CHAPTER XXI

Papillon, a Beaver BravePapillon, a Beaver Brave

We carry away with us two pictures, that we like to cherish, of the convent kiddies of Vermilion. The first thing we saw when we peered round a corner of this old-fashioned building was the bright face of Sister Thomas of Canterbury playing see-saw with a dozen wide-grinning Slavi babies. When the morning came when we were to bid reluctant good-bye to Vermilion and all its spontaneous kindness, the last sight that met our eyes before we turned the corner of the Peace was the whole convent force of Vermilion perched high on stumps and fence-rails, wishing usbon voyagewith fluttering pocket-handkerchiefs, while Sister Thomas of Canterbury, on a ladder, surmounted the crowd and waved her farewells with a table-cloth.

"'Tis a summer such as broodsO'er enchanted solitudes,Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods,And with lavish love outpoursAll the wealth of out-of-doors."—James Whitcomb Riley.

Going to School in WinterGoing to School in Winter

On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the littleMee-wah-sin,and in the tiny tugMessengerof the H.B. Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing cranes are flying.

Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect and created for herself a warm place in every heart. Se-li-nah, though, makes it impossible for us to pose as brave endurers of hardships. Each night and morning she carries her little pack on and off shore, takes her share of pot-luck atmeat-su,and is never cross. Bless the kiddie! If ablutions seem to her a work of supererogation and our daily play of toothbrush furnishes all the fascination of the unknown, still hers is the right stuff for pioneer lands and she has lessons to teach us in pluck and endurance.

The first night out from Vermilion we made camp after dark and, on waking, found that in our blankets we had lain directly across four new bear-tracks. Moose-tracks are plentiful at every stopping-place, so we see to it that both guns and camera are primed. At eight next morning we pass Not-in-a-gu Seepee. Some Indians hail us, asking for tea, and from these we learn that ten families who made this their winter camp last season bagged eighty moose among them.

At half-past two our chance came. To get away from the noise of the engine, the Kid and I had moved our work directly after breakfast to a flour-laden scow that we had in tow, and I was dictating this story to the machine when the sharp eyes of Showan in the distance spied a moose. He was on the shore cropping willows. It had been generously agreed that if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine, so in excited whispers the news is telegraphed to our end of the scow and my rifle is handed up. The fireman slows up on the engine, but still its throbbing sounds distressingly loud as we creep up on the feeding moose and scan the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are high,—perhaps one hundred and fifty feet—and sheer, but there are two gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,—a regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet biscuit. And now at last he sees us. I fire, and the shot just grazes his spine. Will he take to a gully? No, he plunges into the river instead and we follow him up in the little tug. One more shot is effective, and I have killed my premier moose. "Cruel!" you say. Well, just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat, as, with the exception of Vermilion's flesh-pots, we have done, and then find out if you would fly in the face of Providence when the Red Gods send you a young moose! To illuminate the problem I transcribe the menu of one sample week of the summer.

My Premier MooseMy Premier Moose

This is the literal "dope sheet" of the camp cook:

Monday:—Dried caribou and rice.

Tuesday:—Salt fish and prunes.

Wednesday:—Mess-pork and dried peaches.

Thursday:—Salt horse and macaroni.

Friday:—Sow-belly and bannock.

Saturday:—Blue-fish and beans.

Sunday:—Repeat.

Dragged ashore, the moose proved to be a male of two prongs, about eighteen months old, and weighed perhaps four or five hundred pounds. A full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton. We are to learn that there are many viewpoints from which to approach a moose. The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo and Mrs. Gaudet each eloquently argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it, and Se-li-nah, looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in Cree, "Marrowis nice." Poor young stripling of the Royal House of Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!

The first thing Baptiste does is to plunge his penknife into the back to see how deep the fat is. We had noticed this testing process before. A bunch of feathers is always plucked off the new-killed bird that one can immediately gauge the gastronomic niche at which to set one's waiting stomach. No more voyaging to-night. The moose is cleaned and skinned. Mrs. Gaudet draws the skin. I claim the head. A little Indian boy, who with his mother had been added to our ship's crew at Carcajou Point, appropriates the kidneys, which he proceeds to roast in the ashes. Ten-year-old Bill evidently likes his devilled kidneys rare, for within three minutes we see him prancing round the camp, nibbling his dripping dainty from the point of an impaling stick.

Beaver Camp, on Paddle RiverBeaver Camp, on Paddle River

Having sat round the barbecue half the night, we pull out late the next morning. And now, apprised by moccasin telegraph, we are all on thequi viveto catch sight of a floating bride. A fur-trader attached to "The French Company" at Vermilion has been out on six months' leave and is bringing in a bride from Paris. We are to expect them to cross our course on a raft, floating in with the current of the Peace as we make our way upstream. We see the raft. All is excitement. We direct the steersman to draw close in, and the men prime their rifles for a salute. She is not visible,—floating brides on the Peace shrink evidently from being the cynosure of passing eyes. Our men fire their salute, the steersman on the raft looks puzzled when we, smiling our sympathy, peer over the edge of his craft, and see, instead of the Parisian bride,—a load of Poland pigs for Vermilion! It is the wrong raft. The real bride passes us in the gloaming ten hours later, when it is too dark to get a satisfactory photograph!

On the evening of September 22nd we arrive at Peace River Crossing, or Peace River Landing, just a week out from Vermilion. Our course from there has been almost due south. We turn the littleMessengerback here and regretfully bid good-bye to our staunch and friendly boatmen. No people in the world could be pleasanter to travel with than these splendid men of the North. Indefatigable and ready for any emergency, they know their business and are always master of the situation; moreover, nature has dowered them with an intuitive delicacy as rare as it is pleasing. Through all these weeks, intensely interested as they are in everything that is new, never for a moment have they intruded upon us or our doings. At night there is not a man of them who will not walk a quarter of a mile through the woods rather than pass between our occupied tent and the camp fire. But let us offer to show them pictures or to explain the workings of the camera or the typewriter and it is a different story, for then every man Jack drops his oar or tump-line and rushes to our side like an excited schoolboy.

Peace River Crossing is in latitude 56° N. and longitude 117° 20' W. From that far-off day in spring when we first touched the Clearwater we have been following in the historic footprints of Sir Alexander Mackenzie. We now take a day off, with the object of locating Mackenzie's last camp on the Peace, which he reached in 1792 and from which, in the spring of 1793, he started west across the map seeking an unknown route to the Pacific Ocean. We find the remains of that camp. It is in the corner of a potato-field a little way beyond Peace River Crossing and on the opposite side of the river. Only the foundations of the walls are left and the crumbling bricks of two old chimneys. Mackenzie was the first man to cross the continent from sea to sea north of the latitude of Mexico, and it was from this point where we stand that he launched his ambitious canoe. There is no more historic spot on the continent than that on which we stand this September day, and as yet it is all unmarked of commemorative stone or recording tablet. The lost camp had never been photographed until we brought our inquisitive camera to bear upon it.

I stoop and pluck from where it nods behind the old chimney a wild larkspur, and as I half-mechanically count its forty-two seed-pods, I try hard to throw back my thoughts to the year 1792,—one hundred and sixteen years. It is a far call! Canada is tardy in her recognition of her early builders of Empire. Our cousins to the south would appear to be more appreciative. In song and story and by a memorial World's Fair the people of the United States have honoured the discoveries of Lewis and Clark, but Mackenzie crossed the continent a full dozen years in advance of these explorers.

The Site of old Fort McLeodThe Site of old Fort McLeod

Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where, amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company, a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours of dawn and "when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the grey." He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting whisper, but its burden is ever the same.

"Something lost behind the Ranges,

Lost and waiting for you: Go!"

No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791. His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves "somewhere" far beyond the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we stand. The breaking of the spring ice of 1793 sent him forth on the quest of that Northwest Passage by Land.

"O Young Mariner,

Down to the harbor call your companions,

Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas,

And, ere it vanishes over the margin,

After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!"

We have not time to recount the chapters of the story, to name the streams ascended, the boiling gorges passed, the discontent allayed, the encouragement given, the lonely night-watches when the leader himself looked for comfort to his new-found stars. The Fraser was discovered, traced for a while; and then, striking westward, Mackenzie heard the beat of the surf upon the rocks, and came out from among the pines to the silver Pacific sparkling in the sun. It was a sweet day in summer's prime, and as the gulls cried overhead and the sun mixed scent of seaweed with balsam breath from in-shore, we can imagine but not divine the feelings of that brave man who had thrown himself face-downward on the sand and from whose presence the awed companions stole silently away. We remember the words of another builder of Empire,—

"Anybody might have found it,

But God's whisper came to me."

"A haze on the far horizon,

The infinite tender sky,

The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,

And the wild geese sailing high,—

And all over upland and lowland

The charm of the goldenrod.

Some of us call it Autumn,

And others call it God."

—W.H. Carruth.

At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons, which weigh over ten pounds each.

To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and the Pouce Coupé. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been damaged by frost.

Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their cattle longer than six weeks each winter.

Jean Batise, the Pilot on the PeaceJean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace

The Pouce Coupé would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September. Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in, tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn, and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that tickle his palate,—blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries, willow-berries, and saskatoons.

Fort Dunvegan on the PeaceFort Dunvegan on the Peace

On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56° N. I pluck a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.

Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer civilisation,—the "civilisation" of Chicago! A strong desire possesses us to about-face and back to the woods again.

It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,—men, women, children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the south,—one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty picture,—the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. "It is theMan with the Hoe," I murmur. "Yes," assents the Kid, "andThe Angelus at Lesser Slave."

We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey. Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the "horse latitudes"—though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page. The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs. Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole, this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses' mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the act making possible the writing of this "immortal work"!

Fort St. John on the PeaceFort St. John on the Peace

Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year. To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.

Where King Was ArrestedWhere King Was Arrested

There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and, driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.

Alec Kennedy with His Two SonsAlec Kennedy with His Two Sons

By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,—tall, straight, fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum, he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy. It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this Scots-Sioux,—strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who, too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile, of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, "Do not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?"

Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young fellow of the H.B. Co. says, "It's beastly bad form to ask any man who comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a wilful-missing, that's his privilege." However, fate has thrown in our way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs. Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.

Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss CameronCannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron

Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little brothers and cousins,en famille, they pitched off from Little Red River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it, and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless, they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.

How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out, thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas. The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then the sister died.Howshe died God and the watching stars alone know. Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.

Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony undergone by these poor creatures—women and children with affections like our own—shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel camp of death!

Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a recluse, shunned of all Indians as a "Wetigo" or "Cannibal." A friend was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been born.

As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is "even as you and me."

"I hear the tread of Nations yet to be,

The first low wash of waves where soon shall roll a human sea."

A Peace River PioneerA Peace River Pioneer

Taking passage on the steamerNorthern Light, we leave the settlement of Lesser Slave Lake, this world-in-small, on the first day of October, and, from here to Athabasca Landing, travel in company with Mr. J.K. Cornwall, President of the Northern Transportation Company. Between the time of our journey and this writing, Mr. Cornwall has been returned as Member of the Alberta Legislature for the district we are now traversing. He certainly knows his constituency better than most representatives do. There is scarcely a mile of these unmapped ways that he has not tramped alone; not an Indian guide in the North can last with "Jim" for a week, in summer, or on snow-shoes. When some Lesser Slave half-breeds were told that Mr. Cornwall was going to run for the legislature against Allie Brick, one of them said, "Jim wins. Allie Brick can't run. Not much fun in that race. No man on Peace River can run like Jim."

Mr. Cornwall's pronouncement on the North Country can be taken as authoritative. He says, "Practically all the timber of any commercial value between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains is in these northern watersheds. This timber will be a very important factor in the coming development of Prairie Canada to the south, and fortunately, too, it is most get-at-able. There are thirty-six hundred miles of river and lake in the North on which steamers are plying to-day and which are open for navigation for six months in every year. The first railway that comes in will tap a system of transporation equalled only on this continent by the Mississippi and St. Lawrence with the Great Lakes. The American Government has spent two hundred million dollars on the improvement of Mississippi navigation, and to-day it is not as valuable a national asset as the great Athabasca-Mackenzie-Peace system is as it came from the hand of Nature. Thirty thousand bushels of wheat that would grade 'No. 1 Northern' was produced in the Peace River Country this year, besides thousands of bushels of oats and barley. In this Northland there are 100,000,000 acres of land fit for the growing of grain."

Charles Dickens used to carry a note-book in his vest-pocket in which he jotted down names that tickled his fancy. Were Dickens to travel this route with us, his name-note-books would bulge. Where Lesser Slave River issues out of Lesser Slave Lake, we found Tom Lilac in earnest conversation with Jilly Loo-bird. Jilly has navigated the North all the way from Athabasca Landing to Hudson's Hope on the Peace, seeking a wife, and still lacks his connubial rib. Being told that ladies are on board, he breathlessly asks, "What colour?" When he learns that we are white, Jilly makes a dash for some cache in the woods which takes the place of clothes-closet, but the steamer has passed on before he emerges. Another lost chance, both for Jilly and the writer! For two or three miles here, where the river runs out of the lake, it never freezes, and ducks and wild-fowl remain here all the winter in open water. Last month, in this immediate vicinity, no fewer than one hundred moose were killed. Lilac tells us that last winter there was no snow here until March, and two winters ago absolutely no snow fell whatever, so that the sleighs were not gotten out and all the freighting had to be done with waggons. "No need to starve here," says Lilac, "the trout run up to forty pounds each. There are whitefish and grayling, and I gather berries all the year round. In summer, I get the red and white currants, raspberries, saskatoons, blueberries, gooseberries, and strawberries, and all winter long there are both high-bush and low-bush cranberries."

Three GenerationsThree Generations

Travelling with us are Judge Noel and Judge Beck, making the first circuit of justice through this country. Although they had come all the way from Edmonton looking for trouble, so splendid has been the surveillance of the Mounted Police here that no one could scrape up one case for the judges to try. The Peace River people seemed somehow to think that in greeting the judges with an empty house the settlement had failed to make good. Some one comforts them with setting forth as the ethics of the case the fact that the judges should be presented with white gloves, as the traditional sign of an empty docket. Again is Peace River chagrined, neither The Company nor the French Company has white kids in stock. Each judge is made the recipient of a handsome pair of moose-skin gloves, as a substitute, ornamented with beads and quills of the porcupine.

At Norris's, we leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout. The Dominion Government, with a series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel. Where the Lesser Slave River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, and from there to Athabasca Landing float down the last stretch of our northern waterways of delight. There is frost each night now and the deciduous trees on the banks are a rich riot of colour. We resurrect from the depths all the warm clothing available and have opportunity of testing in their own latitudes the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.

Every passenger who floats with us enlarges our knowledge and enriches our vocabulary. Judge Noel's bodyguard is a young stripling of the Mounted Police, born in dear old Lunnon. It is always interesting to note the different things of which people are proud. Old men boast of their age and young ones of their youth. The fat woman in the side-show is arrogant over her avoirdupois; the debutante glories in her slender waist; and the globe-trotter triumphs in the miles he has travelled. Wyllie claimed distinction in never having left Chipewyan. This Mounted Policeman, who stretches out on the scow, plumes himself on two things: "I 'old the dahnsin' championship of Edmonton. I got a gold watch lahst winter for waltzin'." We smile approval, and the constable continues, "I waltzed,—reversin',—an 'our-an'-a-'alf! And—," straightening himself up, "I am the best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta."

A Family on the Lesser SlaveA Family on the Lesser Slave

Rich is the descriptive language of the North, and we lie awake on the scows, rolled in our blankets, loath to lose any of it. "Jim" is at the sweep. Many of the men are going out from the North for the first time in four or five years. They also seem too interested to slumber, and all night long the conversation goes on. A priest is describing some man who seems to be hard to identify. "You know him,—the son of the ole man with the patch on his nose wot died. I christen him last winter." No one is more apt at naming than these men. Two days ago, at the treaty at Lesser Slave, when a smiling couple drew five dollars for a baby one day old, a Cree bystander dubbed the baby "dat little meal-ticket." A young girl who came up to claim her money was nicknamed "Pee-shoo," or "The Lynx," because of her bad temper. So we see where all the old cats of the south come from.

A One Night StandA One Night Stand

The scow glides on, and we doze, but do not sleep. In the dark she hits something and bumps us wide awake to hear the reassuring, "This is where Pat Cunningham's horses were drownded last week." Under Jim's command, everybody works, even learned judges from Edmonton. He says, "Take another shot at the oars, and then you can hit the feathers." In the morning, one half-breed fails to turn up formeat-suand the comment is, "He feels the feathers pullin'." "Don't blime 'im," remarks the constable, passing the tea, "only fools and 'orses work."

"He reached out his hand for a drink," rendered into trans-Athabascan would be, "He got his thievin' irons on the joy-juice," or "He stretched his mud-hooks for the fight-water." "He set him a-foot for his horse" means "He stole his horse," and from this we derive all such phrases as, "He set him a-foot for his blankets," "He set him a-foot for his furs," "He set him a-foot for his wife."

The springy tussocks of grass growing in swampy places aretêtes des femmes, a name that pleased our fancy and made us think each time we negotiated them of walking over the swaying heads of women in a crowd. To call the tribes together, Indians are wont to send out significant little pieces of wood. The announcement in the society columns, if the Indians had any, would be, "The Crees sent out chips for a crush." An Indian far down the Mackenzie had a name that kings might envy. He was known among his tribe asThe-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps. When a beardless and ardent missionary approached this splendid chief, wanting to "convert" him to the Christian religion, the old man replied with indulgent dignity, "My son, for eighty years have I served the Great Spirit in my own way. I fear I am now too old to change."

"The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as

the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself."

—Leviticus, XIX, 34.

A Rye Field in Brandon, ManitobaA Rye Field in Brandon, Manitoba

Edmonton once more. Two Spanish sailors shipwrecked and navigating the Pacific on a log, search the shore for a sign. Into what land are they drifting? The one at the bow (does a log have a bow?) sees something through the haze—"Gracias a Dios! Praise be to God, it is a Christian country! I see the gallows!" We too get our sign. We reach Edmonton on Convocation Day.

Most young countries for the first ten years of their lives confine their energies to roads, bridges, transportation—things of the market-place. Alberta has been a full-fledged Province of Canada for barely three years, and, coming out of the wilds, we sit on the back benches and see her open the doors of her first Provincial University. The record is unique and significant. On the banks of the Saskatchewan rise the walls of the new Parliament Buildings, a replica in small of Minnesota's State Capitol at St. Paul. This new Province, carved out of the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would you?

The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan. On his promised visit to the Orkneys the old man had gotten as far as Winnipeg, where the crowds of the modern city affrighted him. "Miss Cameron, the men on the streets were as trees walking, and no man stopped to ask how the other was doing. If that is the world, I wanted to go no farther. I'm going back to Chipewyan, and I will take my family with me. We go home with dogs on the first ice!" Poor Wyllie! Before the bells rang out the Old Year, his soul heard the summons none may disregard, and alone he went out on the Long Journey.

What of Inspector Pelletier, Walker, Joyce, and Conway, essaying the traverse from Resolution to Hudson Bay? For weeks after coming out we waited for news of the party. Month succeeded month and no word came out of the white silence. Hudson Bay has no daily mail service. "There ain't no busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay." It is not until March that the welcome word comes that the original party safely made salt water. The relieved tension at Regina headquarters and the joy of personal friends is dimmed by the news of the death of Corporal Donaldson, who joined the others at Chesterfield Inlet. Donaldson, in company with Corporal Reeves, started down Hudson Bay in an open boat and encountered a herd of walruses. Enraged and maddened at the shots of the men, one huge animal made a charge, the boat was upset, and Donaldson, trying to make shore, was drowned. Reeves survived.

It seems to be a chapter of accidents. Just as this book goes to press we learn of a double fatality which attended the transport of the 1909 outfit of Count von Hammerstein. This plucky developer of McMurray oilfields, while running Grand Rapids on the Athabasca (the rapids which we had descended in an empty while the other sturgeon-heads were discharging freight at Grand Rapids Island), struck a boulder. The boat turned turtle and the three men were tossed into the torrent,—von Hamerstein, V. Volksooky, a young Russian, and a French half-breed, La France. The Count was washed ashore and escaped, but the others were drowned. Deaths such as these are the price of Empire. When the railroad reaches the Athabasca, the running of these dangerous rapids will no longer be necessary.

Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk RailwayCharles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway

In the footprints of Back and Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and Sir John Franklin, for six months we have been treading the silent places. We have thought much of these faith-possessed men who found the roads that others follow. In faith they wrought. Canada does well to honour these great of old, and that she appreciates the work of her early explorers is shown in the fact that British Columbia recently granted a pension to the granddaughter of Simon Fraser, the man who in 1808 first sailed down the great river that bears his name. But the day of our great men is not over; Canada still in her great North and West has Pathfinders of Empire. The early voyageurs made their quest in the dugout and the birchbark; and the tools of these are rails of steel and iron horses.

William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern RailwayWilliam Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway

We are accustomed to look upon a railroad as a cold thing of dirt and sand and rock, ties and steel,—a mechanical something associated with gradients and curves. But the history of railroading in Canada is one long romance; back of each line is its creative wizard. We are too near these men to get their proper measure; the historian of the future will place their names on Canada's bead-roll:—Charles M. Hays, the forceful President of the Grand Trunk Pacific; Mackenzie and Mann; William Whyte of the Canadian Pacific. Canada owes much to Caledonia. Nine-tenths of those pioneers of pioneers, the trading adventurers of the H.B. Company, came from Scotland, that grey land where a judicious mixture of Scripture and Shorter Catechism, oatmeal and austerity, breeds boys of dour determination and pawky wit, boys who, whatever their shortcomings, are not wont to carry their wishbone where their backbone ought to be. A conspicuous example of the dynamic Scottish Canadian, hale at sixty-six, is William Whyte, Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At an age when most men are content to "drowse them close by a dying fire," William Whyte finds himself in complete charge of all the affairs of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company between the Great Lakes and the Pacific. Through the positions of brakemen, freight clerk, yard master, conductor, night station-agent, passenger agent, this man worked on his own passage along Fame's ladder. Twenty years of adolescence and preparation, twenty years with the Grand Trunk, a quarter of a century with the Canadian Pacific, this is William Whyte's record of splendid service. He has always played the game and he is still in the harness.

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