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The New North

by Agnes Deans Cameron · English · Gutenberg #12874 · 567,242 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The New North

Author: Agnes Deans Cameron


        
Release date: July 10, 2004 [eBook #12874]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW NORTH ***

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

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