CHAPTER IX

A Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's LandingA Transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing

Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay CompanyLord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company

Fort Smith, as places go in this country, is an infant in age, having been established only thirty-four years. Resting on the edge of the high bank of the Slave, it enjoys an eternal outlook on those wonderful rapids. The river here is a mile wide. The sweep and eddy-wash of ages have cut out a deep bay, on the inner shore of which stand the buildings of The Company, the little Roman Church, the houses of the priests. Back of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being more "dead" than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality will soon send unction into the dry bones of the valley.

At the foot of the high hill looms a monument to the initiative and commercial enterprise of the H.B. Company,—a modern steamship in the waters of a wilderness-country. Ours is to be the honor of making in her the initial journey to the Mackenzie mouth. It is impossible coming from the South to navigate the Slave River rapids by steam. Any boat ambitious to ply on the waters lying northward between Fort Smith and the Arctic must be either taken in in sections or built on the ground. With enterprise and pluck, the Hudson's Bay Company has just completed the construction at Fort Smith of the steamship,The Mackenzie River. Its great boilers and engines made in far factories of the south came in over the Athabasca trail on sleighs in winter. Down that whole distance of ninety miles of Athabascan rapids they floated on scows as we floated, and while human ingenuity is bringing north the iron bowels, skilful hands out of native timber are framing the staunch body to receive them.

The builders of the big boat have had disasters which would have daunted any but the dogged Company of Fur-Traders. Two land-slides threatened to slice off and carry into the river the partially-made boat, a fire burned up the blacksmith shop and with it all the imported doors, window-sashes and interior finishings, so that she sails to-morrow with carpenters still at work. While the hull of this carefully modelled vessel is necessarily of light construction, with special steel to enable her to navigate safely the waters of the Mackenzie River, longitudinal strength has been adequately provided in the form of five lattice girders and by numerous hog-posts and ties, and the diagonal bracing of the bulkheads will provide ample transverse strength. The bow also has been made especially strong to resist the impact of ice, snags, etc. The hull is one hundred and twenty-five feet in length, twenty-six feet broad at the water-line, and five and one-third feet deep to the structural deck. The strength and safety of the hull are increased by five water-tight compartments. Propulsion is effected by a pair of modern stern paddle-wheel engines capable of being worked up to over two hundred and fifty horse power, giving her a speed of ten miles an hour. She has stateroom accommodation for twenty-two passengers, draws three and a half feet of water aft, and eats up half a cord of wood an hour. She will carry to the northern posts their trading-goods for the year.

Within a day's ride of Fort Smith grazes a herd of four to five hundred wood bison, the last unconfined herd of buffalo in the world. Doubtless the wood buffalo were originally buffalo of the plains. Their wandering northward from the scoured and hunted prairies has not only saved them from extinction but has developed in them resistance and robust vitality. These bison appear darker and larger than their pictured cousins of the past. Probably the inner hair of these is finer and of thicker texture, a difference which the change of habitat to more northern latitudes would easily account for. The bison have two enemies: the grey wolf and the Indian, one an enemyin esse, the otherin posse. The Government of Canada has prohibited the killing of the buffalo, and my opinion is that this law, as all other Canadian laws, is obeyed in the North. I questioned every one I talked with who lives on the rim of the buffalo-habitat, and the concensus of testimony of priests, H.B. men, settlers, traders, and Mounted Police, is that the Indians do not molest these animals. The arch-enemy of the wood buffalo is the timber wolf.

The World's Last BuffaloThe World's Last Buffalo

Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable mosquito-infested muskeg. An untoward frost is more to be feared by these great brutes than the attacks of any insect. Thirty-eight years ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated. In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North country. In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.

In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake "observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind." In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.

One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning, conclusively prove.

Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, "There, it had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more." Shortly afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal. It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of the wolf. Archbishop Taché tells of the persevering fortitude of a big wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle â la Crosse. Thirty days afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those weary miles.

With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise. There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap. Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in 1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173 worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.

More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver, seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who declared, "I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow proud," would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this age.

In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big enough to market, it is "heads I win, tails you lose." The United States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.

What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the harmless fur-bearers. Several causes make against the extermination of these in Canada. The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures. Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.

What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function, and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.

The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and Northern travellers drink boiled teaau natural. Cows are the eternal feminine and will not be explained by logic.

But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies. "How old is Ann?" pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at Isle â la Crosse in latitude 55° 30', about twenty years ago, an experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary—Burbanks got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!

We are told that Messrs. McDougall & Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt ever paid on the London market,—$1700, that it was one of the most beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state, "Of the American silver-fox (Canis vulpes argentatus) black skins have a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and by the nobles."

Tracking a Scow across Mountain PortageTracking a Scow across Mountain Portage

And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds with keen discriminating sight, "Black's not so black nor white so very white." Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, "The silver-fox is but a phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a difference—!" Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms, and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative, the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat, Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.

I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game. He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without moving an eye-brow.

At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight sepulture and was not "darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our bayonets turning." There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest attempt to "open to her young her tender breast." It is rank libel for Byron to state

"Her beak unlocks her bosom's stream

To still her famished nestling's scream."

And, when Keats states so sententiously inEndymion, "We are nurtured like a pelican brood," he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.

"Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use

Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,

Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,

And the weird magic of old Indian tales."

—

Archibald Lampman

A double cabin is assigned us onThe Mackenzie Riverand the nightmare that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water. Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg, still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated, and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having no popcorn, fizz, or Coney-Island red-hots to distribute, we did the next best thing,—became barkers and gave the calls that go with festivities. So now, as the boat swings out from the soft bank, it is a gay company of urchins who wave their caps and yell, "R-r-r-red lemol-lade, everybody drinks it!"

There is only one Fort Smith! Established for three decades, it has as yet seen no wells dug. The people still climb that steep bank, carrying in pendant buckets from wooden shoulder-yokes water for the daily drinking and ablutions. At four o'clock in the afternoon, should you visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,—the Aquarius sign of the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, "Why should they bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats from Scotland to tote their water up the banks."

The "Red Lemol-lade" BoysThe "Red Lemol-lade" Boys

At noon we reach the Salt River, twenty-two miles up, which is one of the most marvellous salt deposits in the world. The Salt River winds in crescent curves through a valley wooded with aspen and spruce, and the Salt Plains six miles in extent stretch at the base of hills six or seven hundred feet high. The salt lies all over the ground in beautiful cubes,—pure crystal salt. It is anybody's salt plain; you can come here when you will and scoop up all you want. These plains have supplied the North country with salt since first white men penetrated the country. At the mouth of the Salt River are the shacks of the present representatives of the Beaulieus,—a family which has acted as guides for all the great men who ever trended northward. They have been interesting characters always, and as we look in upon them to-day neither Beaulieu nor salt has lost his savour.

Salt BedsSalt Beds

The Slave River from where it leaves Fort Smith to its embouchure in Great Slave Lake is about two hundred miles long, with an average width of half a mile, except where it expands in its course to enclose islands. The big boat behaves beautifully in the water, and on we slip with no excitement until about five o'clock, when a moose and her calf are espied, well out of range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach Fort Resolution.

To Samuel Hearne, the Mungo Park of Canada, belongs the double honour of tracing the Coppermine River and discovering Great Slave Lake. Just one hundred and thirty-seven years ago on Christmas Eve, Hearne got his first glimpse of this magnificent inland sea which is cut through the centre by the parallel of 62°, and which lies east and west between the meridians of 109° and 117°. No survey of Great Slave Lake has been made, but it is estimated to have a superficial area of 10,500 square miles—just one-third the size of troubled Ireland, and as great as Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.

Great Slave Lake, lying wholly within the forested region, is three hundred miles long, and its width at one point exceeds sixty miles. At every place on its banks where the fur-traders have their stations ordinary farm-crops are grown. Barley sown at Fort Resolution in mid-May reaches maturity in a hundred days; potatoes planted at the same time are dug in mid-September. The gardens of Fort Rae on the North Arm of the Lake produce beets, peas, cabbages, onions, carrots, and turnips. As Fort Rae is built on a rocky island with a bleak exposure, this would seem to promise in some future day generous harvests for the more favoured lands on the south and west.

The names given by the old fur-traders to their posts make the traveller think that in these North lands he, a second Christian, is essaying a new Pilgrim's Progress. At the south entry to the Lake we are at Resolution; when we cross it we arrive at Providence; away off at the eastern extremity is Reliance; Confidence takes us to Great Bear Lake; and Good Hope stretches far ahead down the lower reaches of the Mackenzie. Fort Resolution on the south side of Great Slave Lake, a little west of the mouth of the Slave, lies back of an island-sheltered entrance.

Unloading at Fort ResolutionUnloading at Fort Resolution

The striking feature as we enter is an immense Roman Catholic Mission school in process of construction, to supplement the existing church and school of that faith. There is neither station of the Mounted Police nor Church of England here; their places are taken by two independent fur-trading concerns operating in opposition to the Ancient Company.

We had been told that the children down North had the kiddies at Fort Smith and Chipewyan "all skinned" for politeness, and we find it even so. The good nuns are trying to make reputable citizens of the young scions of the Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife nations and are succeeding admirably as far as surface indications go. We approach a group of smiling boys arrayed in their Sunday clothes, awaiting a visit of the Bishop. With one accord come off their Glengarry bonnets, smoking caps, and Christie stiffs, and a row of brown hands is extended to greet us. Very trim the laddies look in their convent-made cadet-uniforms, as, standing at "'Shun!" they answered our every question with, "Yes, missus," "No, missus." When we ask their names, without tittering or looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens. Here they have once more their white brothers "skinned"; no civilised man, woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal name in an audible tone without feeling a fool. I have seen grizzled judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses, squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed them "Archer Martin" or "Peter Secord" or whatever it might be.

It is certainly Old Worldish. We speak with Father Laity who, all unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail and reads his breviary. He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war. The Father came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.

Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow. The Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel. The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. Afterward we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means "A man born."

Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh. The Yellow-Knives were so named by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons of native copper. Each head of a family is issued an identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to year. A father "draws treaty" for his olive-skinned branches until each marries and erects a tepee for himself. Government Agent Conroy, big bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book. Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun. There are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation. TheFiddler Anns, Waggon-box Julias, andMrs. Turkeylegsof the Plains country are absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.

Coming to "Take Treaty" on Great Slave LakeComing to "Take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake

Mary Catholiccomes along hand-in-hand withSamuel the Worm. Full of animal spirits is a group of four—Antoine Gullsmouth, Tongue-of-the-Jackfish, Baptiste Wolftail,andThe Cat's Son. A little chap who announces himself asT'tumturns out to bePetite Homme, the squat mate ofThe Beloved. It would be interesting to know just how each of the next couple acquired his name, for neitherTrois-PoucesandOwl-Plucked-Out-His-Eyebears evidence of abnormal conditions. On a whole the names are more striking than our John Smiths; Richard Roes, and Tom Browns, as for instance the next three—Le Père des Carriboux, Geroux the Eldest, Alixi To-rong-jo. The-man-who-stands-stillis evidently a stand-patter, while one wonders if it would be right to callThe-Man-Who-Walks-With-The-Red-Hair,a Crimson Rambler.

Carry-the-Kettleappears withStar BlanketandThe Mosquito,and the next man in line, who has the tongs from a bon-bon box stuck in the band of his hat, rejoices in the name ofStrike-Him-on-the-Back,which somehow suggests the match-box in the hotel hall-way. As the dignified father,Having-Passed-Many-Birthdays,claims five dollars each for his four daughters,Smiling Martin, My-Wigwam-is-White,and the twinsMake-Daylight-AppearandRed-Sky-of-the-Morning,we acknowledge that here again, in the art of naming, the Yellow-Knife has his white brother "skinned."

Birth, dowry, divorce, death, each must be noted on the treaty ticket, with a corresponding adjustment of the number of dollar-bills to be drawn from the coffer. If a man between treaty-paying and treaty-paying marries a widow with a family, he draws five dollars each for the new people he has annexed. If there is an exchange of wives (a not-infrequent thing), the babies have to be newly parcelled out. Through all the family intricacies Mr. Conroy follows the interpreter with infinite patience and bonhomie. To the listener it sounds startling as the interpreter, presenting two tickets says, "He married these three people—this fellow." "O, he give dat baby away to Charles." When we hear in a dazed way that "Mary Catholic'sson married his dead woman's sister who was the widow ofAnton Larucomand the mother of two boys," we take a long breath and murmur, "If the angle ACB is not equal to the angle ABC, then how can the angle DEF be equal to the angle DFE?" A young couple, looking neither of them more than sixteen or seventeen, return with a shake of the head five of the fifteen dollars proffered them, and the interpreter explains, "Their little boy died—there's only two of them."

Gregory Daniels in a Scottish voice, which cannot quite hide its triumphant ring, pushes back his five dollars and demands forty-five. "I got a wife and siven since last year, she's a Cree wumman." Another half-breed asks anxiously if he would be allowed to send for a "permit" like a white man if he refused to take treaty.

One man with long black hair and a cheese-cutter cap creates consternation at the tent-door by claiming treaty for two wives and seventeen children. Mr. Conroy, scenting an attempt to stuff the ballot-box, produces seventeen matches, lays them at my feet on the tent-floor and asksThe-Lean-Manto name them. He starts in all right. We hear, "Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish, Birdtail, Little Bone, Sweet Grass, Ermine Skin," and then in a monotone he begins over again, "Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish," and finally gives it up, eagerly asking the interpreter to wait "a-little-sun." The drama of paying and recording has gone on for half an hour and we have quite forgottenThe-Lean-Man, when back he comes withMrs. Lean-Man, Sr., andMrs. Lean-Man, Jr. Each spouse leads her own progeny. Seeing is believing, and offLean-Mangoes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at a box of stogies, and the clerk says, "He can afford to blow in his wad on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter." They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.

Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed figures at ten shies for a quarter. "Every time you hit 'em, you get a see-gar!" They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, "Them chaps pinked them dolls every time."

As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy's head. It is the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or "De-deed." The lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kisses her gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother at the open door.

Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves down for an hour's rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness. Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts. The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over all a measureless silence. At three o'clock in the morning we haul into the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at the landing.

On the SlaveOn the Slave

This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole North—although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission, learning how to play the white man's game—jolly and clean little bodies they are. It looks like Christmas time. Parcels are being done up, there is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black eyes. Would you like to see the letters thatThe Teaser, The Twin, Johnny Little Hunter, andMary Blue Quillare sending out to their parents? For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father's and mother's name. The soap has been bought with the children's pennies earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights. The parcels will be passed from one trapper's jerkin to another, and when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or lodge of the deerskin,Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-FoamandMr. Kee-noo-shay-o, orThe Fish, will know their boys and girls "still remember."

One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his quest here, and lived happily ever after. Their children are the most fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness, letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in evergreen boughs for their summer bedding—a delightful Ostermoor mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in summer, and in the winter they haul hay. The hay causes our enquiry, and we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by some glacial drift of the long ago. And thereby hangs a tale. Charlie, an attaché of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day. As man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked, "Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?" "Bill balked," was the laconic reply. Tuesday's question would bring the same response, "Bill balked." And "Bill balked," on Wednesday. Thursday it is—"Bill didn't balk"; and so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter days.

Dogs Cultivating PotatoesDogs Cultivating Potatoes

The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60° Fahrenheit, and the monthly mean for January, 18° below zero. Vegetables of their own growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food supply of this thrifty Mission, one season's harvest giving them a thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten thousand whitefish.

Hay River has never been explored. It is supposed to head near the source of the Nelson and to flow northeast for three hundred miles before emptying, as we see it, into Great Slave Lake. This river marks the limit of those grassy plains which extend at intervals all the way from Mexico northward. Bishop Bompas, years ago, descended a long stretch of the river, discovering not far back from where we stand a majestic cataract, which he named the "Alexandra Falls" after the then Princess of Wales. He describes it as a perpendicular fall one hundred feet high, five hundred feet wide, and of surpassing beauty. "The amber colour of the falling water gives the appearance of golden tresses twined with pearls."

Crossing Great Slave Lake, we think of Chant-la, Chief of the Slavis at Hay River. Bishop Reeves was anxious to convert him to the Christian faith, but had great difficulty in giving Chant-la a proper conception of the Trinity. The old man would not say he believed or understood what was inexplicable to him. Setting out once on a long journey, the cleric adjured the Chief to struggle with the problem during his absence. The Bishop returning, Chant-la came out in his canoe to meet him, eagerly reporting that all now was clear. "It is like Great Slave Lake," said the old man. "It is all water now, just like the Father. When winter comes it will be frozen over, but Great Slave Lake just the same; that is like the Son. In the spring when the ice breaks and the rain makes the snow into slush, it is still Great Slave Lake; and that is like the Holy Ghost."

Beyond Great Slave Lake, forty-five miles down the Mackenzie, we reach Fort Providence, as strongly French in its atmosphere as Hay River is British. Our coming is a gala day. The hamlet flies three flags, the free trader sports his own initials "H.N.," the Hudson's Bay Company loyally runs the Union Jack to the masthead, over the convent floats the tri-colour of France. Fort Providence is hot. We walk to the convent and are hospitably received by the nuns. They call their Red flock together for us to inspect and show us marvellous handwork of silk embroidery on white deerskin. The daintiest of dainty slippers calls forth the question, "Where are you going to find the Cinderella for these?" A blank look is my answer, for no one in Providence Convent has ever heard of Cinderella! But then, convents are not supposed to be the repositories of man-knowledge (although a half-breed, on our passage across the lake, did whisper a romantic story of a Klondiker who assailed this very fortress and tried to carry off the prettiest nun of the north). The garden of the Sisters is a bower of all the old-fashioned flowers—hollyhocks, wall-flower, Canterbury bells, and sweet-William—and down in the corner a young girl of the Dog-Ribs discovers to us a nest of fledgling chipping sparrows.

As we landed from the boat, Tenny Gouley dressed in his Sunday best had beamed, "Nice day—go veesit." And "veesit" we did. Mrs. Herron, of the H.B. Company, has spent many years at Old Fort Rae, and her thoughts hark back to one severe winter spent there. She turns to the wife of our good Captain with, "Hard living, Mrs. Mills, dry suckers." It is a short speech, but fraught with meaning. I honestly think a dry sucker (well sanded) the least succulent of all the impossible fish-dishes of the North. There are many young Herrons all as neat as new pins, the last—no, the latest, enshrined in a moss-bag. Tradition tells that once, when they were fewer in number, the father took the flock out to Winnipeg to school. The children cried so at the parting that Mr. Herron turned and brought them all back with him to the Mackenzie!

David VilleneuveDavid Villeneuve

The most interesting man in all Fort Providence is David Villeneuve, one of the Company's Old Guard. He was anxious to be "tooken" with his wife and grandchild, and over the camera we chatted. David goes through life on one leg—fishes through the ice in winter, traps, mends nets, drives dogs, and does it all with the dexterity and cheerfulness of a young strong man. He tells of his accident. "I was young fellow, me, when a fish-stage fell on me. I didn't pay no notice to my leg until it began to go bad, den I take it to the English Church to Bishop Bompas. He tole me de leg must come off, an' ax me to get a letter from de priest (I'm Cat-o-lic, me) telling it was all right to cut him. I get de letter and bring my leg to Bompas. He cut 'im off wid meat-saw. No, I tak' not'in', me. I chew tobacco and tak' one big drink of Pain-killer. Yas, it hurt wen he strike de marrow."

"Heavens! Didn't you faint with the awful pain?"

"What? Faint, me? No. I say, 'Get me my fire-bag, I want to have a smok'.'"

"Never the Spirit was born: the Spirit shall cease to be never.

Never was time, it was not; end and beginning are dreams.

Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the Spirit,

Death hath not touched it at all, though dead the house of it seems."

We have just finished supper and are sitting reading on the upper deck about seven o'clock, when a cry comes from below, followed by the rushing back and forth of moccasined feet. In a flash Bunny Langford, one of the engineers, has grabbed a lifebuoy, runs past us to the stern, and throws it well out toward a floating figure.

It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution just twenty-four hours before. Finishing his turn at stoking, he had gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen, carrying the hatch with him. At first we think nothing of the incident, as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him. As soon as the startled people realise what has happened the steamer's engines are reversed and a boat is lowered. We call out to De-deed to swim to the buoy, but he doesn't see it or doesn't understand. The black head gets smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again. Down it goes for the second time. A strange, constricted feeling comes into our throats as we cry out, "Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming! They are almost up to you!" The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but a dozen yards away. Will he hold up? As we look, the head sinks,and it does not come up. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before us—the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the Mackenzie, goes out with the current.

The Mackenzie River, "La Grande Rivière en Bas," as the people of Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep to two and a half to three miles.

From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as "The Head of the Line." Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie, when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second. No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough "white coal" rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range. The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main river through passes in that range.

At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.

We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o'clock we are at Fort Simpson in latitude 62°, the old metropolis of the North. Fort Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie, the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was known in fur annals as "The Forks of the Mackenzie."

Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,

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