before us, this linked sweetness long drawn out.
+
+[Illustration: Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo
+
+A--Eskimo soapstone lamp which burns seal-oil. The wick is of reindeer
+moss.
+
+B--Eskimo knife of Stone Age.
+
+C--Its modern successor, fashioned from part of a steel saw, with handle
+of ivory. This is the knife used by the women; note how the old shape is
+retained.
+
+D--Eskimo Tam O'Shanter. The band is of loonskins, the cap proper being
+carefully constructed from swans' feet. This admirably shows the
+cleverness of the Eskimo in adapting natural forms to economic use, each
+foot of the swan being a true sector of a circle.
+
+E--Old-time stone hatchet.
+
+F and G--Knives filed from saw-blades, with bone handles.
+
+H--Mortar for pulverising tobacco into snuff.
+
+I--Needle set in a wood handle, and by rapid rotary motion used to
+pierce ivory.]
+
+
+Mr. John Firth, of the Hudson's Bay Company here, gives us much
+information regarding these people who for thirty-seven consecutive
+years have traded with him. The Kogmollycs have been here "from the
+beginning," the Nunatalmutes moving into this region in 1889, driven out
+of their hunting grounds inland from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, by a
+scarcity of game. The two tribes live in peace and intermarry. The aged
+among them are respected. Criminals and lunatics are quietly removed
+from the drama. Supposed incurables commit suicide and in that act
+reach immediately a hot underground heaven.
+
+Nature to these Eskimo is especially benign. The junction of the
+Mackenzie and the Peel is covered with a forest of spruce, and even to
+the ocean-lip we trace foot-prints of moose and black bear. In the delta
+are cross, red, and silver foxes, mink and marten, with lynx and rabbits
+according to the fortunes of war. The Eskimo declare that, east of Cape
+Parry, bears are so numerous that from ten to twenty are seen at one
+time from a high hilltop.
+
+The Chauncey Depew of the Kogmollycs, the man with the best stories and
+the most inimitable way of telling them, is Roxi. It was Roxi who gave
+us the love story of his cousin the Nuntalmute Lochinvar. This young man
+wooed a maid. The girl's father had no very good opinion of the lad's
+hunting ability and was obdurate. The lover determined to take destiny
+into his own hands. A ravine of ice stretched between his igloo and that
+of the family to whom he would fain be son, and over the chasm a
+drift-log formed a temporary bridge. Lothario, one night, crossed the
+icy gully, entered the igloo of his elect, seized her in her
+_shin-ig-bee_ or sleeping-bag and lifted the dear burden over his back.
+In spite of struggles and muffled cries from within, he strode off with
+her to his side of the stream. The gulch safely crossed, he gaily kicked
+the log bridge into the gulf and bore his squirming treasure to his own
+igloo floor. He had left his seal-oil lamp burning and now it was with
+an anticipative chuckle of joy that he untied the drawstring. We end the
+story where Roxi did, by telling that the figure which rolled out
+sputtering from the _shin-ig-bee_ was the would-not-be father-in-law
+instead of the would-be bride!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
+
+
+"Into this Universe, and _Why_ not knowing
+Nor _Whence_, like Water willy-nilly flowing,
+  And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
+I know not _Whither_, willy-nilly blowing."
+
+--_The Rubaiyat_.
+
+The Midnight Sun! The sun does not sink to the horizon, but pauses for a
+moment and rises again. Dawn and eventide are one. The manifestations of
+light ever since we left Athabasca Landing have been wonderful,
+uplifting. The supreme marvel of the Midnight Sun is not what we see but
+what we feel. Standing at this outpost of Britain's Empire, we give our
+imagination rein and see waking worlds and cities of sleep. As this red
+sun rises from its horizon-dip, it is the first of the unnumbered
+sunrises which, as hour follows hour, will come to the continents.
+Longfellow says:
+
+"Think, every morning where the sun peeps through
+The dim, leaf-latticed windows of the grove,
+How jubilant the happy birds renew
+Their old, melodious madrigals of love!
+And when you think of this, remember too
+_'Tis always morning somewhere_, and above
+The awakening continents, from shore to shore,
+Somewhere the birds are singing evermore."
+
+[Illustration: Home of Mrs. Macdonald.]
+
+How do the people of Macpherson divide into day and night their
+largesse of light? By common consent four o'clock in the morning seems
+to be bedtime, and by four in the afternoon people are busying
+themselves with breakfast. _In Polar Circles, do as the Polars do_, is
+good advice, and we follow suit. Individuality is strongly marked at
+this metropolis on the Peel. Every one you meet is a mine of interest,
+and sharp contrasts present themselves. Mrs. Macdonald discusses fur and
+deer-meat with Jack Johnson. He is a trapper who plays the game alone
+and who last year was reduced to killing his favourite dog for food.
+Current report credits him with having "killed his man in the Yukon."
+Mrs. Macdonald is a Loucheux woman who, at the age of fourteen or
+fifteen, married Archdeacon Macdonald of the English Church and for
+eight long years afterwards assisted him in his life work of translating
+the Gospels into the Loucheux language. She has come all the way from
+Winnipeg to the Arctic Circle to spend the summer visiting her people.
+We lose our hearts to her two sons, splendid fellows both.
+
+It is the Eskimo who brings both missionary and trader to Fort
+McPherson. Are these Eskimo, Christians? Are they _civilised_? These are
+the questions that confront us when we speak of these Farthest North
+Canadians. It is an age of classification. You cannot find a flower
+nowadays that some one has not tacked a Latin name to, and it goes by
+inverse ratio--the smaller the flower the longer the name. Every bird
+you hear sing, even though it stop but an hour to rest its tired pinion
+on its northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat.
+How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape? In the northeast of
+Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary. In Alaska,
+on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to
+its bosom. In between these two come the people we are studying. The
+Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to
+influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not
+Episcopalians. What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of
+integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one? Heathens?
+The question sets us thinking.
+
+The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as "Any irreligious, rude,
+barbarous or unthinking class or person." This Eskimo is not
+"irreligious," for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and
+an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death,
+and he accedes to Kipling's line without ever having heard it,--"They
+that are good shall be happy." He is not "rude," but exceedingly
+courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude.
+"Unthinking" he certainly is not. Six months' darkness within the igloo
+gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker
+has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated
+cobbler is your true philosopher.
+
+There remains but the one ear-mark, "barbarous." The dictionary declares
+that barbarous means, "not classical or pure," "showing ignorance of
+arts and civilisation." On the first of these indictments our poor
+Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical. And what man dare
+pronounce on the purity of another? Then we come to "arts" and
+"civilisation." In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every
+European who has visited him. The stumbling-block in this honest search
+for a tag to put on my people is the term "civilisation." One is
+reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons:
+"Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man's doxy." Was it not
+Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, "I am conscious that life has
+been trying to _civilise_ me for now seventy years with what seems to me
+very inadequate results"?
+
+If "Christianity" with the Eskimo means taking him into the white man's
+church, and "civilising" means bringing him into close contact with
+white men's lives, then he has not yet attained the first, and has but
+little to thank the second for. Two years ago eighty of these people in
+one tribe died of measles, a white man's disease. A stray chaplain
+wandered into an encampment of Eskimo, finding his way from a whaling
+ship. He told the people of Heaven, its golden streets, pearly gates,
+and harp-songs, and it meant nothing to these children of frost. They
+were not interested. Then he changed his theme, and spoke of Hell with
+its everlasting fires that needed no replenishing. "Where is it? Tell
+us, that we may go!" and little and big they clambered over him, eager
+for details.
+
+Prayer as presented by the white man is recognised as an incantation
+which should bring immediate and literal results. An enquiring scientist
+was seated one day with Oo-vai-oo-ak, the two fishing through adjacent
+air-holes in the ice. Calling across to the white man, Oo-vai-oo-ak
+said, "How is it, brother, have you any fish?"
+
+"No," replied the man of letters, "I have taken nothing."
+
+"Have you spoken to God this morning?" asked the Eskimo in a
+business-like tone.
+
+"No," said the wilted Walton.
+
+"Well, that's what's the matter," returned Oo-vai-oo-ak; "I always speak
+to God every morning before I go fishing. Once, when I went to Herschel
+Island, a missionary told me what to say. It always works. I have many
+fish."
+
+The scientist, interested, queried, "And do you do the same when you go
+duck-hunting or goose-hunting or when you are after seal?"
+
+"No," eagerly responded Oo-vai-oo-ak, dropping his line and pressing
+close to the geologist, "Is there a prayer for duck, and for geese, and
+one for seal? The missionary never told me that. You teach it to me, eh?
+I like to make sure what to say to catch that fellow,--goose and seal."
+
+But, unfortunately for both, the university man did not have the charm.
+
+[Illustration: Eskimo Kayaks at the Arctic Edge]
+
+Broadly speaking, the Eskimo's theory of things, evolved from white
+spirits on the ice-floes or carried across in the age of the mastodon
+from sires and grandsires in Asia, does not differ materially from our
+own. There is a Good Spirit, called by different tribes Cood-la-pom-e-o,
+Kelligabuk, or Sidne, who dwells high in the zenith, and to whom it is
+good to pray. There is an Evil Spirit, Atti, symbolising cold and death.
+Their heaven is a warm underworld reached by entrances from the sea.
+Hell is a far, white, dreary plain. The Eskimo pray to Sidne; but it is
+wise to propitiate Atti or Tornarsuk, and in this last idea they but
+follow their Chinese or Tartar ancestors. In common with all nations,
+the Kogmollycs have a tradition of the flood. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the
+Elder said, "This world once covered with the sea." Asked why she
+thought so, she replied, "You have been down to the land of the
+caribou, eh? Little smooth stones from the sea are there, and shells."
+
+The labrets or lip-ornaments, shirt-stud shaped effects worn in holes
+pierced in the cheek, strike us with interest. Is it too daring a
+conjecture to trace in these, which Eskimo men so sedulously cherish and
+resolutely refuse to talk about, a religious significance? The term
+"Kelligabuk" in a literal translation means "Mastodon." This animal,
+whose bones not infrequently are unearthed from ice-floes, has been for
+all time venerated as a god of the hunting grounds. Is it too fanciful
+to suggest that the labrets are a sort of peripatetic idol carried
+around on the person as an imitation of the tusks of this God-Mammoth?
+
+East and south of the Mackenzie delta the Eskimo tell of a Supreme
+Goddess, Nuliayok, who was once a coy maiden and refused to marry a
+mortal. Wooed by a gull, she accompanied the bird to an inland home, to
+find instead of her dreams of delight a nest of sticks and rotten fish
+on a high-hung ledge. Jostled by the other fulmars, or gulls, who tried
+to push her off the rocks, she sent for her father. In the night-time he
+came and sailed with her over the water in an oomiak. The deserted
+fulmar-bridegroom, taking a leaf out of Prospero's book, raised a storm.
+The father, to lighten the craft and propitiate the storm-spirit at the
+same time, threw the poor bride over-board, and cut off her fingers as
+she clung to the boat. As the four fingers dropped into the sea they
+changed respectively into beluga the white whale, nutchook the common
+seal, oog-zook the big seal, and ibyl the walrus. After thus giving
+origin to the four great sea-friends of the Innuit, the Goddess
+Nuliayok let go the boat and went to the world beneath the sea, where
+she now lives in a whalebone house with a dog for husband. She cannot
+stand erect, but hunches over the ground, holding one foot under her as
+a baby does who has not yet learned to walk.
+
+It is to Nuliayok that the spirits of sea-animals go after staying three
+days by their dead bodies; and this is the reason why the Eskimo breaks
+the eyes of a killed seal. He does not want it to witness the indignity
+of seeing its own body denuded of its skin. This too is the _raison
+d'etre_ of the ceremonies which every Eskimo punctiliously performs in
+connection with the animal he kills. Each animal has a soul or spirit to
+be offended or placated; if pleased, the spirit of the dead animal
+communicates with its living kin, who in turn will deem it an honour to
+be killed by such considerate folk as the ceremonious Innuit. Round the
+igloo fire we heard another tradition of Nuliayok. The Goddess of the
+Sea once gave birth to a litter of white and red puppies. These she put
+into two little water-tight baby-boots and set them floating before a
+north wind. The puppies landed on southern shores and became the white
+race and the red race, the Europeans and the Indians. The Innuit, of
+course, had lived from the beginning.
+
+We arrogate to ourselves the term of "white race," but if these Eskimo
+were to wash themselves daily (which they do not do yearly) they would
+be as white as we are. They have fleshy intelligent faces and eyes with
+more than a suggestion of the almond-slant of the Oriental. The idea
+occurs to us that the full appearance of the cheeks of the women is more
+likely to be caused by the exercise of chewing skins and boots than by
+an accumulation of fatty tissue. The men are distinguished by the thin,
+straggling growth of beard and moustache which adorns their Asiatic
+progenitors. The labrets of the men are offset by the long pendant
+earrings of the women, which are made from H.B. Co. beads and shells
+brought by Alaska Indians from the Pacific, It is only the women who
+here tattoo their faces, the three long stripes extending from lower lip
+to the chin. The men crop their hair in the style of the tonsure of the
+monk. Neither man nor woman provides any head covering except the hood
+of the _artikki_ or smock, which hood, fringed with waving hair of the
+carcajou or wolverine, hangs loosely at the back until called into
+requisition by a winter's storm or a summer's siege of mosquitoes.
+
+Eskimo clothing is much lighter in weight than it seems, and this is one
+reason why the Eskimo attaches of every Arctic expedition have moved
+around with less exhaustion than their European or American leaders. A
+well-made Eskimo outfit of inner and outer suits, with mittens, socks,
+and boots, weighs about thirteen pounds, while one imported fur coat of
+European deerskin will alone weigh more than that.
+
+A custom noted at the afternoon whale-meets and pink-teas might
+fittingly find way into the latitudes where narrow toes and French heels
+obtain. Two ingenious young Kogmollyc belles had placed applique pockets
+mid-leg on their lower garments. When the walrus was passed round and
+conversation became general, the boots were slipped off quietly and one
+foot at a time was thrust for a resting spell into the pocket provided
+on the opposite trouser-leg. This act of easement was done deftly, and
+the neat action of instep boot-jack never lost its fascination for us.
+
+[Illustration: A Wise Man of the Dog-Ribs]
+
+All the way from boundary-line to ice-barrier we had seen Indians
+tricked out in grotesque garments borrowed from the white man and used
+in combination with their own tribal covering of skins and furs. These
+sun-bonnets and shepherd's-plaid trousers, silk hats and red-flannel
+petticoats, the trader had persuaded the child of the woods to buy. The
+debonair Eskimo is a re-incarnation of the bastard brother of Aragon's
+Prince, and, leaning his furry back against the North Pole, says with
+him, "I smile at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no
+man's pleasure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business,
+laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour."
+
+[Illustration: A Study in Expression]
+
+You cannot induce an Eskimo to think he wants anything just because you
+have found that thing to your liking. There are two reasons for this.
+First, long experience in the most rigorous climate which the human race
+inhabits has taught this man what garments are the most suitable for him
+in which to live and move and have his being. Second, although the
+Indian may ape the white man as a superior being from whom eleemosynary
+grub and gew-gaws may be wheedled, the Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta
+considers himself to be the superior of every created being. The Eskimo
+knows what he wants; he is always sure of it, and there is no
+vacillating. When he comes into the H.B. Company's post to trade, skins
+are his currency, the pelts of the silver-fox his gold coinage. A good
+silver, or black-fox is worth here about one hundred dollars in barter.
+
+We saw a band of Nunatalmutes come into Fort Macpherson to do their
+summer shopping. They wanted English breakfast tea, superior rifles and
+ammunition, and a special brand of tobacco. Failing any or all of these,
+it was in vain that the Factor displayed before them the wares of John
+Bull, Uncle Sam, or Johnny Canuck, or any seductive lure made in
+Germany. Ig-ly-o-bok and Nan-a-sook-tok bought what they found to their
+liking, took small change out of two silver-fox skins, and put the
+remaining six pelts back into the wooden box which formed at once their
+savings bank and letter of credit for the season to come. The
+hungry-eyed H.B. man confided to us that two of these coveted pelts had
+been thus exhibited to him and thus tucked back into the Eskimo
+sinking-fund for three successive seasons.
+
+As regards weapons, we found Eskimo hunters in the transition stage. The
+old-time spears, four feet long and tipped with ivory, are still in
+active service. The bows, with arrows finished in copper, flint, and
+bone, have been relegated largely to the boys, while Krag-Jorgensen,
+Lee-Enfield, and other high-power guns are bought from American whalers.
+The fish-hooks which I got in friendly barter are interesting to any one
+born with angling blood in his veins. Beautifully fashioned of ivory,
+copper, bone, and beads, the contrivance is a sinker, bait, and hook,
+all in one. The daily baskets procured with this lure incontestably
+proves the Husky a judicious hooker.
+
+The Eskimo is a merger. Father Petitot shows us the close analogy
+between the Kogmollyc language and the tongues of eastern Asiatic
+tribes, ancient and modern. This Eskimo's speech, then, gives him a
+connection with the effete East (which is his west), while enamelled
+washbasins, with here and there a corrugated wash-board, prove that
+slowly but surely Canadian culture is reaching him from the south.
+
+With two modifications, this Eskimo is invariably truthful. Like the
+Indians to the south of him, seeking to please you by answering a
+question in the way that you desire, he will at times tell you an
+untruth, for it seems to him discourteous to answer your question other
+than in the way which you anticipate. For instance, if you say to Roxi,
+"Wasn't that a grey goose we heard overhead?" Roxi will readily assent,
+though he well knows it to have been a mallard duck, but he would spare
+your ignorance. Again, it is Eskimo etiquette to belittle your own
+success in hunting and, in so doing, be not literally truthful. When we
+place this delightful trait alongside the fish-stories we are familiar
+with, who would seek to change the heathen?
+
+Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of
+each other for better or for worse. It is an easy union entered upon and
+maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one
+manifest advantage,--Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When
+unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of
+the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes
+herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium
+attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam
+husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young
+Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways. She
+asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, "No. You may go
+to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction,
+and I hunt." Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e.,
+the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six
+nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father,
+for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the
+ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was
+strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a
+tree handy he would have been lynched. This would have been the first
+lynching recorded in Canada. The feeling of the Eskimo community was
+that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the
+bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper
+state to her father's door or to let her have the dogs.
+
+In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in
+re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical
+ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores. The ceremonies which
+approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the
+importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of
+what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them
+grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out
+each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a
+freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony,
+replied, "New light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was
+yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to
+igloo reminds us of the "first-footing" of the Scottish village. The
+mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the
+old Lord of Misrule.
+
+About the season of Christmas, a great meeting is held in the igloo,
+presided over by the Angekok or medicine-man, who entreats the invisible
+powers for good fortune, immunity from storms, and a plenitude of
+blubber for the ensuing year. This invocation is followed by a family
+feast. Next day the ceremonies are carried on out-of-doors, where all
+from oldest to youngest form a ring-around-a-rosy. In the centre of the
+circle is set a crock of water, while to the communal feast each person
+brings from his own hut a piece of meat, raw preferred. This meat is
+eaten in the solemn silence of a communion, each person thinking of
+Sidne, the Good Spirit, and wishing for good. The oldest member of the
+tribe, a white-haired man or tottering dame, takes up a sealskin cup,
+kept for this annual ceremony, dips up some of the water and drinks it,
+all the time thinking of Sidne, the Good Spirit, while the others close
+their eyes in reverent silence.
+
+Before passing the cup on to the rest of the company that they may
+drink, the old man or woman states aloud the date and place of his or
+her birth, as accurately as it can be remembered. The drinking and
+thinking ceremony is performed by all in succession, down to the last
+naked baby cuddling in its mother's _artikki_, the little child that
+cannot yet speak. The solemn rite is brought to a close by the tossing
+of presents across the ring from one to the other, the theory being
+that, as they generously deal with others, so Sidne will deal with them
+in the coming year. So up here on the edge of things, among our
+"uncivilised heathens," we have our Christmas presents and "_Peace on
+earth, good will to men_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
+
+
+"Man does not live by bread alone."
+
+Exigencies of life have caused the Mackenzie Eskimo to formulate on
+vital matters an unwritten law to which each gives assent. Succinctly
+stated, this system of Northland jurisprudence runs thus:--
+
+_(a) Should a man, inadvertently or by malice aforethought, kill
+another, the wife and children of the man so killed remain a burden on
+the murderer so long as he or they live._
+
+_(b) A drift-log found is treasure-trove, and belongs to the finder, who
+indicates possession by placing upon it a pipe, mitten, or personal
+trinket of some kind_. Whalers, missionaries and Mounted Police are a
+unit in testifying that precious flotsam of this kind has remained four
+or five years in a land of wood-scarcity without being disturbed.
+
+_(c) No one must eat seal and walrus on the same day_. Thus a check is
+given to luxuriousness and the Eskimo is self-prevented from falling
+into the fate which overtook Rome.
+
+_(d) All large animals killed are to be looked upon as common property
+of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them_.
+Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of
+the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's
+crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, holding
+all things in common.
+
+The Eskimo realises that the pleasure of life is in pursuit, not in
+acquisition. Where wants are many, joys are few; the very austerity of
+his life has made a man of him. Laying up few treasures for the elements
+to corrupt, accumulating no property except a little, a very little, of
+the kind designated by Wemmick as "portable," he, to better and saner
+effect than any man, decreases the denominator of his wants instead of
+increasing the numerator of his havings. Surrounded by the palcocrystic
+ice, the genial current of his soul has not been frozen by that ice. An
+Eskimo family accepts life with a smile and, in the faith of little
+children, goes on its way.
+
+An old Scot once prayed, "O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at
+this time the savin' grace o' _continuance_." Only one man has less need
+to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo.
+The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is
+spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are
+never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the
+little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no
+broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out
+dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning
+clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the
+opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the
+Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active
+ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.
+
+On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo
+attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live
+beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is
+happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother
+often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest
+of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and
+spreading over every life it touches.
+
+There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which
+we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his
+generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs
+met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man
+exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all
+carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or
+the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the
+leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his
+price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was
+dropped back into _artikki_ recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy
+child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift.
+It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be
+scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who
+tried to beat down his price as "the _cheap_ engineer."
+
+Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little
+group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs,
+and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while
+the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men
+were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet
+nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our
+researches. The whalers call him "Set-'em-Up," for his name bears the
+convivial translation, "Give us a drink." "You going to make better man,
+you get Outside--make him like Emmie-ray?" As Emmie-ray pursues the
+tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue,
+with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of
+the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating
+Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.
+
+Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people,
+instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him
+for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the
+world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts
+of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be
+a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's
+blood.
+
+Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came
+originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees
+before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their
+predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon
+estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil,
+its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel
+wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has
+another unit--blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and
+Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your
+apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber
+and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season.
+These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at
+the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the
+white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has
+pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.
+
+At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous
+Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder,
+but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had
+whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the
+whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater
+part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and
+who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty
+Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi
+had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of
+the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry,
+and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into
+the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to
+the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the
+sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the
+dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking
+bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard
+the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on
+Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the
+ocean from another age and a far land, "Thy necessity is greater than
+mine." Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the
+shores of many seas.
+
+Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of
+geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to
+the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination
+still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of
+rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if
+you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a
+thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was
+served, though he _would_ eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a
+distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the
+gastronomic line he drew. "Aw!" replied he, "No fellow eats owl, you
+know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all
+right. The crow's a kind of _rook_, you know, and every fellow eats
+_rook-pie."_
+
+Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin
+in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable
+compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this
+people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him
+through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a
+hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the
+light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly
+pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal,
+then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This
+jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of
+food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his
+own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.
+
+Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a
+feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so "bluggy." You feel
+differently about it at 70º North. You put prejudice far from you,
+comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese,
+and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with
+mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment.
+Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square
+there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.
+
+We had brought with us on our transport two years' provisions for the
+detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel
+Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated
+cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their
+commissariat. Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip
+bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick
+or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the
+tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old
+body herself. Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg,
+seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of
+desiccated vegetables. I know. I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed,
+"Honesty _is_ the best policy. _I've tried baith_."
+
+But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a
+bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back
+between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw
+or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes
+like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. If you have scooped shrimps
+from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a
+parasite.
+
+Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale
+which in life holds the baleen. What is whale-gum like? It tastes like
+chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber
+tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would
+liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a
+southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as
+lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled
+beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and
+gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and
+moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than
+pigs-feet.
+
+Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that
+overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You
+may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the
+musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's
+scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my
+vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw
+the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the
+association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat _must_
+taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first
+blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is
+that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing
+exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by
+cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much
+better frozen than cooked.
+
+Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much
+esteemed delicacy. During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide
+light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo. The
+blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in
+sealskin bags--the winter provision of gas-tank, electric
+storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this
+master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not
+centuries, the inventive adaptability of his "civilised" cousins. The
+blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its
+flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an
+inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land
+kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he
+has never seen. He doesn't eat it, but drops it into the cavernous
+recesses of his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of
+English undefiled. "Disgusting," you say. It's all a matter of latitude.
+Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet
+of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer
+period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of
+an "all-day sucker." These little babies have the digestion of an
+ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts
+until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at
+once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about
+as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little
+chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it
+with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled
+Fauntleroy on an imported apple. The Eskimo mother has no green apples
+to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon
+the troubled waters. Every day in the year her babies are crammed with
+marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.
+
+To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only
+vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their
+food is eaten. They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the
+marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised
+and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the
+Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen
+hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island
+sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis
+of the _Karluk_, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132
+ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked
+whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.
+
+Who are these people, and whence came they? Each little tribe is a book
+unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are
+confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they
+are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning
+himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation
+chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. "_We used to know
+it." "Our fathers have told us." "This land-whale with its tail in
+front once lived in the land of the Innuit_." We are now the ones to
+become excited. Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had
+been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest. "Where did
+your fathers see this animal?" we asked. "Here, in this country. In the
+ice his bones were hidden," said the old man. With this he relapsed into
+the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.
+
+Captain Mogg, of the whaling schooner _Olga_, two winters ago pursued
+his whaling operations far to the north and east. Ice-bound at Prince
+Albert Land, he stumbled upon a little settlement of Eskimo. These were
+completely isolated from and had had no communication with white men or
+any community of their own race. Only one of their number had seen a
+white man before--one old, old woman, the grandmother of the band. The
+captain of the _Olga_ speaks Eskimo fluently, and to him this ancestress
+of the "lost tribe" had an interesting story to tell. She remembered a
+white man who came across the Great Sea from the west in "a big kayak,"
+and she extended her arms to show its size. Her people had given this
+stranger seal-meat and blubber and the "Chief" from the great ship had
+presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the
+seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very
+child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early
+fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage
+and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the
+little girl's questioning wonder,--"Of what animal is this the skin?"
+Thus does history manifest itself on the other side of the shield "after
+many days."
+
+Through the years, the Eskimo has fared better than the Indian. It
+would seem that the London Directorate of the H.B. Co. expected its
+servants within the Arctic Circle in the days that are past to do almost
+a Creator's part and make all things of nothing. The scanty provisions
+and trading goods from England which filtered in thus far were to be
+given to the Indians in exchange for furs, while the Factor and his
+people were largely expected to "live on the country."
+
+Cannibalism was not unknown. The winter of 1841-2 was an especially hard
+one. On the 18th March, 1841, J. William Spence and Murdock Morrison
+were dispatched with the winter express from Fort Good Hope to Fort
+Macpherson. During the second night out, while they were asleep in the
+encampment, they were knocked on the head by four starving Indian women,
+immediately cut to pieces, and devoured. It is further reported that
+these women previously had killed and eaten their husbands and all their
+children except one little boy. Of the two murdered Scots they ate what
+they could that night and made pemmican of what was over, reporting
+afterward that one was sweet but that the other, tasting of tobacco, was
+not so good.
+
+Father Petitot gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His naive
+words are, "_Chie-ke-nayelle,_ a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning
+fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his
+features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his
+youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine of 1841. He
+killed his young daughter with a hatchet-blow, cooked her like flesh,
+and ate her as a meat-pate. It is said that after one has partaken of
+human flesh, the appetite for it often returns. I hasten to add that
+_Chie-ke-nayelle,_ in spite of the soubriquet _mangeur de monde_ which
+is irrevocably rivetted to his name, has not succumbed to such an
+appetite. He is indeed an excellent Christian. Nevertheless, I would not
+like to camp with _Chie-ke-nayelle_ in time of famine."
+
+Another starvation story related by the good Father is not quite so
+ghastly. He tells us of one "M. Finlaison of burlesque memory," who,
+when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of
+his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish
+reel. That was their dinner for the day,--instead of meat they had
+sound. The narrator adds, "In America they would have lynched the
+too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed and
+applauded the master."
+
+The winter of 1844 also was a season of distress. Referring to this
+year, a beautiful young Indian woman said to the sympathetic priest, "I
+did not wish to eat the arm of my father. I was then a small child of
+eight, and I had not been able to see my old father eaten without crying
+out with loud screams. But my mother called to me in rage, 'If you do
+not eat of it, it is that you condemn us and hate us, then you will
+surely go the same way.' And I ate the flesh of my father, hiding my
+sobs and devouring my tears, for fear of being killed like him; so much
+was I afraid of the eyes of my mother."
+
+Another Indian woman confesses, "I left my husband, a hunter at the
+fort, and took with me by the hand my only child, a boy of six, and
+directed my steps towards _Ka-cho-Gottine._ It was indeed far. I only
+knew the way by hearsay. Once I myself have eaten of my father, but now
+I am a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm
+in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days.
+Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on
+the final resurrection day?" Here Father Petitot interpolates, "Ah! if
+she had only read Dante!" "I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he
+was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart
+for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and
+knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death
+that awaited my only child. But what could I do?" This story has a more
+comfortable ending than the previous one. We breathe relief in learning
+from the priest that the following night the little boy overtook his
+mother. He had walked all day and all night, following her snowshoe
+tracks. They went on together, the third day they snared some hares, and
+their troubles were over.
+
+Father Petitot tells of a Rabbit-skin Indian who found a mummified body
+in the forks of a tree near the Ramparts of the Mackenzie and who came
+running into the Mission, his hair on end with fright, asking excitedly,
+"Did God make that man or was he made by the men of the Hudson's Bay?"
+
+Another tale of his is of an Indian, _Le Petit Cochon_, who had a
+tape-worm and thought it was a whale. "Unfortunate!" exclaims the
+Father, "possessed of a whale! That's the difference between _Le Petit
+Cochon_ and Jonah." Sucking Pig said he would join the Church if the
+priest would rid him of the tape-worm. But we must use the words of
+Petitot himself, for they are too delicious to lose. "Christmas night,
+1865, after midnight mass, _Le Petit Cochon,_ carefully purged, both as
+to body and soul, by an emetic, two purgatives, and a good confession,
+content as a King, received holy baptism. I gave him the name of Noel."
+
+In starvation times, guests were not appreciated. Robert Campbell of the
+H.B. Company, writing from Fort Halkett in 1840, says, "God grant that
+the time of privation may soon end, and that I may not see a soul from
+below till the snow disappears." These days of the early forties when
+England was engaged with the Chartist risings at home and her Chinese
+wars abroad, were surely parlous times up on this edge of empire. The
+Fort Simpson journals of February 4, 1843, record, "The _Cannibal_, with
+young _Noir_, and others of the party of _Laman_, arrived this evening
+in the last stage of existence, being compelled by starvation to eat all
+their furs."
+
+Still these sonsy Scots kept a good heart and were able to jest at their
+misfortunes with the grim humour that belongs to their race. Neither
+empty larder nor other misfortune disheartened them. The recurrence of
+New Year's Day and the Feast of St. Andrew were made ever occasions for
+rejoicing. Up on the Pelly Forks under date of November 30th, 1848, the
+record reads, "Though far from our native land and countrymen, let us
+pass St. Andrew's Day in social glee. So fill your glasses, my lads, and
+pass the bottle round." Three years later, on the same anniversary, the
+lines are, "Very cold for St. Andrew's, and no haggis for dinner."
+
+And as January Ist ushers in the year 1845, the Factor at Fort
+Macpherson bursts into verse:
+
+"This day, Time winds th' exhausted chain
+To run the twelvemonths' length again.
+I see the old bald-pated fellow
+With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,
+Adjust the unimpaired machine
+To wheel the equal, dull routine.
+
+Underneath the record a postscript appears, in another hand:
+
+"Oh let us love our occupations,
+Bless the Co. and their relations,
+Be content with our poor rations,
+And always know our proper stations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TALE OF A WHALE
+
+
+"In the North Sea lived a whale."
+
+What is a whale? Well, although the whalers dub it so, it is not a fish,
+but is a true mammal, the last of the mammoth creatures that trod the
+earth and floundered the seas of a past age. The whale is the biggest,
+the meekest, and the most interesting of living animals. As we go north,
+we readjust all our ideas of distance and immensity. Rivers are longer,
+lakes more majestic, and whales bigger than we have ever dreamed.
+Examining a stranded whale at Herschel, we see the flippers to be really
+hands with four fingers and a thumb enveloped in a sheath, and
+rudimentary hind-legs are discovered under the tough skin. Without
+doubt, the ancestors of the whale were land mammals which became adapted
+to a littoral life, and in splashing round the shore acquired the habit
+of swimming. Subsequently carried out to sea, they became under the new
+environment the structure as we see it.
+
+Off the delta of the Mackenzie, the Circumpolar of Arctic Bowhead whale
+_(Balaena mysticetus_) is making his last stand. Unless a close season
+is enforced, this cetacean carrying round his ten thousand dollar
+mouthful of baleen will soon fold his fluked fins like the Arab and
+swing that huge body of his into line with the Great Auk, the
+Sea-Otter, the Plains Buffalo, and all the melancholy procession of
+Canadian Has-Beens.
+
+[Illustration: We Tell the Tale of a Whale]
+
+Whales divide themselves into two great classes: those furnished with
+teeth (the _Denticete_) and those in which the place of teeth is
+supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or "whalebone" of
+commerce (the _Mysticete_ or _Balaenidae_). The members of the Baleen
+Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the
+Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality
+of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the "Arctic
+Whale," "Polar Whale," "Greenland Whale," "Bowhead," "Right Whale," or
+"Icebreaker."
+
+Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to
+one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of
+exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons.
+Comparisons are illuminating. The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field
+Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in
+longitudinal measurement. The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen
+to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil
+each,--lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy! The eyes placed
+in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange. The
+tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of
+which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he
+feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil. The
+aorta is as big as a man's waist and, at each pulsation of the heart,
+spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood. The heart itself is more
+than a yard in transverse diameter. The toothed whales carry the teeth
+in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti
+or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca'ing Whale, the White
+Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as
+Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins. Only the toothed whale eats fish;
+the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life,
+called "brit" by the whalers. The Bowhead that we have come up to the
+Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria. He couldn't eat a herring
+if by that one act he might attain immortality.
+
+Whale errors die hard. Artists persistently depict the big animals as
+spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales
+breathe out air only from their lungs. They come to the surface for
+that purpose, the "blowing" being quite analogous to the breathing of
+land mammals. Noticing the condensation of a whale's breath up here in
+the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular
+blunder. Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale)
+bulls. "At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea."
+Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything
+but common or seaside air.
+
+The Bowhead is hunted for his "whalebone"; the Cachalot or true Sperm,
+the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and
+spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his
+head.
+
+It is customary to call whales "fierce," "savage," "murderous," but this
+is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate. Every family,
+however, has its black sheep. The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of
+sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales. One Killer taken
+up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals,
+and it choked to death on the fifteenth. Banded in Molly Maguire groups,
+the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in
+swimming off the Pribilofs. We have seen them, a pack of hungry
+sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale! A number of these brigands of the
+Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened
+mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead's tongue is
+eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles. At the approach of the Killer
+even sea-lions seek the shore. And the Alaska Indian who would pose as
+Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the
+crest of his totem.
+
+The American is more aggressive--shall we say progressive?--than the
+Canadian. The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his
+summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada. Each of these
+floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen
+thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been
+content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into
+their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.
+
+[Illustration: Two Little Ones at Herschel Island]
+
+Is there much money in whales to-day? Are not oil and whalebone drugs in
+the market? Let us see. Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island
+anchorage. Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out
+from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter
+waiting-quarters. One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of
+outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit.
+In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer _Orca_, captured
+twenty-eight whales. The _Jeanette_ in 1905 got ten whales and a calf,
+the _Karluk_ got seven whales, the _Alexander_ eight, the _Bowhead_
+seven. The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them
+thirty-three whales and one calf. At fifteen thousand dollars each (San
+Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very
+nearly half a million. Two years later the _Narwhal_ took out fifteen
+whales, the _Jeanette_ and _Bowhead_ each four. Although the average
+bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far
+beyond that figure. A whale caught by Capt. Simmons of the ship _John M.
+Winthrop_ carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its
+head,--$16,750! One of these at a time would be good fishing.
+
+The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American
+steam-whaler _Grampus_, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one
+whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go
+"to the east'ard of P'int Barrow" for this big whale; since that date
+the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five
+whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the "bone" (baleen) at
+two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a
+pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half
+millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the
+past twenty years, by the back-door route.
+
+Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert
+evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the _Narwhal_, in 1907
+lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen
+whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous,
+but that they are on the move east and north.
+
+The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San
+Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go
+into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible
+next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can
+stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its
+catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible;
+dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over
+again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks,
+and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a
+lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one
+twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one
+forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth,
+fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth.
+Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It
+looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco
+waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B.
+overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the
+vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come
+across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land
+or marine) induces in most of us.
+
+A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific
+route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a
+half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the
+whaling-fleet. "The farther north the finer fur" is a recognised law.
+The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns,
+ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the
+choicest furs this continent produces.
+
+The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this
+international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British
+Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver
+Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur
+bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would
+think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the "feel" of
+Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta
+claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs,
+feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60 deg. and the uttermost edge of
+things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be
+hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the
+rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by
+interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of
+these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.
+
+Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by
+deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its
+biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern
+Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon
+the shingle. "As far as we go!" This is essentially the Island of
+Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's
+last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings.
+We are in latitude 69-1/2 deg. N. and just about 139 deg. west of Greenwich; we
+are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in
+South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never
+dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above
+sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel
+at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is
+twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For
+six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice
+hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose
+from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for
+twenty years to make their home!
+
+The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one
+corner,--who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from
+Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste
+hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is
+interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily
+lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his
+boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the
+whaler picked up and attached to his menage the Eskimo from the mainland
+in little bunches _en famille_. Ensuing connubial complications brought
+the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from
+each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American
+citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax
+Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty
+whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.
+
+Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can
+winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a
+feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and
+automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers'
+quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest
+Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear
+panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.
+
+North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy
+arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief
+smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly
+desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that
+they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above
+ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between
+this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is
+nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid
+disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of
+America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have
+been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the _Penelope_ off
+Shingle Point, the _Bonanza_ off King Point, the _Triton_ on the shores
+of Herschel itself, the _Alexander_ near Horton River, a little
+missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship _The Duchess of
+Bedford_, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in
+Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the
+ocean of her quest.
+
+The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for
+miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with
+drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,--a boon more prized by
+them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps
+and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where
+whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.
+
+In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,--saxifrages, white anemones
+through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox
+dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight
+Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It
+sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the
+evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints
+and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish,
+shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature
+whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the
+short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds
+nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming,
+the "cockshut light" of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the
+morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the
+day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into
+activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are
+cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter
+deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the
+year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring "leads"
+in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend
+out in the track of the big Bowhead.
+
+Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for
+"Outside" got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel
+all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy
+threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are "mounted" in
+imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride
+here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got
+to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One
+able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a
+medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the
+request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the
+island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was
+signed "T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.," and, after making it, the A.B., M.D.
+saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury
+spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes
+"you never can tell."
+
+Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size:
+they are "suckers" under a year, "short-heads" as long as they are
+suckled, "stunts" at two years, "skull-fish" with baleen less than six
+feet long, and "size-fish" at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A
+whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds
+enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the
+greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand
+years! A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles
+when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring
+with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an
+Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps.
+Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a
+thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of
+Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual
+migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and
+salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads
+trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey
+in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept
+them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year
+by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in
+successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family
+of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm,
+excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change
+in the season of their amours.
+
+A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended
+motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds
+beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface
+horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same,
+a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale
+of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an
+hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five.
+Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that
+a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains
+23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead
+feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. He quaintly elucidates
+this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons
+would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in
+the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive
+and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.
+
+The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and "long years
+afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke." Those who stick
+harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating
+rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in
+blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and
+a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage
+connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir
+John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the "North
+Sea" lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of
+having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of
+Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his
+inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked _Ansell Gibbs_.
+The _Ansell Gibbs_ was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield
+Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871. Imagination sees opportunity in
+this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept
+apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern
+Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of
+utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's
+enamoured dolphin?
+
+Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday,
+while officers from three ships were "gamming" over their afternoon
+walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, "I hear a Bowhead!" There was
+much chaffing about "Kelly's band," but Kelly weighed anchor and went to
+find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the
+bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made
+by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to
+give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice.
+Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the
+water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths.
+Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck,
+at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is "gallied" or
+stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but
+there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From
+the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out "hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo" of the
+hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that
+"beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before
+slipping back to 'F' again." He assures us that, "with the Humpback the
+tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a
+violin."
+
+Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year
+men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a
+mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they
+strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to
+the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He
+carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers
+and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the
+ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm,
+and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He
+had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.
+
+[Illustration: Breeding Grounds of the Seals]
+
+Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has
+entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have
+shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out
+strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a
+cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on
+Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention
+of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance
+which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which
+clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the
+harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the
+"fish" is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound,
+and hot air from the engine pumped into the "proposition" keeps it
+afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales
+in one day,--Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.
+
+The Eskimo say, "There is no part of a seal that is not good," and the
+same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The
+viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear
+in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From
+the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields
+of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers
+for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn
+can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is
+absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the
+Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more
+than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders
+find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the
+Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward
+and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now,
+enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow
+fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she
+must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like
+it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will
+bear the legend, "Whale cream soda" and "Best Whale Milkshake."
+
+To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the
+whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of
+ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.
+
+What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and
+flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all
+the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made
+from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone
+horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a
+dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last
+generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never "broke its mighty heart"
+in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible
+steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new
+avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers
+of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine
+filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the
+manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and
+elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this
+writing advertises:
+
+WHALEBONE TEETH $5
+A GREAT DISCOVERY
+THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST
+AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN
+DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH
+Guaranteed ten years
+YOU BITE CORN OFF THE COB
+
+Spermaceti, the solid waxy body carried round in the Cachalot's head in
+solution, is a valuable whale-product. Bland and demulcent, spermaceti
+is employed as an ingredient in ointments, cosmetics, and cerates.
+Spermaceti candles of definite size form the measure of electric light,
+giving rise to the phrase "of so many candle-power." Present-day
+spermaceti is both a saving and a destructive agent. Large quantities of
+it are used in Europe in the manufacture of ecclesiastical candles, and
+part of the same consignment may help to make self-lubricating
+cartridges.
+
+Most valuable of all whale-products, the costliest commodity on this
+earth ounce for ounce with the one exception of radium, is ambergris. As
+amber was once considered "the frozen tears of seagulls," so ambergris
+for ages puzzled the ancients. Some called it "the solidified foam of
+the sea," with others it was a "fungoidal growth of the ocean analogous
+to that on trees." When people in the old days came across anything
+exceedingly costly they wanted to eat it, on the same principle which
+makes the baby put each new gift into his mouth. So we have historic
+record of pearl soup a la Cleopatra, and dishes dashed with ambergris.
+Milton sings of,--
+
+"Beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
+In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
+Grisamber-steamed."
+
+What is this choice tidbit? It is a morbid secretion of the intestines
+of the sick Sperm-whale, and sells for from thirty to forty dollars an
+ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a
+dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or
+cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island
+beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that
+solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy
+odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a
+floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In
+pharmacy, it is regarded as a cardiac and anti-spasmodic and as a
+specific against the rabies. For years it has been used in sacerdotal
+rites of the church; and suitors of old times sought with it to charm
+their mistresses. The dying sperm, spouting up the ghost, offers of his
+very vitals to aid the lover and serve the church.
+
+Fascinating are the finds of ambergris. The barque _Sea-Fox_ of New
+Bedford, in 1866, off the coast of Arabia, took a one hundred and
+fifty-six pound mass of ambergris, which was sold to the Arabs of
+Zanzibar for ten thousand dollars in gold. The _Adeline Gibbs_, in the
+same year, took one hundred and thirty-two pounds from a bull-sperm
+south of St. Helena, and sold the hunk for twenty-three thousand
+dollars. Three winters ago an Arctic whaling-crew put into Seattle, and
+there leaked out the interesting story of how, not recognising the
+priceless unguent, they had greased their oars, masts, and knee-boots
+with "a big lump of ambergrease."
+
+In modern whaling not an ounce of the carcase is cast as rubbish to the
+void. The intestines make a soft kid which takes any dye and is largely
+used for artistic leather-work. The size of these immense strips makes
+possible splendid belts for machinery with a minimum of joinings. The
+chemically-macerated bones are turned into an "indestructible"
+crockery-ware which is far more enduring than anything made of
+vegetable-fibre. The Beluga gives us the best shoe-strings in the world.
+You can lace your shoes with a Beluga lace for two years and be sure it
+will not break the morning you are in an especial hurry to catch an
+inter-Reuben train.
+
+An interest attaches to living whales which outweighs the fascination
+with which we study their dead parts. Each species of the whale
+propagates with one of its own species only. The fidelity of whales to
+each other exceeds the constancy of birds. The whale mother gives birth
+to one calf, and in extremely rare cases two calves, producing every
+second year, the young being born between the end of March and the
+beginning of May. When the mother suckles her young she throws herself
+on one side on the surface of the sea and the calf regularly feeds at
+the breast (like a young Eskimo) for nearly two years. During this time
+the baby is extremely fat and the mother correspondingly emaciated.
+Perhaps nothing in nature is more touching than the devotion of a female
+whale to its wounded young. Whalers harpoon the babe at the breast so
+that they may afterwards secure the dam. In this case, the mother joins
+the wounded young under the surface of the water, comes up with it when
+it rises to breathe, encourages it to swim off, assists its flight by
+taking it under her fin, and seldom deserts it while life remains.
+
+Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the
+thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities
+in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great
+Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to
+restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which
+has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a
+thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant
+generations of man grow another one to take its place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
+
+
+"The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
+That blaze in the velvet blue.
+They're God's own guides on the Long Trail--
+The trail that is always new."
+
+--_Kipling_.
+
+A tax on tea caused the revolt of the thirteen Colonies, a taunting load
+of tennis-balls lost France to the Dauphin. Eighty years ago on this
+Arctic edge, white beads, or the lack of them, lost a lucrative
+fur-trade, alienated the Loucheux and caused the death of whites.
+"Trifles make the sum of human things."
+
+The old records tell the story. John Bell from Fort Good Hope, under
+date of August 14th, 1827, writes to the Factor at Fort Simpson:
+
+"The beads sent in for the Loucheux trade are not sufficiently large to
+please them. I request you will endeavour to send in the largest size
+for the trade of the ensuing year. A specimen of the kind wanted I send
+enclosed."
+
+The Factor at Fort Simpson, under date of November 22nd of the same
+year, writes to the Governor and Chief Factors at Montreal:
+
+"I now forward a specimen of the common white beads wanted for the trade
+with the Loucheux Indians. It is their request and I hope it will be
+attended to. I would not venture to make the demand, were it not from
+conviction that without this favourite article these Indians look with
+indifference on the best of our goods. No other ornamental article is
+ever asked for or wanted by these natives."
+
+The same official on March 15th, 1828, pleads with Montreal:
+
+"The white beads demanded for the Loucheux trade I hope will be sent,
+and of the size according to sample enclosed. May I use the freedom of
+representing the importance of getting this article to the liking of the
+Indians, to come up by the Montreal canoes and be ready for outfit 1829?
+Three kegs will contain the quantity required, 200 to 250 pounds."
+
+Again on the 29th of November, 1829, he writes Montreal:
+
+"The White Beads asked for the trade with the Loucheux are not according
+to the order sent, 15 pounds only of the quantity received (200 pounds)
+are of the proper size, the remainder being the same as those in outfit
+1825 so much complained of. They will not be satisfactory to the
+Indians. We request you will be pleased to make a strong representation
+to their Honours at Home that this article be sent according to order
+and sample. We now conceive to say anything further would be tiresome."
+
+The Fort Simpson Factor on March 19th, 1830, reports to Montreal:
+
+
+"The goods came. The white beads was too small and not according to
+order or sample asked for. The Indians would not take them and left the
+Fort dissatisfied."
+
+The Trader at Fort Good Hope augments the story by recording that the
+Indians would be better pleased in trade with two small kegs of the
+special beads they wanted than with half a ton of any other trade goods
+which London could manufacture and send out. The sequel of the story is
+that, disappointed time and again in not getting their favourite beads,
+the Loucheux Indians failed to bring in the autumn supply of meat to
+Fort Good Hope and in consequence, before the snows of the winter of
+1831 had melted, many of the white men attached to that post died of
+starvation.
+
+[Illustration: The Keele Party on the Gravel River]
+
+We had gone North with the birds in spring and now, as we turn our faces
+homeward, the first migrants with strong wing are beginning their
+southward flight. Our travel is against current now, for we make slower
+time than we did coming in and consequently see more of the passing
+shore-line. The last specimens we gather within the Arctic Circle are
+the blue blossoms of the flax. In them we see the earnest of many a
+cultivated farm of the future. The days are getting perceptibly shorter
+and one by one the old familiar constellations come back in the
+heavens. We find it a relief to have once more a twilight and a
+succeeding period of dusk. Yet are we loath to leave this fascinating
+North with its sure future, its quaint to-days, and all the glamour of
+its rich past.
+
+We had just passed Fort Norman when the sharp eyes of an Indian
+deck-hand saw three figures on the beach ahead. Pulling in at the point
+where the Gravel River joins the Mackenzie, we find a regular Robinson
+Crusoe group,--Mr. J. Keele, of the Dominion Government Survey, and his
+two associates. Going in on the Yukon side, Mr. Keele's task has been to
+cross the Divide between the Yukon and the Mackenzie, mapping the rocks.
+The only white man they had seen in sixteen months was a French priest
+who had passed yesterday, and whose knowledge of current events in
+Canada and Europe was scanty. They were glad to see us. A moose-skin
+boat showed how they had run the rough Gravel; the meat of two moose
+smoked over the camp-fire; their dogs were fat. These are men who know
+the woods--no hard-luck story here. It needs only Friday's funny fat
+umbrella to complete the picture, with the goat scampering in the middle
+distance.
+
+Coming on board, the surveyors are greedy for newspapers, and we in
+return learn somewhat of that great slice of land which they are the
+first to traverse. The Gravel River is two hundred and fifty-five miles
+long, with "white water" all the way. The force of the current may be
+appreciated from the fact that it is forty-four hundred feet above the
+sea-level at the Height-of-Land, and only four hundred feet here where
+it enters the Mackenzie. All along the banks of the Gravel are moose,
+mountain sheep, and caribou. The winter cabin of the party was built on
+the Ross River and there, during the past winter, they experienced a
+temperature of 54 deg. below. A party of this kind must be to a large extent
+self-supporting, as it would be impossible to carry from the outside
+food for such a long sojourn. Speaking with Mr. Keele, one is forcibly
+struck with the fact that what the technical schools teach their
+students forms but a small part of the equipment of the man who would do
+field work in Northern Canada--packing, tracking, hunting, and breaking
+trail,--each man must do his share of these.
+
+The Keele party on the great watershed, as they travelled east, crossed
+two families of Mackenzie River Indians going westward to hunt, on the
+west side of the ridge, the marten and the beaver. It was 32 deg. below, and
+cold. The whole families were on the march, a little baby tucked in the
+curve of the sled, and tottering on foot an old, old woman, bent and
+wrinkled and scarcely able to move. As the Indians were on their return
+journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again.
+But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow
+falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in
+the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many
+journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering
+capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of
+hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that
+luxurious garment. In order that one might be warmly clad, many have
+gone cold, more than one sad, tired, old head has lain down for the last
+time by the lonely camp-fire.
+
+Sad is the lot of the Indian woman of the North. Fated always to play a
+secondary part in the family drama, it is hard to see what of pleasure
+life holds for her. The birth of a girl baby is not attended with joy or
+thankfulness. From the beginning the little one is pushed into the
+background. The boy babies, even the dogs, have the choicer bed at
+night, and to them are given the best pieces of the meat. The little
+girl is made to feel that she has come into a world that has no welcome
+for her and her whole life seems to be an apology. You read it in the
+face of every Indian girl or woman you meet, from the shrinking pathetic
+little figure in the camp to the bent old crone, whose upturned face
+with its sadly acceptive look gives you the flicker of a smile.
+
+Storm-stayed at Wrigley Harbour at the entrance to Great Slave Lake, we
+have some splendid fishing,--jackfish, whitefish, loche, inconnu, "and
+here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling." Within an
+hour I get fifteen graylings to my own rod. Collectively they weigh just
+a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the
+fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish.
+Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and
+the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had "The Complete Angler"
+for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the
+catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the
+grayling is eating fit only for "anglers and other honest men."
+
+The traverse of Great Slave Lake in the teeth of a wind is not without
+its interest, for the new steamer has yet to be tried in the waters of
+what practically amounts to an open sea. She behaves well, and brings
+us dry-shod into Fort Rae.
+
+[Illustration: The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake]
+
+We are the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae, and we
+afford as much interest to the Indians as they afford us. Lone Fort Rae,
+clinging to the Northern Arm of Great Slave Lake, was noted in the past
+as a "meat-post." It supplied the Mackenzie District with dried
+caribou-meat, and formed an outfitting point for the few big game
+hunters who trended east from here into the Barren Grounds seeking the
+musk-ox. Its foundation dates back to some time before the year 1820. We
+cross a bridge of clever Indian construction and sit for a while to muse
+on a flat boulder of primal rock. This stands as bell-tower to a quaint
+bell cast in Rome and bears an inscription to some dead and gone Pope.
+The missionary priest over half a century ago paddled in here bringing
+the Gospel to the Dog-Ribs.
+
+[Illustration: The Bell at Fort Rae Mission]
+
+The musk-ox _(Ovibos moschatus)_ is a gregarious animal which would
+appear to be a Creator's after-thought,--something between an ox and a
+sheep. The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the
+appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd. The
+present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and
+between the meridians of 86 deg. and 125 deg.. As it is the most inaccessible
+game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being
+hunted to extinction. Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed
+like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up
+wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees
+fit. Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle
+and horns outside, to meet a common danger. The robe of the musk-ox is a
+rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being
+very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base. According to
+the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April. The
+mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a
+sheltered place for the cradle. Three days after its post-natal burial
+it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf's
+burden.
+
+[Illustration: The Musk-ox]
+
+We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to
+Fort Resolution. Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the
+topics of conversation. Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk,
+and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and
+deposited at the front door of the H.B. Co. Factor there--a cow but no
+cow-food. All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North. She was
+fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her
+kind. One of Mr. Keele's men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which
+ate bacon-rinds with a relish. The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb
+trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become
+burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish
+enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead. A dog in
+the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the
+asphodel meadows. I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner
+probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to
+work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.
+
+From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories
+from the outgoing traders. We learn that when the church was still
+young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the
+wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were
+to be considered fish, or flesh. Rome evidently was not "long" on North
+American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever
+by declaring said tails "fish" and not flesh. This is why you can
+discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and
+commit no sin.
+
+The stories give us some idea of the difference between winter and
+summer travel across Great Slave Lake. Captain Mills tells of two Indian
+women, one old enough to have a daughter of forty, who drove a dogsled
+one hundred and forty-eight miles from Providence to Rae, in four days.
+The older one walked ahead of the dogs and made the trail while the
+other drove. Coming back, it took them five days, and the old woman
+explained, "We didn't make such good time, as we had a man with us." It
+was her son-in-law whom she brought back with her.
+
+A striking picture is given us of a woman who walked alone from Hay
+River to Province on snowshoes, taking thirteen days to do it. She had
+no matches, and carried her fire with her, keeping it alight in a little
+copper kettle. This, of course, necessitated her guarding it very
+closely and stopping to renew the fire from time to time; for if the
+burning wood was once permitted to die down, her life in that intense
+cold would go out with it.
+
+How cold does it get? Mr. Campbell Young, of our little group, says that
+he has been out when a thermometer--one obtained from the U.S.
+Meteorological Station--registered seventy-six degrees below zero, and
+has worked in weather like that. "I've been trapping in that
+temperature, when of course the weather was absolutely still, and I tell
+you I'd rather be out in seventy-six below than to cross Smith Portage
+with the mosquitoes." Mr. Christie, of the Keele Survey Party, says,
+"Last winter I had to go out and get a moose for the camp, and on the
+second day I met the Mounted Police boys who told me it had been
+seventy-five below. I had started out when it was quite mild, only
+forty-five below. You know when it is below fifty, for then your breath
+begins to crackle, and that's a sure sign." Mr. John Gaudet says, "I
+was driving last winter on Lesser Slave Lake when it was sixty-four
+below. Yes, it was quite cold."
+
+At Resolution we see once more our old friend Dr. Sussex, happy and
+busied among his Indians. It is just hail and farewell. The little "red
+lemonade" kiddies are the first to greet us as we come into Fort Smith,
+and here everybody goes visiting. Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald tells us
+that her grandfather had two wives, and was the father of twenty-two
+children. She says she and her brother are glad of this, as it gives
+them so many friends in all parts of the country; and we notice that at
+every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit--a cousin
+here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling
+cards and little friendly gifts up here is a "musky-moot"; the more
+formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may
+stay a day or two, is a "_skin-ichi-mun."_ Visiting a little on our own
+account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the
+gaudy calendars of the advertiser have not yet made their way. Each man,
+foolish enough here to want a calendar, marks out his own on pencilled
+paper. We come across an H.B. Journal of the vintage of 1826 where the
+reckless scribe introduces two Thursdays into one week, acknowledging
+his error in a footnote with the remark, "It is not likely that the eye
+of man will ever read this record."
+
+At Fort Smith we leave the steamer _Mackenzie River_ to take passage in
+the _Grahame_ from Smith's Landing, and once more essay the Mosquito
+Portage. We find our winged friends in fine fettle. Their eyes are not
+dimmed, their strength not abated. For miles we notice blackened and
+dead stems of young spruce, cut off as if by machinery, at a uniform
+height of two and a half feet from the ground. The top of the dead stem
+shows the depth of the snow when the rabbits, running along the surface,
+had nibbled off and eaten the growing spruce. A fur-trader at our side
+says, "While at Fort Macpherson I noticed that the ice always melted in
+the spring in Peel's River before it did in the Mackenzie. It would
+break up in the Peel about the Queen's Birthday and begin to go out.
+Reaching the Mackenzie, it came up against a solid mass of unbroken ice
+which sent it back to flood the whole country. It was a curious
+experience to paddle round in a canoe for miles and miles where one had
+set rabbit snares but a few weeks before. The poor rabbits themselves
+were at a loss, for no kind monition apprised them of the coming flood.
+We could see whole colonies of them,--each a shipwrecked sailor on his
+own little raft of bark, buffeted here and there with the stream and
+peering out across the swollen waters, like Noah's dove, seeking some
+green thing."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TO MCMURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
+
+
+"Think o' the stories round the camp, the yarns along the track--
+O' Lesser Slave an' Herschel's Isle an' Flynn at Fond du Lac;
+Of fur an' gun, an' ranch an' run, an' moose and caribou,
+An' bull-dogs eatin' us to death! Good-bye--good luck to you!"
+
+Our arrival at Chipewyan is opportune. Honorine Daniels, unceremoniously
+known as 'Norine among her friends (and they are legion), is about to
+join hand and fortune with one of the Mercredi boys. 'Norine owns a
+cottage in her own right, and to-night under her roof-tree there is to
+be a wedding-dance. We wait round, hungering for an invitation, finally
+to be told largely, "You don't need no invitation, everybody goes."
+
+We go with the crowd. The room is full to overflowing. Babies are
+deposited on the benches along the wall, dogs look in at the window. The
+air is heavy with mosquitoes and tobacco-smoke. But joy reigns. Nobody
+is too old or too obese to dance. Old Mr. Loutit and lame Jimmy Flett
+each secures a sonsy partner. There are three fiddlers, and these
+relieve each other in turn, for fiddling, beating time with your
+moccasin on the earthen floor, and "calling out" is hard work for one
+man. There are but two kinds of dances,--the Red River jig, and a square
+dance which probably had for honourable ancestors the lancers on the
+father's side and a quadrille on the mother's.
+
+Endurance is a sign of merit in the Red River jig. A man or woman steps
+into the limelight and commences to jig, a dark form in moccasins slips
+up in front of the dancer, and one jigs the other down, amid plaudits
+for the survivor and jeers for the quitter.
+
+It is the square dance that interests us, our attention being divided
+between watching the deft forms in the half light and listening to the
+caller-off. _Louie-the-Moose_ first officiates. His eyes look dreamy but
+there is a general's stern tone of command in his words:
+
+"Ladeez, join de lily-white han's,
+Gents, your black-and-tan!
+Ladeez, bow! Gents, bow-wow!
+Swing 'em as hard's ye can.
+
+"Swing your corner Lady,
+Then the one you love!
+Then your corner Lady,
+Then your Turtle Dove!"
+
+Over and over again Louie reiterates his injunction, to the
+accompaniment of pattering moccasins and a humming chorus from door and
+windows. There are phrases of variation, too. We catch the words,
+"_Address your pardner," "Adaman left," "Show your steps," "Gents walk
+round, and all run away to the west_."
+
+Then Michel Manvil takes hold of the situation. He stands up to it, and
+we hear
+
+"Ladies round ladies, and gents all so!
+Ladies round gents, and gents don't go!"
+
+Why should they, we wonder!
+
+The third fiddler is a full-blooded Chipewyan. In some dancing academy
+in the woods he has learnt a "call-off" all his own, and proud indeed is
+he of his stunt. We manage to copy it down in its entirety, fighting
+mosquitoes the while and dodging out into the open now and again for a
+little air.
+
+"'Slute your ladies! All together!
+  Ladies opposite, the same--
+Hit the lumber with yer leathers,
+  Balance all, and swing yer dame!
+Bunch the moose-cows in the middle!
+  Circle, stags, and do-si-do--
+Pay attention to the fiddle!
+  Swing her round, an' off you go!
+
+"First four forward! Back to places!
+  Second foller--shuffle back!
+Now you've got it down to cases--
+  Swing 'em till their back-teeth crack!
+Gents, all right, a heel and toeing!
+  Swing 'em, kiss 'em if you kin--
+On to next, and keep a-goin'
+  Till you hit your pards ag'in!
+
+"Gents to centre; ladies round 'em,
+  Form a basket; balance all!
+Whirl yer gals to where you found 'em!
+  Promenade around the hall!
+Balance to yer pards and trot 'em
+  Round the circle, double quick!
+Grab and kiss 'em while you've got 'em--
+  Hold 'em to it; they won't kick!"
+
+The perspiring musician pushes his instrument into the hands of _Running
+Antelope_ and turns to us with, "There's another verse, but I don't
+always give it." We ask him to repeat it for us, but he seems a little
+at a loss. "It's hard to call it out without the fiddle. When yer
+playin' you just spit it out--the words come to you."
+
+It is August 6th at Chipewyan, and once again we are at the parting of
+the ways. Every one we know is heading for "Outside" by way of the
+steamer _Grahame_ and the Athabasca scows. Our own ambition is to make a
+traverse of the great Peace River Country before the snows. We have had
+no mail since last May, and the temptation to follow the multitude as
+far as McMurray in the hope of finding letters there is too strong to be
+resisted. We will then return and try to perfect arrangements for the
+Peace.
+
+The outgoers are a cosmopolitan and happy "bunch,"--Major Jarvis,
+R.N.W.M.P., fur-traders galore, three Grey Nuns and a priest, Mr. Wyllie
+and his family bound for the Orkney Islands, fifty-four souls in all,
+without counting the miscellaneous and interesting fraternity down on
+the lower deck among the fur-bundles.
+
+It is essentially a _voyage de luxe_. When Mr. Keele imagines a place is
+good, the steamer stops and we all gather fossils. When lame James, the
+steward, our erstwhile jig-expert, is about to serve coffee, he pokes
+his head over the side and orders the engines stopped that we may drink
+the beverage without spillage. The beardless prospector buys tinned
+peaches from the commissariat, opens them with a jack-knife and passes
+them round the deck with impartiality and a
+to-hell-with-the-man-that-works smile. Who would envy kings?
+
+We arrive at McMurray in time for treaty-payment. Tethered horses at the
+tepee-poles, store-dolls for the babies, and unmistakable "Outside"
+millinery prove the prosperity of these Crees, and proves also their
+proximity to Edmonton. One little group looks tattered, out-at-heel,
+and hungry,--a Cree widow presenting her four offspring that they may
+receive the annual payment. The officials within the treaty tent declare
+the youngest baby an illegitimate child and will pay it no treaty,--it
+"has no name." I catch the anxious look in the mother's eye. Five
+dollars goes a long way when baby bodies have to be fed and clothed. The
+situation is crucial. Without a sponsor, the priest will not name the
+baby. With no name, it cannot draw treaty. I conclude to father the
+child, as its own (un)lawful father will not. My offer to give my name
+to the girlie, after due deliberation of Church and State, is accepted.
+Under the name of Agnes Deans Cameron the Cree kiddie is received into
+the Mother Church and finds her place on the list of treaty-receiving
+Indians--No. 53 in the McMurray Band. May she follow pleasant trails!
+
+[Illustration: A Meadow at McMurray]
+
+Back of McMurray lies a lush land. We tread a path a full mile in length
+leading to meadows where, belly-high, the horses graze. Every yard of
+our way is lined with raspberry bushes bent with their rich, red burden.
+
+While the furs are being transferred from the _Grahame_ to the scows,
+the working of our typewriter is a matter of much wonderment. Old Paul
+Fontaine, a half-breed who thinks he is a white man, first looks through
+the door, then comes into the dining hall where we are, takes his hat
+off, and watches respectfully. Then, with an air of great conviction,
+"This is the first time I ever see that. It is wonderful what man can
+do--wonderful. There is only one thing left to be done now--and that is
+to put the breath of life into a dead body." Solemnly putting on his
+hat, he turns and walks out.
+
+Mrs. Loutit, another fellow-passenger attracted by the click of the
+machine, comes in and recounts her arts, wild and tame. In winter she
+goes off in dog-cariole, traps cross-foxes off her own bat, shoots
+moose, and smokes the hide according to the ancient accepted mode.
+Coming home, she takes the smoked hide and works upon it silk embroidery
+of a fineness which would be the envy of any young ladies' seminary in
+Europe or America. She weaves fantastic belts of beads and sets the
+fashion for the whole North in _chef d'oeuvres_ of the quills of the
+porcupine. She is a most observant "old wife." Watching, fascinated, the
+lightning play of the machine, "Much hard that, I think, harder than
+bead-work, eh?" Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to
+find out how the dickens when you strike capital "A" at one end of the
+keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small "o" at the other
+end. There is something uncanny about it, and our stock goes up.
+
+[Illustration: Starting up the Athabasca]
+
+We confess to being a little homesick as we wave farewell to the half
+hundred passengers in the familiar scows embarked for their two hundred
+and thirty-eight mile journey up the Athabasca. It will be a tiresome
+enough trip, though, for every foot of the way the big boats will have
+to be tracked (towed) by teams of half-breeds scrambling along the
+shore, now on land, now splashing in the water. The party will have the
+mosquito as companion on the sorrowful way and it will take them four
+weeks to make Athabasca Landing, the distance which in the spring we
+dropped down in little over a week. We send letters home, and with
+hand-shaking all round bid farewell to Mr. Wyllie, the Grey Nuns, and
+the rest.
+
+[Illustration: On the Clearwater]
+
+Our way back on the _Grahame_ to Chipewyan is not without adventure. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon we run up hard and fast on a batture!
+There is no swearing, no shouting of orders. The deck-hands from long
+experience know exactly what to do. The engines are reversed and, in
+their efforts, seem to speak Cree, for we catch the sound of the
+familiar "Wuh! Wey!" But it is no go. The sun sinks behind the bank,
+over the tops of the poplars floats a faint rosy glow which fades into
+purple and then into black, and we are still there hard and fast. The
+drifting sand piles up against us, and, in scows, the whole cargo is
+removed. The captain throws out a kedge-anchor, and in a mysterious way
+we pull ourselves off by hawsers, as a man lifts himself by his own
+boot-straps.
+
+We have head-winds all the way. At four o'clock on the morning of August
+14th, stress of weather causes us to run in under the lee of an island.
+We tie up at the base of some splendid timber. Spruce here will give
+three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground. With an improvised
+tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big
+poplars (rough-backed). The first ran seven feet three inches, the
+second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches. Within
+view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and
+interspersed with them were spruce with a base-girth scarcely less.
+
+Arrived at Chipewyan, we are able to arrange to be taken up the Peace in
+the same little tug _Primrose_ which had before carried us so safely to
+Fond du Lac.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
+
+
+"What lies ahead no human mind can know,
+To-morrow may bring happiness or woe.
+We cannot carry charts, save the hope that's in our hearts
+As along the unknown trail we blithely go."
+
+When we leave Chipewyan August 17th, the fall hunt of waveys has already
+begun. We learn afterwards that the Loutit boys alone made a bag of
+sixteen hundred of these birds which, salted down, form a considerable
+part of the winter food of the old Fort. Mrs. William Johnson comes down
+to see us embark. She has overwhelmed us with generous kindness at our
+every visit to Chipewyan, kindness we cannot soon forget. It is a small
+group which now starts out in the little tug on the bosom of the mighty
+Peace,--Major Routledge, R.N.W.M.P., Mr. and Mrs. John Gaudet with their
+two olive-branches "Char-lee" and "Se-li-nah," now returning to Lesser
+Slave Lake from a visit to Fort Good Hope, Miss Brown and myself.
+
+This part of the journey we are to enjoy more keenly than all that has
+gone before. Rising on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, the
+Peace River is the largest affluent of the Mackenzie, being already a
+splendid stream when it cuts through that range. With but one break, the
+Peace River affords a nine hundred mile stretch of navigation, and we
+can justly describe the country through which it flows as a plateau in
+which the river has made for itself a somewhat deep valley. Extensive
+grassy plains border it on both sides, and north of Fort Vermilion
+country of this character extends to the valley of the Hay River.
+Crossing the Quatre Fourches, an offshoot of the Peace at the Lake
+Athabasca edge, we turn our faces due west to a land of promise. The
+Mackenzie River and the banks of the Great Slave may some day afford
+homes to a busy and prosperous populace, but there are many fertile and
+more accessible lands to be settled first. With the Peace River Country
+there is no conjecture, for it is merely a question of the coming of the
+railway. Given a connection with the world to the south, the district
+watered by the Peace will at once support a vast agrarian population.
+The advance riders are already on the ground.
+
+It is not our intent to go to the expense of using a steamer for our
+whole journey up the Peace. Scows will allow us to proceed more
+leisurely and to see more as we go, so the second day we turn the
+steamer back and transfer ourselves and our belongings into a little
+open craft or model-boat _The Mee-wah-sin._ We have a crew of five men,
+one on the steering-sweep and four to track, and in this wise we make
+our way for three hundred miles up the great river to Fort Vermilion.
+One day we improvise a sail and so make fifty miles in a favourable
+wind, but, with this exception, every other mile of the journey is by
+patient towing.
+
+Incidents are many. The first morning after we turned back the little
+tug, the Kid and I left the slow trackers behind and were glad to
+stretch ourselves in a long forenoon's tramp along the sandy beach. The
+mosquitoes were practically gone and for the first time all summer one
+could really enjoy the woods, where a tang of autumn in the air made
+every breath a tonic draught. Exulting in the fact that we were alive,
+we turned a sharp corner and came suddenly face to face with a grey
+wolf, loping along at a swinging pace at the water's edge, muzzle close
+to the ground! To make the story worth telling, one should have
+something to say of "yawning jaws" and "bloodshot eyes" and "haunches
+trembling for a spring." But this grey wolf simply refused to play that
+part. He took one look at us, evidently didn't approve, and turned up
+from his tracks quietly into the cottonwoods above. As we on our side
+had brought neither gun nor camera from the _Mee-wah-sin_, we are unable
+to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture. _Sic transit lupus_!
+
+A week out from Chipewyan, where the Swan River makes into the Peace, we
+came one glorious afternoon upon a camp of Crees, the family of the
+_Se-weep-i-gons_. They had just killed two bears. We bought the skins
+and a large portion of meat from them, and Mrs. _Se-weep-i-gon_ very
+kindly added to the feast of fat things some high-bush cranberries "in a
+present." As an excuse for listening to their soft voices, before we
+left the camp we asked the name of every member of the little group,
+scratching the list down on a piece of birchbark. The Crees evidently
+considered this an official ceremony, for after we had paid our score
+and shaken hands with everybody from Grandpa to the latest baby and were
+well out in mid-stream, Mrs. _Se-weep-i-gon_ came running down to the
+bank to call us back. Rowing to the shore we found that she had
+remembered one more child whose name she wanted to add to the list. She
+assured us that this one too had a little brass cross hanging round his
+neck, so we will be sure to know him if we meet him in the woods.
+
+We lived for the next two days on bear-meat and cranberries.
+
+[Illustration: Evening on the Peace]
+
+So one wonderful day follows another as our little boat is towed first
+against one bank then another of this majestic stream. The forest growth
+is a marvel. We measure one morning three of the spruce trees to which
+our tent-ropes are tied, and get for base measurement six feet eight
+inches, five feet two inches, and five feet respectively. The trees
+averaged ninety feet in height and would give perhaps one thousand feet
+to each tree. The autumn tints on the willows and alders of the high
+river-banks are indescribably beautiful. We pass through one hundred
+miles of a veritable field of the cloth of gold. We look out of our
+tent-flaps at night on this living glory, and wake up to it again with
+each new morning sun.
+
+One Sunday evening at dusk we slip into the Hudson's Bay post where the
+Little Red River makes into the Peace, the dear home of Tom Kerr, his
+Scottish wife, and their four bairns. Let me try to give the picture.
+Tom had been off all day cutting meadowgrass, and now wended his way
+home with a load of it in a little Old Country cart drawn by a wall-eyed
+mare. At her side frisked a foal, and two great stag-hounds ran back and
+forward between the master and his home by the riverside. Three children
+bounded out to greet their father. "Oh! Daddy, Daddy, the red coo broke
+away from the byre and is far awa on the ither side o' the burn!" Here,
+in a nutshell, you have the difference between the Mackenzie River of
+to-day and the Peace River. On the Mackenzie, swarthy forms are in
+evidence, Cree and French is spoken on all sides, there are no great
+fields of waving grain, and the dog is the only domestic animal. On the
+Peace is an essentially white race, cows, chickens, trustworthy old
+nags, porridge for breakfast, "the tongue that Shakespeare spake,"
+rendered in an accent born far ayont the Tweed. Right across the mouth
+of the Little Red River, Tom Kerr has a fishing scine. We go down with
+him to lift it, after the cows have been brought back to the narrow
+path. The net yields seven fish and they are of five different
+species,--trout, ling, sucker, jack-fish, and something else that Tom
+calls a "Maria." Daily this net is set, and for three hundred and
+sixty-five days every year it furnishes food for the family, in summer
+in the flowing water, and in winter under the ice. You couldn't starve
+at Little Red River if you wanted to. This is one of the most beautiful
+spots in the whole North Countree. Long after Tom and we and Mrs. Tom
+are under the gowans, and the little Kerrs possess the land, there will
+be populous cities along the Peace, and millionaires will plant their
+summer villas on the beauteous spot where we now stand.
+
+[Illustration: Our Lobsticks on the Peace]
+
+Bidding the bairns good-bye, we press onward on our way, Tom Kerr
+accompanying us. A great honour awaits us round the next corner, when
+the boatmen announce that they are going to make us each a lobstick. We
+land, as pleased as Punch over the suggestion. We now know what it feels
+like when the philanthropist of a village takes his after-dinner walk
+through the square and sees the sparrows drinking from the memorial
+fountain surmounted with his own bust, done in copper, life-size. It
+takes fully two hours to trim the trees into significant shape, but the
+beauty of this particular kind of Cook's Tour is that you go down when
+you like and stop when you want to. The lobsticks furnished, the men
+form a circle and discharge their muskets in salute, and on we go. We
+learn that the ethics of lobsticks is that each of these men, should
+Fate take him past this point again, will salute the lobstick just made
+and send a strong thought across the spruce-tops to us. There is a
+reverse to the shield. Should we, at any time before this journey ends,
+fail to make good, the men on the return voyage will cut the lobstick
+down. We are going to make no impertinent enquiries regarding the
+ulterior fate of these family trees. Is it not sufficient glory to say,
+"On the Peace River we _had_ a lobstick"?
+
+The Chutes of the Peace! These will live forever with the Ramparts of
+the Mackenzie as the two most majestic visions which the whole North
+Land gave us. We had not been prepared for that wonderful spectacle
+which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars
+for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its
+great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite
+across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet
+and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara,
+yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this
+land so pregnant with possibilities, a land which, though it echo now
+only the quiet foot of the Cree, is so unmistakably a White Man's
+Country, intensifies the sense of majesty and power which here takes
+possession of us. The men talk of the water-power furnished by the great
+falls, and hazard guesses of the future economic purposes to which it
+will be put. For our own part, our one wish is to get away from the
+noise of even these subdued voices and in silence feast our very souls
+on this manifestation of the power of God. The thoughts that we feel
+cannot be put into words. Why attempt the impossible?
+
+[Illustration: The Chutes of the Peace]
+
+Our way lies beyond this, and the Chutes have to be overcome. These
+half-breeds know exactly what to do in every emergency which arises.
+Only one of the men has traversed this river before, and he gives
+orders. We strip our little _Mee-wah-sin_ of her temporary masts and
+canvas awning and take out all our belongings. Everybody works. A
+purchase is obtained by throwing a pulley and rope over a nearby
+jack-pine, and the boat is pulled out bodily from the water. Then the
+crew drag her along the shore well beyond the head of the rapid, and we
+make camp.
+
+[Illustration: Pulling out the _Mee-wah-sin_]
+
+These delicious nights within the tent are memories that will remain
+through all the years to come. It is cool and silent and productive of
+thought. We are selfishly glad that fifty people went out by Athabasca
+ways, leaving to us all the mighty reaches and pleasant pastures of the
+Peace. The midnight is flooded by a glorious moon, and the thoughts born
+this afternoon of that stupendous fall have driven sleep far away.
+Opening the tent-flap, I slip through the camp of sleeping Indians to
+the edge of the fast-flowing stream. The feeling is insistent here which
+has been ever-present since we entered this valley of the Peace--here is
+the home prepared and held in waiting for the people who are to follow.
+
+"Listening there, I heard all tremulously
+Footfalls of Autumn passing on her way,
+And in the mellow silence every tree
+Whispered and crooned of hours that are to be.
+Then a soft wind like some small thing astray
+Comes sighing soothingly."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
+
+
+"Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and cheerily wise,
+With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes,
+Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,
+Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood,
+Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,
+As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world."
+
+--_Service_.
+
+It is on August 27th, in the evening, that the crew, all slicked up in
+their Sunday-go-to-meetings, draw us up on the beach of the City in the
+Silences, this Past-in-the-arms-of-the-Present,--Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+The first thing to meet our eye is the red roof of the flour-mill of the
+H.B. Co., a picture of progressiveness set in a living frame of golden
+wheat, the heavy heads nodding to the harvest.
+
+Vermilion is an old post of the Old Company. Alexander Mackenzie on his
+way to the Pacific found people at work here far back in 1792. The
+Vermilion of to-day stands a living monument to the initiative faith and
+hard work largely of one man, Mr. Francis D. Wilson, who has had charge
+of H.B. Co. interests here for nineteen years. Mr. Wilson found this
+place a fur-post on the edge of civilisation, and he has made of it a
+commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre. And his example has
+been contagious, for the half-breeds around him have become farmers, the
+Indians who traded furs a dozen years ago now buy harness and ploughs
+and breach-loading guns from The Company, paying for the same with wheat
+of their own growing.
+
+[Illustration: The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace]
+
+Vermilion is in latitude 58 deg. 30' N.,--that is, about four hundred miles
+due north of Edmonton, and on practically the same parallel as
+Stockholm. The flour-mill that we now inspect is the most northerly
+wheat-mill on this continent, and it has been running for five years. It
+is the roller process, with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, the
+motor-power being a 40 H.P. Corliss engine. The wheat which feeds these
+rollers is all grown in nearby fields, and the resultant flour is
+consumed by the people of the lone posts of the Peace and the lower
+Mackenzie. Two years ago the H.B. Company paid to farmers, all of whom
+lived within a radius of five miles from the mill, the sum of $27,000
+spot cash for their wheat. An electric plant lights the mill and fort
+buildings, affording fifty six-candle-power lights.
+
+Right up to the door of the mill extends the sixty-acre wheat-field of
+the H.B. Company, from which Mr. Wilson computes that he will this year
+thrash two thousand bushels. If the H.B. wheat-field were to sell the H.B.
+mill these two thousand bushels at $1.25 a bushel (the ruling
+Vermilion price), there would be a net profit of $1500, after paying all
+expense of culture, to the credit of one branch of Mr. Wilson's
+commercial institution. For thirty years, wheat, oats, barley, and
+vegetables have been grown in Vermilion, not as an experiment, but as
+regular commercial crops. Cereals are sown late in April or early in
+May, and the harvest is gathered in August. More than once, wheat has
+matured in eighty-six days from seed-sowing to seed-garnering.
+
+Vermilion farmers boast sulkies and gang-ploughs and the latest geared
+McCormick, Massey-Harris, and Deering farm implements,--self-binders and
+seeders. Everything is up-to-date. We ourselves counted fifteen
+self-binders at work. And grain is not the whole story. The farmers own
+thoroughbred Ayrshire stock and splendid horses. I happened to be at the
+garden of the Church of England Mission when the potato-crop was being
+harvested, and found that seven bags of seed planted in the middle of
+May produced one hundred bags by the end of August. Five potatoes that I
+gathered haphazard from one heap weighed exactly five and one-half
+pounds. I photographed and weighed a collection of vegetables grown by
+Robert Jones on the Dominion Experimental Farm.
+
+[Illustration: Articles Made by Indians
+
+A--Wall-pocket of white deerskin, embroidered in silk-work, and bordered
+with ermine--the work of a Cree woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+B--Gloves of white deerskin embroidered in silk, the work of a Slavi
+woman on the Liard River (a branch of the Mackenzie).
+
+C, D, E, F, G, H, I--Moccasins as worn respectively by the Crees,
+Chipewyans, Slavis, Dog-Ribs, Yellow-Knives, Loucheux--all the work of
+the women.
+
+J.--Flour bag from the mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace, the most
+northerly flour-mill in America.
+
+K--Sinew, from close to the spine of the moose--used by the women of the
+North instead of thread.
+
+L--Very valuable net of willow-bark made by an old squaw at Fort
+Resolution. This is almost a lost art, and harks back to the pre-string
+days.
+
+M--The "crooked knife" or knife of the country.
+
+N--Match-box made from a copper kettle by an old Beaver Indian at Fort
+Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
+
+O--_Babiche_, or rawhide of the moose or caribou--"the iron of the
+country."]
+
+One cauliflower weighed eight pounds, half a dozen turnips weighed nine
+pounds each, and twenty table beets would easily average six pounds
+each. The carrots and onions were sown in the open in mid-May and were
+as inviting specimens as I have ever seen. Tomatoes ripened in the open
+air on this farm on July 13th. Peas, sown on May 23rd and gathered on
+August 12th, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel. Experimental plots
+of turnips gave sixteen tons to the acre, and white carrots twelve tons.
+Apple-trees and roses we found flourishing on this farm, with
+twenty-five varieties of red, black, and white currants. The wheat story
+is of compelling interest. Preston wheat, sown on May 6th and cut on
+August 22nd, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel; Ladoga wheat, sown
+on the last day of April and cut on September 5th, ran sixty-four pounds
+to the bushel also, and early Riga weighed sixty-three pounds. In the
+garden of the R.C. Mission we were presented with splendid specimens of
+ripened corn and with three cucumbers grown in the open air, which
+weighed over a pound each.
+
+[Illustration: The Hudson's Bay Store]
+
+Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in
+extent than the whole of Belgium. There are probably a million acres of
+land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops
+like those cited. Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there
+are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white. They
+all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by
+hunting, trapping, and freighting. The settlement boasts two churches,
+two mission schools, and two trading stores,--a happy, prosperous, and
+very progressive community. Everything in the place points to this
+conclusion.
+
+The H.B. Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing
+$1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the
+monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats. This
+sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer _Peace River_,
+built here four years ago of native timber. She is a hundred and
+ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half
+feet and carrying forty tons burden. She can accommodate thirty
+passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes
+fifteen knots an hour. The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this
+boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.
+
+Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one
+man's logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of
+Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill. Edmond Paul's logs in
+one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at
+the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber. The biggest log in this raft was a
+twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which
+cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.
+
+Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and
+arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful
+of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and
+seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what
+has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole
+country spring when it is given rail communication with the
+plains-people to the south?
+
+Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious
+autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.
+Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these
+walls? Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and
+stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us
+to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home. It is a modern
+house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of
+hollyhocks on all sides. The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace,
+here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty. To the visitor who
+steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the
+reading man and the clever artificer. Scientific works of reference,
+good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged
+travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and
+human-nature, for five long months. The office furniture, hand-made of
+native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson's individual work in both
+design and execution. Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also
+a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these
+carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any
+one in the settlement, whether fort employe or not, who cares to come in
+here for a quiet hour to read.
+
+Kipling says, "You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile," but the
+Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line. In a corner of
+the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history. The
+honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of
+Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a
+sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by
+portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton. It
+carries on it the name of John Broadwood & Sons, London. Mrs. Wilson
+tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house
+to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance.
+The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of
+the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod
+Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.
+
+Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and
+the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B. Co., has put in a
+life of loving service among the people of Vermilion. Her knowledge of
+medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of
+need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother
+and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion.
+These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly
+kindness.
+
+Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with
+the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper. The country
+furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and
+bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made
+butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies
+whose four constituents--flour, lard, butter and fruit--are products of
+the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid
+fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild
+game--moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs,
+and mallards. Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen
+different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry,
+blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon. The salt comes from
+Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion
+beets if there should arise a market. What more would you? The
+Vermilionese on his fertile acres is as independent of the world outside
+as is the Eskimo in his Arctic igloo. The farm of Sheridan Lawrence,
+exhibiting its wide-stretching wheat-fields, some heads of which counted
+seventy-one kernels, with its patches of one-pound potatoes, twelve-foot
+sunflowers, and its quiverful of happy, tow-headed children, gives as
+sweet a picture of Canadian thrift and happiness as one would wish to
+see. Indeed, happiness seems to be the keynote of Vermilion, whether we
+seek it within the fort walls of the H.B. Co., on the fat acres of the
+farmers, or within the folds of Protestant or Roman Mission.
+
+[Illustration: Papillon, a Beaver Brave]
+
+We carry away with us two pictures, that we like to cherish, of the
+convent kiddies of Vermilion. The first thing we saw when we peered
+round a corner of this old-fashioned building was the bright face of
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury playing see-saw with a dozen wide-grinning
+Slavi babies. When the morning came when we were to bid reluctant
+good-bye to Vermilion and all its spontaneous kindness, the last sight
+that met our eyes before we turned the corner of the Peace was the whole
+convent force of Vermilion perched high on stumps and fence-rails,
+wishing us _bon voyage_ with fluttering pocket-handkerchiefs, while
+Sister Thomas of Canterbury, on a ladder, surmounted the crowd and waved
+her farewells with a table-cloth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
+
+
+"'Tis a summer such as broods
+O'er enchanted solitudes,
+Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods,
+And with lavish love outpours
+All the wealth of out-of-doors."
+
+--_James Whitcomb Riley_.
+
+[Illustration: Going to School in Winter]
+
+On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the
+little _Mee-wah-sin,_ and in the tiny tug _Messenger_ of the H.B.
+Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we
+puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around
+us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing
+cranes are flying.
+
+Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months
+of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect
+and created for herself a warm place in every heart. Se-li-nah, though,
+makes it impossible for us to pose as brave endurers of hardships. Each
+night and morning she carries her little pack on and off shore, takes
+her share of pot-luck at _meat-su,_ and is never cross. Bless the
+kiddie! If ablutions seem to her a work of supererogation and our daily
+play of toothbrush furnishes all the fascination of the unknown, still
+hers is the right stuff for pioneer lands and she has lessons to teach
+us in pluck and endurance.
+
+The first night out from Vermilion we made camp after dark and, on
+waking, found that in our blankets we had lain directly across four new
+bear-tracks. Moose-tracks are plentiful at every stopping-place, so we
+see to it that both guns and camera are primed. At eight next morning we
+pass Not-in-a-gu Seepee. Some Indians hail us, asking for tea, and from
+these we learn that ten families who made this their winter camp last
+season bagged eighty moose among them.
+
+At half-past two our chance came. To get away from the noise of the
+engine, the Kid and I had moved our work directly after breakfast to a
+flour-laden scow that we had in tow, and I was dictating this story to
+the machine when the sharp eyes of Showan in the distance spied a moose.
+He was on the shore cropping willows. It had been generously agreed that
+if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine, so in excited
+whispers the news is telegraphed to our end of the scow and my rifle is
+handed up. The fireman slows up on the engine, but still its throbbing
+sounds distressingly loud as we creep up on the feeding moose and scan
+the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are
+high,--perhaps one hundred and fifty feet--and sheer, but there are two
+gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly
+creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,--a
+regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those
+animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet
+biscuit. And now at last he sees us. I fire, and the shot just grazes
+his spine. Will he take to a gully? No, he plunges into the river
+instead and we follow him up in the little tug. One more shot is
+effective, and I have killed my premier moose. "Cruel!" you say. Well,
+just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat, as, with
+the exception of Vermilion's flesh-pots, we have done, and then find out
+if you would fly in the face of Providence when the Red Gods send you a
+young moose! To illuminate the problem I transcribe the menu of one
+sample week of the summer.
+
+[Illustration: My Premier Moose]
+
+This is the literal "dope sheet" of the camp cook:
+
+_Monday_:--Dried caribou and rice.
+
+_Tuesday_:--Salt fish and prunes.
+
+_Wednesday_:--Mess-pork and dried peaches.
+
+_Thursday_:--Salt horse and macaroni.
+
+_Friday_:--Sow-belly and bannock.
+
+_Saturday_:--Blue-fish and beans.
+
+_Sunday_:--Repeat.
+
+Dragged ashore, the moose proved to be a male of two prongs, about
+eighteen months old, and weighed perhaps four or five hundred pounds. A
+full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton. We are
+to learn that there are many viewpoints from which to approach a moose.
+The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo and Mrs. Gaudet each eloquently
+argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it,
+and Se-li-nah, looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in
+Cree, "_Marrow_ is nice." Poor young stripling of the Royal House of
+Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!
+
+The first thing Baptiste does is to plunge his penknife into the back to
+see how deep the fat is. We had noticed this testing process before. A
+bunch of feathers is always plucked off the new-killed bird that one can
+immediately gauge the gastronomic niche at which to set one's waiting
+stomach. No more voyaging to-night. The moose is cleaned and skinned.
+Mrs. Gaudet draws the skin. I claim the head. A little Indian boy, who
+with his mother had been added to our ship's crew at Carcajou Point,
+appropriates the kidneys, which he proceeds to roast in the ashes.
+Ten-year-old Bill evidently likes his devilled kidneys rare, for within
+three minutes we see him prancing round the camp, nibbling his dripping
+dainty from the point of an impaling stick.
+
+[Illustration: Beaver Camp, on Paddle River]
+
+Having sat round the barbecue half the night, we pull out late the next
+morning. And now, apprised by moccasin telegraph, we are all on the _qui
+vive_ to catch sight of a floating bride. A fur-trader attached to "The
+French Company" at Vermilion has been out on six months' leave and is
+bringing in a bride from Paris. We are to expect them to cross our
+course on a raft, floating in with the current of the Peace as we make
+our way upstream. We see the raft. All is excitement. We direct the
+steersman to draw close in, and the men prime their rifles for a salute.
+She is not visible,--floating brides on the Peace shrink evidently from
+being the cynosure of passing eyes. Our men fire their salute, the
+steersman on the raft looks puzzled when we, smiling our sympathy, peer
+over the edge of his craft, and see, instead of the Parisian bride,--a
+load of Poland pigs for Vermilion! It is the wrong raft. The real bride
+passes us in the gloaming ten hours later, when it is too dark to get a
+satisfactory photograph!
+
+On the evening of September 22nd we arrive at Peace River Crossing, or
+Peace River Landing, just a week out from Vermilion. Our course from
+there has been almost due south. We turn the little _Messenger_ back
+here and regretfully bid good-bye to our staunch and friendly boatmen.
+No people in the world could be pleasanter to travel with than these
+splendid men of the North. Indefatigable and ready for any emergency,
+they know their business and are always master of the situation;
+moreover, nature has dowered them with an intuitive delicacy as rare as
+it is pleasing. Through all these weeks, intensely interested as they
+are in everything that is new, never for a moment have they intruded
+upon us or our doings. At night there is not a man of them who will not
+walk a quarter of a mile through the woods rather than pass between our
+occupied tent and the camp fire. But let us offer to show them pictures
+or to explain the workings of the camera or the typewriter and it is a
+different story, for then every man Jack drops his oar or tump-line and
+rushes to our side like an excited schoolboy.
+
+Peace River Crossing is in latitude 56 deg. N. and longitude 117 deg. 20' W.
+From that far-off day in spring when we first touched the Clearwater we
+have been following in the historic footprints of Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie. We now take a day off, with the object of locating
+Mackenzie's last camp on the Peace, which he reached in 1792 and from
+which, in the spring of 1793, he started west across the map seeking an
+unknown route to the Pacific Ocean. We find the remains of that camp. It
+is in the corner of a potato-field a little way beyond Peace River
+Crossing and on the opposite side of the river. Only the foundations of
+the walls are left and the crumbling bricks of two old chimneys.
+Mackenzie was the first man to cross the continent from sea to sea north
+of the latitude of Mexico, and it was from this point where we stand
+that he launched his ambitious canoe. There is no more historic spot on
+the continent than that on which we stand this September day, and as yet
+it is all unmarked of commemorative stone or recording tablet. The lost
+camp had never been photographed until we brought our inquisitive camera
+to bear upon it.
+
+I stoop and pluck from where it nods behind the old chimney a wild
+larkspur, and as I half-mechanically count its forty-two seed-pods, I
+try hard to throw back my thoughts to the year 1792,--one hundred and
+sixteen years. It is a far call! Canada is tardy in her recognition of
+her early builders of Empire. Our cousins to the south would appear to
+be more appreciative. In song and story and by a memorial World's Fair
+the people of the United States have honoured the discoveries of Lewis
+and Clark, but Mackenzie crossed the continent a full dozen years in
+advance of these explorers.
+
+[Illustration: The Site of old Fort McLeod]
+
+Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where,
+amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company,
+a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is
+Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the
+noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours
+of dawn and "when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the
+grey." He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if
+he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting
+whisper, but its burden is ever the same.
+
+"Something lost behind the Ranges,
+Lost and waiting for you: Go!"
+
+No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to
+Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty
+and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his
+name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought
+uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not
+pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in
+astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for
+a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791.
+His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western
+Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of
+Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves "somewhere" far beyond
+the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong
+determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort
+Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we
+stand. The breaking of the spring ice of 1793 sent him forth on the
+quest of that Northwest Passage by Land.
+
+"O Young Mariner,
+Down to the harbor call your companions,
+Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas,
+And, ere it vanishes over the margin,
+After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!"
+
+We have not time to recount the chapters of the story, to name the
+streams ascended, the boiling gorges passed, the discontent allayed, the
+encouragement given, the lonely night-watches when the leader himself
+looked for comfort to his new-found stars. The Fraser was discovered,
+traced for a while; and then, striking westward, Mackenzie heard the
+beat of the surf upon the rocks, and came out from among the pines to
+the silver Pacific sparkling in the sun. It was a sweet day in summer's
+prime, and as the gulls cried overhead and the sun mixed scent of
+seaweed with balsam breath from in-shore, we can imagine but not divine
+the feelings of that brave man who had thrown himself face-downward on
+the sand and from whose presence the awed companions stole silently
+away. We remember the words of another builder of Empire,--
+
+"Anybody might have found it,
+But God's whisper came to me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
+
+
+"A haze on the far horizon,
+  The infinite tender sky,
+The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,
+  And the wild geese sailing high,--
+And all over upland and lowland
+  The charm of the goldenrod.
+Some of us call it Autumn,
+  And others call it God."
+
+--_W.H. Carruth_.
+
+At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is
+here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good
+Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they
+left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs
+twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons,
+which weigh over ten pounds each.
+
+To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies
+present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and
+the Pouce Coupe. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square
+miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water
+are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been
+damaged by frost.
+
+Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande
+Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande
+Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square
+miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their
+cattle longer than six weeks each winter.
+
+[Illustration: Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace]
+
+The Pouce Coupe would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace
+River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves
+the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in
+mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September.
+Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give
+abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in,
+tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and
+pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the
+naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn,
+and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This
+is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and
+the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that
+tickle his palate,--blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries,
+willow-berries, and saskatoons.
+
+[Illustration: Fort Dunvegan on the Peace]
+
+On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles
+south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in
+our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand
+miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the
+suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost
+all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times
+and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us
+through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open
+glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us
+bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this
+land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail
+is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and
+tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are
+fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the
+very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this
+Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling
+amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56 deg. N. I pluck
+a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.
+
+Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser
+Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer
+civilisation,--the "civilisation" of Chicago! A strong desire possesses
+us to about-face and back to the woods again.
+
+It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we
+intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into
+sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,--men, women,
+children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering
+flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look
+up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the
+south,--one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty
+picture,--the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns
+with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. "It is the _Man with
+the Hoe_," I murmur. "Yes," assents the Kid, "and _The Angelus at Lesser
+Slave_."
+
+We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey.
+Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear
+delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the "horse
+latitudes"--though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey
+leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page.
+The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat
+and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs.
+Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole,
+this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses'
+mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the
+act making possible the writing of this "immortal work"!
+
+[Illustration: Fort St. John on the Peace]
+
+Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody
+rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a
+gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed
+on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey
+and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in
+Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly
+rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at
+dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the
+latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the
+vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant
+bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year.
+To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot
+straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the
+healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.
+
+[Illustration: Where King Was Arrested]
+
+There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in
+which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and,
+driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph
+giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.
+
+[Illustration: Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons]
+
+By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,--tall, straight,
+fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch
+blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one
+granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His
+grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a
+century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He
+married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the
+time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the
+notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to
+lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum,
+he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the
+flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy.
+It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can
+navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this
+Scots-Sioux,--strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party
+of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching
+Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who,
+too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec
+Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating
+sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile,
+of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of
+the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec
+has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, "Do
+not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?"
+
+Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young
+fellow of the H.B. Co. says, "It's beastly bad form to ask any man who
+comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a
+wilful-missing, that's his privilege." However, fate has thrown in our
+way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan
+up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down
+at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or
+less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise
+herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon
+make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs.
+Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.
+
+[Illustration: Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron]
+
+Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty
+years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged
+eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little
+brothers and cousins, _en famille_, they pitched off from Little Red
+River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger
+men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was
+seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it,
+and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless,
+they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who
+nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.
+
+How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the
+woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her
+clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little
+children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters
+who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat
+came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike
+became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate
+of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her
+sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket
+between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make
+Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful
+experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each
+feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out,
+thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping
+companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas.
+The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then
+the sister died. _How_ she died God and the watching stars alone know.
+Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as
+food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but
+admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.
+
+Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language
+which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same
+word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own
+volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human
+imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony
+undergone by these poor creatures--women and children with affections
+like our own--shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel
+camp of death!
+
+Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a
+recluse, shunned of all Indians as a "Wetigo" or "Cannibal." A friend
+was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon
+Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years
+passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is
+The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been
+born.
+
+As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly
+caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the
+Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat
+difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is "even
+as you and me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
+
+
+"I hear the tread of Nations yet to be,
+The first low wash of waves where soon shall roll a human sea."
+
+[Illustration: A Peace River Pioneer]
+
+Taking passage on the steamer _Northern Light_, we leave the settlement
+of Lesser Slave Lake, this world-in-small, on the first day of October,
+and, from here to Athabasca Landing, travel in company with Mr. J.K.
+Cornwall, President of the Northern Transportation Company. Between the
+time of our journey and this writing, Mr. Cornwall has been returned as
+Member of the Alberta Legislature for the district we are now
+traversing. He certainly knows his constituency better than most
+representatives do. There is scarcely a mile of these unmapped ways that
+he has not tramped alone; not an Indian guide in the North can last with
+"Jim" for a week, in summer, or on snow-shoes. When some Lesser Slave
+half-breeds were told that Mr. Cornwall was going to run for the
+legislature against Allie Brick, one of them said, "Jim wins. Allie
+Brick can't run. Not much fun in that race. No man on Peace River can
+run like Jim."
+
+Mr. Cornwall's pronouncement on the North Country can be taken as
+authoritative. He says, "Practically all the timber of any commercial
+value between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains is in these
+northern watersheds. This timber will be a very important factor in the
+coming development of Prairie Canada to the south, and fortunately, too,
+it is most get-at-able. There are thirty-six hundred miles of river and
+lake in the North on which steamers are plying to-day and which are open
+for navigation for six months in every year. The first railway that
+comes in will tap a system of transporation equalled only on this
+continent by the Mississippi and St. Lawrence with the Great Lakes. The
+American Government has spent two hundred million dollars on the
+improvement of Mississippi navigation, and to-day it is not as valuable
+a national asset as the great Athabasca-Mackenzie-Peace system is as it
+came from the hand of Nature. Thirty thousand bushels of wheat that
+would grade 'No. 1 Northern' was produced in the Peace River Country
+this year, besides thousands of bushels of oats and barley. In this
+Northland there are 100,000,000 acres of land fit for the growing of
+grain."
+
+Charles Dickens used to carry a note-book in his vest-pocket in which he
+jotted down names that tickled his fancy. Were Dickens to travel this
+route with us, his name-note-books would bulge. Where Lesser Slave River
+issues out of Lesser Slave Lake, we found Tom Lilac in earnest
+conversation with Jilly Loo-bird. Jilly has navigated the North all the
+way from Athabasca Landing to Hudson's Hope on the Peace, seeking a
+wife, and still lacks his connubial rib. Being told that ladies are on
+board, he breathlessly asks, "What colour?" When he learns that we are
+white, Jilly makes a dash for some cache in the woods which takes the
+place of clothes-closet, but the steamer has passed on before he
+emerges. Another lost chance, both for Jilly and the writer! For two or
+three miles here, where the river runs out of the lake, it never
+freezes, and ducks and wild-fowl remain here all the winter in open
+water. Last month, in this immediate vicinity, no fewer than one hundred
+moose were killed. Lilac tells us that last winter there was no snow
+here until March, and two winters ago absolutely no snow fell whatever,
+so that the sleighs were not gotten out and all the freighting had to be
+done with waggons. "No need to starve here," says Lilac, "the trout run
+up to forty pounds each. There are whitefish and grayling, and I gather
+berries all the year round. In summer, I get the red and white currants,
+raspberries, saskatoons, blueberries, gooseberries, and strawberries,
+and all winter long there are both high-bush and low-bush cranberries."
+
+[Illustration: Three Generations]
+
+Travelling with us are Judge Noel and Judge Beck, making the first
+circuit of justice through this country. Although they had come all the
+way from Edmonton looking for trouble, so splendid has been the
+surveillance of the Mounted Police here that no one could scrape up one
+case for the judges to try. The Peace River people seemed somehow to
+think that in greeting the judges with an empty house the settlement had
+failed to make good. Some one comforts them with setting forth as the
+ethics of the case the fact that the judges should be presented with
+white gloves, as the traditional sign of an empty docket. Again is Peace
+River chagrined, neither The Company nor the French Company has white
+kids in stock. Each judge is made the recipient of a handsome pair of
+moose-skin gloves, as a substitute, ornamented with beads and quills of
+the porcupine.
+
+At Norris's, we leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift
+Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout. The Dominion Government, with a
+series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to
+make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel. Where the Lesser Slave
+River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, and from
+there to Athabasca Landing float down the last stretch of our northern
+waterways of delight. There is frost each night now and the deciduous
+trees on the banks are a rich riot of colour. We resurrect from the
+depths all the warm clothing available and have opportunity of testing
+in their own latitudes the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and
+other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.
+
+Every passenger who floats with us enlarges our knowledge and enriches
+our vocabulary. Judge Noel's bodyguard is a young stripling of the
+Mounted Police, born in dear old Lunnon. It is always interesting to
+note the different things of which people are proud. Old men boast of
+their age and young ones of their youth. The fat woman in the side-show
+is arrogant over her avoirdupois; the debutante glories in her slender
+waist; and the globe-trotter triumphs in the miles he has travelled.
+Wyllie claimed distinction in never having left Chipewyan. This Mounted
+Policeman, who stretches out on the scow, plumes himself on two things:
+"I 'old the dahnsin' championship of Edmonton. I got a gold watch lahst
+winter for waltzin'." We smile approval, and the constable continues, "I
+waltzed,--reversin',--an 'our-an'-a-'alf! And--," straightening himself
+up, "I am the best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta."
+
+[Illustration: A Family on the Lesser Slave]
+
+Rich is the descriptive language of the North, and we lie awake on the
+scows, rolled in our blankets, loath to lose any of it. "Jim" is at the
+sweep. Many of the men are going out from the North for the first time
+in four or five years. They also seem too interested to slumber, and all
+night long the conversation goes on. A priest is describing some man who
+seems to be hard to identify. "You know him,--the son of the ole man
+with the patch on his nose wot died. I christen him last winter." No one
+is more apt at naming than these men. Two days ago, at the treaty at
+Lesser Slave, when a smiling couple drew five dollars for a baby one day
+old, a Cree bystander dubbed the baby "dat little meal-ticket." A young
+girl who came up to claim her money was nicknamed "Pee-shoo," or "The
+Lynx," because of her bad temper. So we see where all the old cats of
+the south come from.
+
+[Illustration: A One Night Stand]
+
+
+The scow glides on, and we doze, but do not sleep. In the dark she hits
+something and bumps us wide awake to hear the reassuring, "This is where
+Pat Cunningham's horses were drownded last week." Under Jim's command,
+everybody works, even learned judges from Edmonton. He says, "Take
+another shot at the oars, and then you can hit the feathers." In the
+morning, one half-breed fails to turn up for _meat-su_ and the comment
+is, "He feels the feathers pullin'." "Don't blime 'im," remarks the
+constable, passing the tea, "only fools and 'orses work."
+
+"He reached out his hand for a drink," rendered into trans-Athabascan
+would be, "He got his thievin' irons on the joy-juice," or "He stretched
+his mud-hooks for the fight-water." "He set him a-foot for his horse"
+means "He stole his horse," and from this we derive all such phrases as,
+"He set him a-foot for his blankets," "He set him a-foot for his furs,"
+"He set him a-foot for his wife."
+
+The springy tussocks of grass growing in swampy places are _tetes des
+femmes_, a name that pleased our fancy and made us think each time we
+negotiated them of walking over the swaying heads of women in a crowd.
+To call the tribes together, Indians are wont to send out significant
+little pieces of wood. The announcement in the society columns, if the
+Indians had any, would be, "The Crees sent out chips for a crush." An
+Indian far down the Mackenzie had a name that kings might envy. He was
+known among his tribe as _The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps_. When a
+beardless and ardent missionary approached this splendid chief, wanting
+to "convert" him to the Christian religion, the old man replied with
+indulgent dignity, "My son, for eighty years have I served the Great
+Spirit in my own way. I fear I am now too old to change."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
+
+
+"The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as
+the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself."
+
+--_Leviticus, XIX_, 34.
+
+[Illustration: A Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba]
+
+Edmonton once more. Two Spanish sailors shipwrecked and navigating the
+Pacific on a log, search the shore for a sign. Into what land are they
+drifting? The one at the bow (does a log have a bow?) sees something
+through the haze--"_Gracias a Dios_! Praise be to God, it is a
+Christian country! I see the gallows!" We too get our sign. We reach
+Edmonton on Convocation Day.
+
+Most young countries for the first ten years of their lives confine
+their energies to roads, bridges, transportation--things of the
+market-place. Alberta has been a full-fledged Province of Canada for
+barely three years, and, coming out of the wilds, we sit on the back
+benches and see her open the doors of her first Provincial University.
+The record is unique and significant. On the banks of the Saskatchewan
+rise the walls of the new Parliament Buildings, a replica in small of
+Minnesota's State Capitol at St. Paul. This new Province, carved out of
+the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within
+it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil
+in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a
+hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young
+people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of
+happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would
+you?
+
+The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan.
+On his promised visit to the Orkneys the old man had gotten as far as
+Winnipeg, where the crowds of the modern city affrighted him. "Miss
+Cameron, the men on the streets were as trees walking, and no man
+stopped to ask how the other was doing. If that is the world, I wanted
+to go no farther. I'm going back to Chipewyan, and I will take my family
+with me. We go home with dogs on the first ice!" Poor Wyllie! Before the
+bells rang out the Old Year, his soul heard the summons none may
+disregard, and alone he went out on the Long Journey.
+
+What of Inspector Pelletier, Walker, Joyce, and Conway, essaying the
+traverse from Resolution to Hudson Bay? For weeks after coming out we
+waited for news of the party. Month succeeded month and no word came out
+of the white silence. Hudson Bay has no daily mail service. "There ain't
+no busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay." It is not until March that
+the welcome word comes that the original party safely made salt water.
+The relieved tension at Regina headquarters and the joy of personal
+friends is dimmed by the news of the death of Corporal Donaldson, who
+joined the others at Chesterfield Inlet. Donaldson, in company with
+Corporal Reeves, started down Hudson Bay in an open boat and encountered
+a herd of walruses. Enraged and maddened at the shots of the men, one
+huge animal made a charge, the boat was upset, and Donaldson, trying to
+make shore, was drowned. Reeves survived.
+
+It seems to be a chapter of accidents. Just as this book goes to press
+we learn of a double fatality which attended the transport of the 1909
+outfit of Count von Hammerstein. This plucky developer of McMurray
+oilfields, while running Grand Rapids on the Athabasca (the rapids which
+we had descended in an empty while the other sturgeon-heads were
+discharging freight at Grand Rapids Island), struck a boulder. The boat
+turned turtle and the three men were tossed into the torrent,--von
+Hamerstein, V. Volksooky, a young Russian, and a French half-breed, La
+France. The Count was washed ashore and escaped, but the others were
+drowned. Deaths such as these are the price of Empire. When the
+railroad reaches the Athabasca, the running of these dangerous rapids
+will no longer be necessary.
+
+[Illustration: Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway]
+
+In the footprints of Back and Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and Sir
+John Franklin, for six months we have been treading the silent places.
+We have thought much of these faith-possessed men who found the roads
+that others follow. In faith they wrought. Canada does well to honour
+these great of old, and that she appreciates the work of her early
+explorers is shown in the fact that British Columbia recently granted a
+pension to the granddaughter of Simon Fraser, the man who in 1808 first
+sailed down the great river that bears his name. But the day of our
+great men is not over; Canada still in her great North and West has
+Pathfinders of Empire. The early voyageurs made their quest in the
+dugout and the birchbark; and the tools of these are rails of steel and
+iron horses.
+
+[Illustration: William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern
+Railway]
+
+We are accustomed to look upon a railroad as a cold thing of dirt and
+sand and rock, ties and steel,--a mechanical something associated with
+gradients and curves. But the history of railroading in Canada is one
+long romance; back of each line is its creative wizard. We are too near
+these men to get their proper measure; the historian of the future will
+place their names on Canada's bead-roll:--Charles M. Hays, the forceful
+President of the Grand Trunk Pacific; Mackenzie and Mann; William Whyte
+of the Canadian Pacific. Canada owes much to Caledonia. Nine-tenths of
+those pioneers of pioneers, the trading adventurers of the H.B. Company,
+came from Scotland, that grey land where a judicious mixture of
+Scripture and Shorter Catechism, oatmeal and austerity, breeds boys of
+dour determination and pawky wit, boys who, whatever their shortcomings,
+are not wont to carry their wishbone where their backbone ought to be. A
+conspicuous example of the dynamic Scottish Canadian, hale at sixty-six,
+is William Whyte, Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At an
+age when most men are content to "drowse them close by a dying fire,"
+William Whyte finds himself in complete charge of all the affairs of the
+Canadian Pacific Railway Company between the Great Lakes and the
+Pacific. Through the positions of brakemen, freight clerk, yard master,
+conductor, night station-agent, passenger agent, this man worked on his
+own passage along Fame's ladder. Twenty years of adolescence and
+preparation, twenty years with the Grand Trunk, a quarter of a century
+with the Canadian Pacific, this is William Whyte's record of splendid
+service. He has always played the game and he is still in the harness.
+
+[Illustration: Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern
+Railway]
+
+[Illustration: William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway]
+
+When people enquired of the early Christians, "What do you call your new
+religion?" they answered, "We call it _The Road_." If religion is the
+best work of a man made visible, as I think it is, then the Canadian
+Northern Road may well stand for the religious expression of the men
+who made it. It takes more than money, more than dreams, more than
+ambition, for two men in twelve years to build, own, and personally
+control five thousand miles of railway. As Riley says, it takes sweat. A
+mile a day for twelve years,--this is the construction-record of the
+Canadian Northern. It sounds like the story of Jonah's gourd. In 1896,
+nothing. In 1909, a railroad line with earnings of ten million dollars a
+year west of Port Arthur alone, and twelve thousand people on the
+regular pay-roll. Beginning in Manitoba and operating in the three
+prairie Provinces, the Canadian Northern is primarily a western railway,
+its remarkable growth being coincident with and closely related to the
+tide of immigration.
+
+[Illustration: In the Wheat Fields]
+
+As a case in point, on our way south from Edmonton we pass through the
+divisional point of Vermilion on the Canadian Northern, which is not to
+be confounded with our Far North Vermilion-on-the-Peace. Vermilion
+exemplifies wonderfully the Go-Fever and the Grow-Fever of the
+Prairies. Before it was three months old its citizens had organised a
+Board of Trade, had given it a Methodist Church, a newspaper, a bank, a
+public school, three lumber-yards, three hotels, three restaurants, four
+implement warehouses, two hardware stores, two butcher shops, four real
+estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a
+steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a
+bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two
+doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There
+were two pool-rooms and a bowling-alley.
+
+Farther south we reach the town of Vonda. The Canadian Northern reached
+this neighbourhood, and the town-site was surveyed in June, 1905. That
+year Vonda shipped over the line one hundred thousand bushels of wheat,
+and in 1906 her exports were five hundred thousand bushels. The Canadian
+farmer looks upon the railroad as his friend; you cannot expect _him_ to
+use the inclusive condemnation, "Corporations have no souls." The main
+line of the Canadian Northern runs from Port Arthur on Lake
+Superior--where, by the way, stands the world's largest grain
+elevator--to beyond Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan, operating in the
+heart of one gigantic wheat-farm. The method of construction has been
+unique. The owners commenced to build branch railways almost before they
+had a main line. Little spurs to small elevators grew into long branches
+flanked with bigger elevators, and the elevators evolved into villages,
+towns, and cities, until to-day the result of twelve years' growth shows
+a main line of thirteen hundred miles, with over three thousand miles
+of branch railways. An orchard tree is a good fruit-bearer when the
+thick clustering branches are more in evidence than the long thin trunk,
+and the same applies to railroads. But this main line will grow, too.
+Working out from its wheaten heart, its natural line of growth is east
+to Hudson Bay, north beyond Edmonton, and west to the Pacific. Surely
+the tentacles are pushing out. Already the Alberta Legislature has
+granted the Canadian Northern a charter to Athabasca Landing, and one
+hundred miles of steel will here tap all the lush land watered by the
+Peace and the Athabasca.
+
+More interesting than the line which gridirons the wheat-lands we are
+passing through, are the men who made it. To try to write the history of
+Western Canada's development and not speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann
+would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without
+mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil
+Rhodes of Canada--gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and
+with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher,
+he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of
+action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a
+saw-mill. Three things come to him as priceless treasure out of the
+self-discipline of these experiences: a rare aptitude to see and to
+focus the central idea of any proposition, quick and unerring decision,
+and the power of ready calculation. "I am seldom wrong in a figure," is
+one of his few admissions about himself. The President of the Canadian
+Northern travels without a secretary, dictates letters sparingly, and
+works in an office as bare of adornment as a monk's cell.
+
+And his working partner? Donald D. Mann is a man of deeds rather than
+words. James J. Hill has declared Mr. Mann to be the greatest railway
+builder in the world. Mr. Mann was born in Ontario not far from the
+sleepy town of Acton and just six miles east of Rockwood, the birthplace
+of James J. Hill. These two boys learned to swim in the same
+swimming-hole. One wonders from what roadside spring they quaffed the
+draught which sent them railroad-building. Mr. Mann thinks it a great
+advantage to be born a country boy, for he says it makes a lad frugal,
+strong, and resourceful. It worked out this way in his own case at
+least, for there is not a thing in railroad building that Mr. Mann
+cannot do with his own hands, from shoeing a mule to finding the best
+pass in the Rockies through which to slide his iron horse down to the
+sea. Direct, strong, simple, he knows how to control himself and manage
+others. D.D. Mann is a conspicuous example of what a Canadian boy has
+managed to accomplish by his own efforts. The beauty of this Western
+Canada is that it holds out opportunities to every plucky lad who has
+initiative and who is willing to work; nothing is stratified, the whole
+thing is formative.
+
+While the steel kings are letting the light of day into this great
+granary, they are being helped by a government representative, as
+democratic and direct as any of the pathmakers whose visible work we
+have been noticing. The Hon. Frank Oliver, Canada's Minister of the
+Interior, is essentially a self-made man. Before the railroad men
+realised their vision splendid, young Mr. Oliver and his bride rode into
+Edmonton on an ox-cart, with a modest little printing-press tucked away
+among the wedding-gifts and household goods. Oliver was a practical
+printer and soon issued a hand-dodger called by courtesy a newspaper.
+The editing habit sticks. The Minister of the Interior owns and
+publishes the Edmonton _Bulletin_. Mr. Mann says, "I like building
+railroads"; Mr. Oliver might parody him and say, "I like building
+newspapers."
+
+[Illustration: Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior]
+
+Arrived at Winnipeg, we look back across this great prairie we have
+twice traversed. The land stands ready to produce bread for the nations;
+Nature has done her part, now man must do his. The two greatest needs of
+Western Canada to-day are transportation and immigration. Of the one we
+have spoken; the other claims our interest even more compelling, for man
+is more vital than machinery. Canada is a country with a meagre past, a
+solid present, and an illimitable future.
+
+She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man's
+sky,--where wilderness and man are meeting. The flood of immigration
+hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the
+immigration policy of a government. It is the natural sequence of the
+economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least
+resistance to a more favourable situation. The people who are coming in
+are not dreamers but workers. "The world's greatest wheat-farm," says
+the economist. It is more than this: it is a human crucible, and we are
+witnessing here the birth-throes of an entirely new nation.
+
+[Illustration: Threshing Grain]
+
+While seventy-five per cent of Canada's wheat-farmers are either
+Canadian, American, or British-born, and of the class that preserves the
+homogeneity of the race, every country on the map pays tribute to the
+plains. Austrians are here and Galicians, Hungarians and Belgians,
+Dutch and French and Germans, Italians and Polish, the Russian
+Doukhobortsi, Finns and Danes and Icelanders, Swedes in thousands and
+stalwart Norwegians. South Africans and West Indians are coming in with
+Bermudians and Jamaicans and the bearded Spaniard. Far off on the
+Pacific Coast, strangers are knocking at the western gate,--Chinese,
+Japanese, and Hindoos.
+
+[Illustration: Doukhobors Threshing Flax]
+
+There is no Established Church in Canada; it is the freest land in the
+world. On his one hundred and sixty government-given acres, the new
+arrival may worship his God in his own way. The Greek Church in Winnipeg
+has a Bishop who one day each year makes holy water of the Red River
+when the Czar is performing the same blessing on the Neva. Down in
+Southern Alberta refugee Mormons from Salt Lake grow sugar-beets,
+revere the memory of Brigham Young, and multiply after their kind. Until
+within two years ago the expatriated Russian Doukhobors maintained a
+commonwealth of ten thousand souls, eschewing liquors and flesh-meats,
+making the prairie blossom into bumper harvests, and holding all things
+in common.
+
+Winnipeg has three thousand Icelanders who, every August, take a day off
+to celebrate the fact that the Danish King, in 1874, granted a
+constitution to Iceland. When you ask them why they came to America,
+they say, "Did not our Lief Ericcson discover this continent, why
+shouldn't we come?" The Icelanders boast two members in the Manitoba
+legislature. A Mennonite is a member of the Parliament of Alberta. The
+first graduate of Wesley College in Winnipeg to find a place on the
+staff of his Alma Mater is also a Mennonite. Winnipeg has several, Roman
+Catholic Polish lawyers. Statistics prove that the young Jewish people
+of Western Canada patronise the public libraries more than any other
+class or race. All the citizens-in-the-making are closely interested in
+politics. Recently there was chronicled the formation in Winnipeg of a
+Syrian Liberal Club and a Syrian Conservative Club. Up in Edmonton the
+Galicians (Ruthenians?) have just organised a corps of volunteer militia
+to serve the Canadian country of their adoption.
+
+[Illustration: Sir William Van Horne, First President of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway]
+
+The Americanisation of Canada? During the past seven years over three
+hundred and fifty thousand people have come to us from the United
+States. Is this American invasion to be feared politically? Western
+Canada has no more desirable citizens than those who come to us from
+the south. They are not failures, but are people who have made good,
+intent on making better. One generation at the most,--sometimes but a
+few years,--converts these into Canadian voters. The troubled English
+brother should remember that when "American" farmers in Canada pronounce
+on Canadian matters they do so constitutionally at the polls and as
+Canadian citizens. As Canadians we believe that our national
+institutions, though far from perfect, are in some respects superior to
+those of the United States. We believe they are at once more elastic,
+more responsive to the popular will, and more stable because more
+elastic. The west is gaining in political power as it gains in
+population and prosperity, and fortunately our government machinery has
+been well tested before it is called upon to feel the strain of our
+rapidly-increasing population. Canada may construct where older nations
+must reconstruct, and if we borrow an American institution or two,
+provided it be a good one, let no man hold up hands in holy horror.
+Japan has borrowed nationally whenever she saw, lying around loose,
+something she could use, and Japan is as Japanese at heart as she was in
+the days of the Tycoon and the two-sworded Samurai. Belgium to-day,
+after centuries of contiguity and intercourse, is not exactly France;
+and little Switzerland, surrounded by the Powers, will be Switzerland
+till the last curtain-fall.
+
+"Is Canada loyal to England?" is a question that sometimes meets us. No,
+Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let
+England see to it that she, too, is loyal.
+
+Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the
+Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace,
+are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated
+as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and
+the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land.
+God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the
+diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people in
+time will intermarry,--Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with
+these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations.
+Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type
+will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into
+the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who will step out?
+
+In the point of population, Canada begins the twentieth century where
+the United States began the nineteenth. The race is ours to run. Wise
+the nation, as is the individual, who can learn his lesson from a page
+torn out of his neighbour's book, learn what to follow and what to
+avoid. Our fore-elders who laid the foundations for us laid them
+four-square. As Canadians, we owe a debt to the Fathers of Confederation
+and their successors. In the West, our particular thanks are due to the
+Hudson's Bay Company, the R.N.W.M.P., and all those factors which
+established British law "in the beginning." Canada has never seen a
+lynching; we have had no Indian war; with but one weak-kneed exception
+there has been no attempt to hold up a train within our Western borders.
+This is the inheritance of the people of this generation, and on this
+foundation we must build. Our hope is in the children.
+
+On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had
+been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New
+Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary. They were
+all singing "_The Maple Leaf Forever_." It is the lessons these children
+are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the
+future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel
+wheat. In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed. Many
+signs are full of hope. Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with
+dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children
+in school. Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post. At
+all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed
+out with them!
+
+May I close with a purely personal note? At the end of a summer which
+had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman
+priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my
+life. We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls,
+the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the
+Lake of the Woods country. I was anxious to get the story of the
+recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs. But
+the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve. We
+turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary. Looking in
+at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a
+blackboard problem. "If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a
+trench 82 yards long----." And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse
+stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.
+
+"You are interested?" queried the Father.
+
+"Yes," I acknowledged, "I once taught school."
+
+He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.
+
+"I taught school for twenty-five years," I admitted.
+
+We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he
+turned to me with, "And you taught school--for twen-ty five years?"
+
+I nodded my head, and we went on. At the next landing the remark was
+repeated. At the foot of the stairs he excused himself and came back
+with the photographs which he presented to me with an Old World courtesy
+and dignity. Grasping my hand in farewell, once more the man of God
+wondered, "And for twen-ty five years you taught school. And you remain
+so--" He hesitated for the word, and I wondered what it would be. At
+last it came,--the tribute of one who expected to teach school all his
+life to one who had put in a quarter of a century at the work and still
+survived,--"You have taught school for twen-ty five years, _and you
+remain so glad!_"
+
+And this is the keynote of what the summer has left with us. As
+Canadians, looking at this Western Canada which has arrived and thinking
+of the lands of Canada's fertile Northland far beyond, for the future we
+are full of optimism, and of the present we are _glad_.
+
+
+
+ROUTES OF TRAVEL
+
+ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO THE ARCTIC VIA THE ATHABASCA AND MACKENZIE RIVER
+SYSTEMS.
+
+MILES     PLACE                PASSENGER              FREIGHT TARIFF      MODE OF TRAVEL                               TIMES
+                                TARIFF                  per cwt.
+  0   Edmonton
+100   Athabasca Landing         $8.00                    $1.00         Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy              Twice a week all year round
+
+
+                            DOWN      RETURN     DOWN    RETURN
+                           STREAM    UPSTREAM   STREAM  UPSTREAM
+  0   Athabasca Landing                                                Northern Transportation Co.'s SS.
+120   Pelican Rapids       $ 7.50    $ 7.50     $  .75   $  .75         _Midnight Sun_ (when business offers)
+165   Grand Rapids          10.00     15.00       1.50     1.50          or scows. From Athabasca Landing
+                                                                         to Grand Rapids.
+252   Fort McMurray         20.00     27.50       3.25     3.25        Scows from Grand Rapids to Fort
+                                                                         McMurray
+437   Fort Chipewyan        35.00     45.00       4.50     4.50        H.B. Co's SS. _Grahame_ (sternwheel
+539   Smith's Landing       45.00     55.00       5.50     5.50          river steamer, 130 ft. x 28 ft.;
+                                                                         accommodates 30 passengers; blankets
+                                                                         supplied; bathroom; meals served 50         From June to
+                                                                         cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).         August inclusive[1]
+                                                                         From Fort McMurray to Smith's
+                                                                         Landing.
+555   Fort Smith             48.00     58.00       6.25    6.25        H.B. Co. Transport, portage by teams
+                                                                         from Smith's Landing to Fort Smith.
+749   Fort Resolution        56.00     68.00       7.25    8.25        H.B. Co's SS. _Mackenzie River_
+819   Hay River              59.00     73.00       7.75    9.25          (strong new sternwheel, lake and
+869   Fort Rae               62.00     78.00       8.25   10.25          river steamer; accommodates 50
+917   Fort Providence        65.00     82.00       8.25   10.25          passengers, same conditions as _Grahame_
+1078   Fort Simpson          73.00     92.00       9.25   12.25          above). From Fort Smith to Fort
+1214   Fort Wrigley          80.00    102.00      10.25   14.25          Macpherson.
+1398   Fort Norman           87.00    112.00      11.25   16.25
+1572   Fort Good Hope        93.00    122.00      12.25   18.25
+1780   Arctic Red River     100.00    130.00      13.00   19.50
+1854   Fort Macpherson      103.00    133.00      13.75   21.25
+        (Peel's River)
+
+[Footnote 1: For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Edmonton Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO PEACE RIVER, VIA THE ATHABASCA RIVER (UP
+STREAM), LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LESSER SLAVE LAKE.
+
+MILES       PLACE                 PASSENGER     FREIGHT TARIFF  MODE OF TRAVEL                                                     TIMES
+                                    TARIFF         per cwt.
+   0   Edmonton
+ 100   Athabasca Landing            $8.00           $1.00       Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy                      Twice a week all year round
+
+
+   0   Athabasca Landing                                        Northern Transportation Co.'s SS.
+  75   Mouth of Lesser Slave                                    _Midnight Sun_ (sternwheel river
+       River                        $6.00          $ .80        steamer, 120 ft. long x 24 ft. beam;
+                                                                accomodates 35 in staterooms; passengers
+                                                                supply their own blankets;
+                                                                meals served 50 cents each; freight-carrying
+                                                                capacity 50 tons). From
+                                                                Athabasca Landing to Mouth of
+                                                                Lesser Slave River.
+
+  91   Norris's (head of rapids)    8.00            1.40        Portage 16 miles in N.T. Co's passenger
+                                                                and freight waggons from                             From May 15 to
+                                                                Mouth of Lesser Slave River to                       Oct. 15.[2]
+                                                                Norris's (head of rapids).
+
+ 194   Shaw's Point on Lesser
+       Slave Lake                  16.00            2.50        N.T. Co.'s SS. _Northern Light_ (sidewheel
+                                                                river and lake steamer, 100
+                                                                ft. long x 26 ft. beam; accommodates
+                                                                35 in staterooms; passengers
+                                                                supply their own blankets; meals
+                                                                served 50 cents each; freight capacity
+                                                                30 tons). From Norris's to
+                                                                Shaw's Point.
+
+ 201   Lesser Slave Lake Settlement                             Portage 7 miles to the settlement.
+
+
+   0   Lesser Slave Lake Settlement                             From Lesser Slave Lake Settlement to
+                                  $10.00            2.00        Peace River Crossing, teams and
+                                    to                          drivers may be hired; fare depends
+                                   25.00                        on number of passengers; takes 3                      All the year round
+                                 according                      days. Stopping places at intermediate
+                                 to number                      points, with stabling and hay;
+                                                                bunkhouses for travellers who supply
+  90   Peace River Crossing (Peace                              their own bedding and provisions.
+       River Landing)
+
+[Footnote 2: For further particulars regarding dates and rates, application 
+should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K. Cornwall, M.P.P.,
+of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to A.G. Harrison, 
+Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+PEACE RIVER ROUTES:--(1) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING UP TO HUDSON'S HOPE.
+(2) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING DOWN TO FORT CHIPEWYAN.
+
+MILES       PLACE                 PASSENGER             FREIGHT TARIFF          MODE OF TRAVEL                                                     TIMES
+                                    TARIFF                 per cwt.
+
+                                UPSTREAM RETURN         UPSTREAM RETURN         Having arrived at Peace River Crossing,
+                                          DOWN                    DOWN          the traveller may go up the
+                                         STREAM                  STREAM         Peace by H.B. SS. _Peace River_
+   0    Peace River Crossing                                                    (sternwheel river steamer, electric               From June to August
+  70    Fort Dunvegan            $10.00   $ 5.00          $1.00   $ .75         light, bathroom; accomodates 40                   inclusive.[3]
+ 200    Fort St. John's           25.00    15.00           3.00    2.25         passengers; blankets supplied; meals
+ 240    Hudson's Hope             35.00    20.00           5.00    4.25         served 50 cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free).
+
+
+                                  DOWN   RETURN          DOWN   RETURN
+                                 STREAM  UPSTREAM       STREAM  UPSTREAM
+   0    Peace River Crossing                                                    Or, having arrived at Peace River
+ 280    Fort Vermilion           $15.00  $25.00          $1.00   $3.00          Crossing, the traveller may go down
+                                                                                the Peace.--
+ 330    Chutes of the Peace       17.00   30.00           1.75    4.00          By the H.B. SS. _Peace River_, from          From June to August
+                                                                                Peace River Crossing to the Chutes                inclusive.[3]
+                                                                                of the Peace.
+ 570    Fort Chipewyan            37.00   60.00           3.25    7.00          By H.B. SS. _Grahame_ or Tug _Primrose_,
+                                                                                from Chutes of the Peace to
+                                                                                Fort Chipewyan.
+
+
+[Footnote 3: For further particulars regarding dates and rates,
+application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K.
+Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to
+A.G. Harrison, Secretary Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New North, by Agnes Deans Cameron
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