It is August 6th at Chipewyan, and once again we are at the parting of the ways. Every one we know is heading for "Outside" by way of the steamer Grahame and the Athabasca scows. Our own ambition is to make a traverse of the great Peace River Country before the snows. We have had no mail since last May, and the temptation to follow the multitude as far as McMurray in the hope of finding letters there is too strong to be resisted. We will then return and try to perfect arrangements for the Peace.

The outgoers are a cosmopolitan and happy "bunch,"—Major Jarvis, R.N.W.M.P., fur-traders galore, three Grey Nuns and a priest, Mr. Wyllie and his family bound for the Orkney Islands, fifty-four souls in all, without counting the miscellaneous and interesting fraternity down on the lower deck among the fur-bundles.

It is essentially a voyage de luxe. When Mr. Keele imagines a place is good, the steamer stops and we all gather fossils. When lame James, the steward, our erstwhile jig-expert, is about to serve coffee, he pokes his head over the side and orders the engines stopped that we may drink the beverage without spillage. The beardless prospector buys tinned peaches from the commissariat, opens them with a jack-knife and passes them round the deck with impartiality and a to-hell-with-the-man-that-works smile. Who would envy kings?

We arrive at McMurray in time for treaty-payment. Tethered horses at the tepee-poles, store-dolls for the babies, and unmistakable "Outside" millinery prove the prosperity of these Crees, and proves also their proximity to Edmonton. One little group looks tattered, out-at-heel, and hungry,—a Cree widow presenting her four offspring that they may receive the annual payment. The officials within the treaty tent declare the youngest baby an illegitimate child and will pay it no treaty,—it "has no name." I catch the anxious look in the mother's eye. Five dollars goes a long way when baby bodies have to be fed and clothed. The situation is crucial. Without a sponsor, the priest will not name the baby. With no name, it cannot draw treaty. I conclude to father the child, as its own (un)lawful father will not. My offer to give my name to the girlie, after due deliberation of Church and State, is accepted. Under the name of Agnes Deans Cameron the Cree kiddie is received into the Mother Church and finds her place on the list of treaty-receiving Indians—No. 53 in the McMurray Band. May she follow pleasant trails!



Back of McMurray lies a lush land. We tread a path a full mile in length leading to meadows where, belly-high, the horses graze. Every yard of our way is lined with raspberry bushes bent with their rich, red burden.

While the furs are being transferred from the Grahame to the scows, the working of our typewriter is a matter of much wonderment. Old Paul Fontaine, a half-breed who thinks he is a white man, first looks through the door, then comes into the dining hall where we are, takes his hat off, and watches respectfully. Then, with an air of great conviction, "This is the first time I ever see that. It is wonderful what man can do—wonderful. There is only one thing left to be done now—and that is to put the breath of life into a dead body." Solemnly putting on his hat, he turns and walks out.

Mrs. Loutit, another fellow-passenger attracted by the click of the machine, comes in and recounts her arts, wild and tame. In winter she goes off in dog-cariole, traps cross-foxes off her own bat, shoots moose, and smokes the hide according to the ancient accepted mode. Coming home, she takes the smoked hide and works upon it silk embroidery of a fineness which would be the envy of any young ladies' seminary in Europe or America. She weaves fantastic belts of beads and sets the fashion for the whole North in chef d'oeuvres of the quills of the porcupine. She is a most observant "old wife." Watching, fascinated, the lightning play of the machine, "Much hard that, I think, harder than bead-work, eh?" Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to find out how the dickens when you strike capital "A" at one end of the keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small "o" at the other end. There is something uncanny about it, and our stock goes up.



We confess to being a little homesick as we wave farewell to the half hundred passengers in the familiar scows embarked for their two hundred and thirty-eight mile journey up the Athabasca. It will be a tiresome enough trip, though, for every foot of the way the big boats will have to be tracked (towed) by teams of half-breeds scrambling along the shore, now on land, now splashing in the water. The party will have the mosquito as companion on the sorrowful way and it will take them four weeks to make Athabasca Landing, the distance which in the spring we dropped down in little over a week. We send letters home, and with hand-shaking all round bid farewell to Mr. Wyllie, the Grey Nuns, and the rest.



Our way back on the Grahame to Chipewyan is not without adventure. At three o'clock in the afternoon we run up hard and fast on a batture! There is no swearing, no shouting of orders. The deck-hands from long experience know exactly what to do. The engines are reversed and, in their efforts, seem to speak Cree, for we catch the sound of the familiar "Wuh! Wey!" But it is no go. The sun sinks behind the bank, over the tops of the poplars floats a faint rosy glow which fades into purple and then into black, and we are still there hard and fast. The drifting sand piles up against us, and, in scows, the whole cargo is removed. The captain throws out a kedge-anchor, and in a mysterious way we pull ourselves off by hawsers, as a man lifts himself by his own boot-straps.

We have head-winds all the way. At four o'clock on the morning of August 14th, stress of weather causes us to run in under the lee of an island. We tie up at the base of some splendid timber. Spruce here will give three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground. With an improvised tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big poplars (rough-backed). The first ran seven feet three inches, the second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches. Within view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and interspersed with them were spruce with a base-girth scarcely less.

Arrived at Chipewyan, we are able to arrange to be taken up the Peace in the same little tug Primrose which had before carried us so safely to Fond du Lac.



CHAPTER XIX

UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION

"What lies ahead no human mind can know, To-morrow may bring happiness or woe. We cannot carry charts, save the hope that's in our hearts As along the unknown trail we blithely go."

When we leave Chipewyan August 17th, the fall hunt of waveys has already begun. We learn afterwards that the Loutit boys alone made a bag of sixteen hundred of these birds which, salted down, form a considerable part of the winter food of the old Fort. Mrs. William Johnson comes down to see us embark. She has overwhelmed us with generous kindness at our every visit to Chipewyan, kindness we cannot soon forget. It is a small group which now starts out in the little tug on the bosom of the mighty Peace,—Major Routledge, R.N.W.M.P., Mr. and Mrs. John Gaudet with their two olive-branches "Char-lee" and "Se-li-nah," now returning to Lesser Slave Lake from a visit to Fort Good Hope, Miss Brown and myself.

This part of the journey we are to enjoy more keenly than all that has gone before. Rising on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, the Peace River is the largest affluent of the Mackenzie, being already a splendid stream when it cuts through that range. With but one break, the Peace River affords a nine hundred mile stretch of navigation, and we can justly describe the country through which it flows as a plateau in which the river has made for itself a somewhat deep valley. Extensive grassy plains border it on both sides, and north of Fort Vermilion country of this character extends to the valley of the Hay River. Crossing the Quatre Fourches, an offshoot of the Peace at the Lake Athabasca edge, we turn our faces due west to a land of promise. The Mackenzie River and the banks of the Great Slave may some day afford homes to a busy and prosperous populace, but there are many fertile and more accessible lands to be settled first. With the Peace River Country there is no conjecture, for it is merely a question of the coming of the railway. Given a connection with the world to the south, the district watered by the Peace will at once support a vast agrarian population. The advance riders are already on the ground.

It is not our intent to go to the expense of using a steamer for our whole journey up the Peace. Scows will allow us to proceed more leisurely and to see more as we go, so the second day we turn the steamer back and transfer ourselves and our belongings into a little open craft or model-boat The Mee-wah-sin. We have a crew of five men, one on the steering-sweep and four to track, and in this wise we make our way for three hundred miles up the great river to Fort Vermilion. One day we improvise a sail and so make fifty miles in a favourable wind, but, with this exception, every other mile of the journey is by patient towing.

Incidents are many. The first morning after we turned back the little tug, the Kid and I left the slow trackers behind and were glad to stretch ourselves in a long forenoon's tramp along the sandy beach. The mosquitoes were practically gone and for the first time all summer one could really enjoy the woods, where a tang of autumn in the air made every breath a tonic draught. Exulting in the fact that we were alive, we turned a sharp corner and came suddenly face to face with a grey wolf, loping along at a swinging pace at the water's edge, muzzle close to the ground! To make the story worth telling, one should have something to say of "yawning jaws" and "bloodshot eyes" and "haunches trembling for a spring." But this grey wolf simply refused to play that part. He took one look at us, evidently didn't approve, and turned up from his tracks quietly into the cottonwoods above. As we on our side had brought neither gun nor camera from the Mee-wah-sin, we are unable to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture. Sic transit lupus!

A week out from Chipewyan, where the Swan River makes into the Peace, we came one glorious afternoon upon a camp of Crees, the family of the Se-weep-i-gons. They had just killed two bears. We bought the skins and a large portion of meat from them, and Mrs. Se-weep-i-gon very kindly added to the feast of fat things some high-bush cranberries "in a present." As an excuse for listening to their soft voices, before we left the camp we asked the name of every member of the little group, scratching the list down on a piece of birchbark. The Crees evidently considered this an official ceremony, for after we had paid our score and shaken hands with everybody from Grandpa to the latest baby and were well out in mid-stream, Mrs. Se-weep-i-gon came running down to the bank to call us back. Rowing to the shore we found that she had remembered one more child whose name she wanted to add to the list. She assured us that this one too had a little brass cross hanging round his neck, so we will be sure to know him if we meet him in the woods.

We lived for the next two days on bear-meat and cranberries.



So one wonderful day follows another as our little boat is towed first against one bank then another of this majestic stream. The forest growth is a marvel. We measure one morning three of the spruce trees to which our tent-ropes are tied, and get for base measurement six feet eight inches, five feet two inches, and five feet respectively. The trees averaged ninety feet in height and would give perhaps one thousand feet to each tree. The autumn tints on the willows and alders of the high river-banks are indescribably beautiful. We pass through one hundred miles of a veritable field of the cloth of gold. We look out of our tent-flaps at night on this living glory, and wake up to it again with each new morning sun.

One Sunday evening at dusk we slip into the Hudson's Bay post where the Little Red River makes into the Peace, the dear home of Tom Kerr, his Scottish wife, and their four bairns. Let me try to give the picture. Tom had been off all day cutting meadowgrass, and now wended his way home with a load of it in a little Old Country cart drawn by a wall-eyed mare. At her side frisked a foal, and two great stag-hounds ran back and forward between the master and his home by the riverside. Three children bounded out to greet their father. "Oh! Daddy, Daddy, the red coo broke away from the byre and is far awa on the ither side o' the burn!" Here, in a nutshell, you have the difference between the Mackenzie River of to-day and the Peace River. On the Mackenzie, swarthy forms are in evidence, Cree and French is spoken on all sides, there are no great fields of waving grain, and the dog is the only domestic animal. On the Peace is an essentially white race, cows, chickens, trustworthy old nags, porridge for breakfast, "the tongue that Shakespeare spake," rendered in an accent born far ayont the Tweed. Right across the mouth of the Little Red River, Tom Kerr has a fishing scine. We go down with him to lift it, after the cows have been brought back to the narrow path. The net yields seven fish and they are of five different species,—trout, ling, sucker, jack-fish, and something else that Tom calls a "Maria." Daily this net is set, and for three hundred and sixty-five days every year it furnishes food for the family, in summer in the flowing water, and in winter under the ice. You couldn't starve at Little Red River if you wanted to. This is one of the most beautiful spots in the whole North Countree. Long after Tom and we and Mrs. Tom are under the gowans, and the little Kerrs possess the land, there will be populous cities along the Peace, and millionaires will plant their summer villas on the beauteous spot where we now stand.



Bidding the bairns good-bye, we press onward on our way, Tom Kerr accompanying us. A great honour awaits us round the next corner, when the boatmen announce that they are going to make us each a lobstick. We land, as pleased as Punch over the suggestion. We now know what it feels like when the philanthropist of a village takes his after-dinner walk through the square and sees the sparrows drinking from the memorial fountain surmounted with his own bust, done in copper, life-size. It takes fully two hours to trim the trees into significant shape, but the beauty of this particular kind of Cook's Tour is that you go down when you like and stop when you want to. The lobsticks furnished, the men form a circle and discharge their muskets in salute, and on we go. We learn that the ethics of lobsticks is that each of these men, should Fate take him past this point again, will salute the lobstick just made and send a strong thought across the spruce-tops to us. There is a reverse to the shield. Should we, at any time before this journey ends, fail to make good, the men on the return voyage will cut the lobstick down. We are going to make no impertinent enquiries regarding the ulterior fate of these family trees. Is it not sufficient glory to say, "On the Peace River we had a lobstick"?

The Chutes of the Peace! These will live forever with the Ramparts of the Mackenzie as the two most majestic visions which the whole North Land gave us. We had not been prepared for that wonderful spectacle which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara, yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this land so pregnant with possibilities, a land which, though it echo now only the quiet foot of the Cree, is so unmistakably a White Man's Country, intensifies the sense of majesty and power which here takes possession of us. The men talk of the water-power furnished by the great falls, and hazard guesses of the future economic purposes to which it will be put. For our own part, our one wish is to get away from the noise of even these subdued voices and in silence feast our very souls on this manifestation of the power of God. The thoughts that we feel cannot be put into words. Why attempt the impossible?



Our way lies beyond this, and the Chutes have to be overcome. These half-breeds know exactly what to do in every emergency which arises. Only one of the men has traversed this river before, and he gives orders. We strip our little Mee-wah-sin of her temporary masts and canvas awning and take out all our belongings. Everybody works. A purchase is obtained by throwing a pulley and rope over a nearby jack-pine, and the boat is pulled out bodily from the water. Then the crew drag her along the shore well beyond the head of the rapid, and we make camp.



These delicious nights within the tent are memories that will remain through all the years to come. It is cool and silent and productive of thought. We are selfishly glad that fifty people went out by Athabasca ways, leaving to us all the mighty reaches and pleasant pastures of the Peace. The midnight is flooded by a glorious moon, and the thoughts born this afternoon of that stupendous fall have driven sleep far away. Opening the tent-flap, I slip through the camp of sleeping Indians to the edge of the fast-flowing stream. The feeling is insistent here which has been ever-present since we entered this valley of the Peace—here is the home prepared and held in waiting for the people who are to follow.

"Listening there, I heard all tremulously Footfalls of Autumn passing on her way, And in the mellow silence every tree Whispered and crooned of hours that are to be. Then a soft wind like some small thing astray Comes sighing soothingly."



CHAPTER XX

VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE

"Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and cheerily wise, With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes, Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood, Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world."

—Service.

It is on August 27th, in the evening, that the crew, all slicked up in their Sunday-go-to-meetings, draw us up on the beach of the City in the Silences, this Past-in-the-arms-of-the-Present,—Vermilion-on-the-Peace. The first thing to meet our eye is the red roof of the flour-mill of the H.B. Co., a picture of progressiveness set in a living frame of golden wheat, the heavy heads nodding to the harvest.

Vermilion is an old post of the Old Company. Alexander Mackenzie on his way to the Pacific found people at work here far back in 1792. The Vermilion of to-day stands a living monument to the initiative faith and hard work largely of one man, Mr. Francis D. Wilson, who has had charge of H.B. Co. interests here for nineteen years. Mr. Wilson found this place a fur-post on the edge of civilisation, and he has made of it a commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre. And his example has been contagious, for the half-breeds around him have become farmers, the Indians who traded furs a dozen years ago now buy harness and ploughs and breach-loading guns from The Company, paying for the same with wheat of their own growing.



Vermilion is in latitude 58 deg. 30' N.,—that is, about four hundred miles due north of Edmonton, and on practically the same parallel as Stockholm. The flour-mill that we now inspect is the most northerly wheat-mill on this continent, and it has been running for five years. It is the roller process, with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, the motor-power being a 40 H.P. Corliss engine. The wheat which feeds these rollers is all grown in nearby fields, and the resultant flour is consumed by the people of the lone posts of the Peace and the lower Mackenzie. Two years ago the H.B. Company paid to farmers, all of whom lived within a radius of five miles from the mill, the sum of $27,000 spot cash for their wheat. An electric plant lights the mill and fort buildings, affording fifty six-candle-power lights.

Right up to the door of the mill extends the sixty-acre wheat-field of the H.B. Company, from which Mr. Wilson computes that he will this year thrash two thousand bushels. If the H.B. wheat-field were to sell the H.B. mill these two thousand bushels at $1.25 a bushel (the ruling Vermilion price), there would be a net profit of $1500, after paying all expense of culture, to the credit of one branch of Mr. Wilson's commercial institution. For thirty years, wheat, oats, barley, and vegetables have been grown in Vermilion, not as an experiment, but as regular commercial crops. Cereals are sown late in April or early in May, and the harvest is gathered in August. More than once, wheat has matured in eighty-six days from seed-sowing to seed-garnering.

Vermilion farmers boast sulkies and gang-ploughs and the latest geared McCormick, Massey-Harris, and Deering farm implements,—self-binders and seeders. Everything is up-to-date. We ourselves counted fifteen self-binders at work. And grain is not the whole story. The farmers own thoroughbred Ayrshire stock and splendid horses. I happened to be at the garden of the Church of England Mission when the potato-crop was being harvested, and found that seven bags of seed planted in the middle of May produced one hundred bags by the end of August. Five potatoes that I gathered haphazard from one heap weighed exactly five and one-half pounds. I photographed and weighed a collection of vegetables grown by Robert Jones on the Dominion Experimental Farm.

[Illustration: Articles Made by Indians

A—Wall-pocket of white deerskin, embroidered in silk-work, and bordered with ermine—the work of a Cree woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.

B—Gloves of white deerskin embroidered in silk, the work of a Slavi woman on the Liard River (a branch of the Mackenzie).

C, D, E, F, G, H, I—Moccasins as worn respectively by the Crees, Chipewyans, Slavis, Dog-Ribs, Yellow-Knives, Loucheux—all the work of the women.

J.—Flour bag from the mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace, the most northerly flour-mill in America.

K—Sinew, from close to the spine of the moose—used by the women of the North instead of thread.

L—Very valuable net of willow-bark made by an old squaw at Fort Resolution. This is almost a lost art, and harks back to the pre-string days.

M—The "crooked knife" or knife of the country.

N—Match-box made from a copper kettle by an old Beaver Indian at Fort Vermilion-on-the-Peace.

O—Babiche, or rawhide of the moose or caribou—"the iron of the country."]

One cauliflower weighed eight pounds, half a dozen turnips weighed nine pounds each, and twenty table beets would easily average six pounds each. The carrots and onions were sown in the open in mid-May and were as inviting specimens as I have ever seen. Tomatoes ripened in the open air on this farm on July 13th. Peas, sown on May 23rd and gathered on August 12th, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel. Experimental plots of turnips gave sixteen tons to the acre, and white carrots twelve tons. Apple-trees and roses we found flourishing on this farm, with twenty-five varieties of red, black, and white currants. The wheat story is of compelling interest. Preston wheat, sown on May 6th and cut on August 22nd, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel; Ladoga wheat, sown on the last day of April and cut on September 5th, ran sixty-four pounds to the bushel also, and early Riga weighed sixty-three pounds. In the garden of the R.C. Mission we were presented with splendid specimens of ripened corn and with three cucumbers grown in the open air, which weighed over a pound each.



Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in extent than the whole of Belgium. There are probably a million acres of land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops like those cited. Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white. They all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by hunting, trapping, and freighting. The settlement boasts two churches, two mission schools, and two trading stores,—a happy, prosperous, and very progressive community. Everything in the place points to this conclusion.

The H.B. Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing $1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats. This sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer Peace River, built here four years ago of native timber. She is a hundred and ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half feet and carrying forty tons burden. She can accommodate thirty passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes fifteen knots an hour. The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.

Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one man's logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill. Edmond Paul's logs in one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber. The biggest log in this raft was a twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.

Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole country spring when it is given rail communication with the plains-people to the south?

Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these walls? Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home. It is a modern house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of hollyhocks on all sides. The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace, here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty. To the visitor who steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the reading man and the clever artificer. Scientific works of reference, good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and human-nature, for five long months. The office furniture, hand-made of native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson's individual work in both design and execution. Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any one in the settlement, whether fort employe or not, who cares to come in here for a quiet hour to read.

Kipling says, "You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile," but the Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line. In a corner of the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history. The honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton. It carries on it the name of John Broadwood & Sons, London. Mrs. Wilson tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance. The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.

Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B. Co., has put in a life of loving service among the people of Vermilion. Her knowledge of medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion. These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly kindness.

Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper. The country furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies whose four constituents—flour, lard, butter and fruit—are products of the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild game—moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs, and mallards. Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry, blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon. The salt comes from Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion beets if there should arise a market. What more would you? The Vermilionese on his fertile acres is as independent of the world outside as is the Eskimo in his Arctic igloo. The farm of Sheridan Lawrence, exhibiting its wide-stretching wheat-fields, some heads of which counted seventy-one kernels, with its patches of one-pound potatoes, twelve-foot sunflowers, and its quiverful of happy, tow-headed children, gives as sweet a picture of Canadian thrift and happiness as one would wish to see. Indeed, happiness seems to be the keynote of Vermilion, whether we seek it within the fort walls of the H.B. Co., on the fat acres of the farmers, or within the folds of Protestant or Roman Mission.



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



CHAPTER XXI

FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE

"'Tis a summer such as broods O'er enchanted solitudes, Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods, And with lavish love outpours All the wealth of out-of-doors."

—James Whitcomb Riley.



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

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

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

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



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

Monday:—Dried caribou and rice.

Tuesday:—Salt fish and prunes.

Wednesday:—Mess-pork and dried peaches.

Thursday:—Salt horse and macaroni.

Friday:—Sow-belly and bannock.

Saturday:—Blue-fish and beans.

Sunday:—Repeat.

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

"Something lost behind the Ranges, Lost and waiting for you: Go!"

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

"O Young Mariner, Down to the harbor call your companions, Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas, And, ere it vanishes over the margin, After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!"

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

"Anybody might have found it, But God's whisper came to me."



CHAPTER XXII

PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE

"A haze on the far horizon, The infinite tender sky, The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields, And the wild geese sailing high,— And all over upland and lowland The charm of the goldenrod. Some of us call it Autumn, And others call it God."

—W.H. Carruth.

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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



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.



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.



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.



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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XXIII

LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON

"I hear the tread of Nations yet to be, The first low wash of waves where soon shall roll a human sea."



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

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

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



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."



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.



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

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

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



CHAPTER XXIV

HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT

"The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself."

—Leviticus, XIX, 34.



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.



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.



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.



When people enquired of the early Christians, "What do you call your new religion?" they answered, "We call it The Road." If religion is the best work of a man made visible, as I think it is, then the Canadian Northern Road may well stand for the religious expression of the men who made it. It takes more than money, more than dreams, more than ambition, for two men in twelve years to build, own, and personally control five thousand miles of railway. As Riley says, it takes sweat. A mile a day for twelve years,—this is the construction-record of the Canadian Northern. It sounds like the story of Jonah's gourd. In 1896, nothing. In 1909, a railroad line with earnings of ten million dollars a year west of Port Arthur alone, and twelve thousand people on the regular pay-roll. Beginning in Manitoba and operating in the three prairie Provinces, the Canadian Northern is primarily a western railway, its remarkable growth being coincident with and closely related to the tide of immigration.



As a case in point, on our way south from Edmonton we pass through the divisional point of Vermilion on the Canadian Northern, which is not to be confounded with our Far North Vermilion-on-the-Peace. Vermilion exemplifies wonderfully the Go-Fever and the Grow-Fever of the Prairies. Before it was three months old its citizens had organised a Board of Trade, had given it a Methodist Church, a newspaper, a bank, a public school, three lumber-yards, three hotels, three restaurants, four implement warehouses, two hardware stores, two butcher shops, four real estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There were two pool-rooms and a bowling-alley.

Farther south we reach the town of Vonda. The Canadian Northern reached this neighbourhood, and the town-site was surveyed in June, 1905. That year Vonda shipped over the line one hundred thousand bushels of wheat, and in 1906 her exports were five hundred thousand bushels. The Canadian farmer looks upon the railroad as his friend; you cannot expect him to use the inclusive condemnation, "Corporations have no souls." The main line of the Canadian Northern runs from Port Arthur on Lake Superior—where, by the way, stands the world's largest grain elevator—to beyond Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan, operating in the heart of one gigantic wheat-farm. The method of construction has been unique. The owners commenced to build branch railways almost before they had a main line. Little spurs to small elevators grew into long branches flanked with bigger elevators, and the elevators evolved into villages, towns, and cities, until to-day the result of twelve years' growth shows a main line of thirteen hundred miles, with over three thousand miles of branch railways. An orchard tree is a good fruit-bearer when the thick clustering branches are more in evidence than the long thin trunk, and the same applies to railroads. But this main line will grow, too. Working out from its wheaten heart, its natural line of growth is east to Hudson Bay, north beyond Edmonton, and west to the Pacific. Surely the tentacles are pushing out. Already the Alberta Legislature has granted the Canadian Northern a charter to Athabasca Landing, and one hundred miles of steel will here tap all the lush land watered by the Peace and the Athabasca.

More interesting than the line which gridirons the wheat-lands we are passing through, are the men who made it. To try to write the history of Western Canada's development and not speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil Rhodes of Canada—gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher, he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a saw-mill. Three things come to him as priceless treasure out of the self-discipline of these experiences: a rare aptitude to see and to focus the central idea of any proposition, quick and unerring decision, and the power of ready calculation. "I am seldom wrong in a figure," is one of his few admissions about himself. The President of the Canadian Northern travels without a secretary, dictates letters sparingly, and works in an office as bare of adornment as a monk's cell.

And his working partner? Donald D. Mann is a man of deeds rather than words. James J. Hill has declared Mr. Mann to be the greatest railway builder in the world. Mr. Mann was born in Ontario not far from the sleepy town of Acton and just six miles east of Rockwood, the birthplace of James J. Hill. These two boys learned to swim in the same swimming-hole. One wonders from what roadside spring they quaffed the draught which sent them railroad-building. Mr. Mann thinks it a great advantage to be born a country boy, for he says it makes a lad frugal, strong, and resourceful. It worked out this way in his own case at least, for there is not a thing in railroad building that Mr. Mann cannot do with his own hands, from shoeing a mule to finding the best pass in the Rockies through which to slide his iron horse down to the sea. Direct, strong, simple, he knows how to control himself and manage others. D.D. Mann is a conspicuous example of what a Canadian boy has managed to accomplish by his own efforts. The beauty of this Western Canada is that it holds out opportunities to every plucky lad who has initiative and who is willing to work; nothing is stratified, the whole thing is formative.

While the steel kings are letting the light of day into this great granary, they are being helped by a government representative, as democratic and direct as any of the pathmakers whose visible work we have been noticing. The Hon. Frank Oliver, Canada's Minister of the Interior, is essentially a self-made man. Before the railroad men realised their vision splendid, young Mr. Oliver and his bride rode into Edmonton on an ox-cart, with a modest little printing-press tucked away among the wedding-gifts and household goods. Oliver was a practical printer and soon issued a hand-dodger called by courtesy a newspaper. The editing habit sticks. The Minister of the Interior owns and publishes the Edmonton Bulletin. Mr. Mann says, "I like building railroads"; Mr. Oliver might parody him and say, "I like building newspapers."



Arrived at Winnipeg, we look back across this great prairie we have twice traversed. The land stands ready to produce bread for the nations; Nature has done her part, now man must do his. The two greatest needs of Western Canada to-day are transportation and immigration. Of the one we have spoken; the other claims our interest even more compelling, for man is more vital than machinery. Canada is a country with a meagre past, a solid present, and an illimitable future.

She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man's sky,—where wilderness and man are meeting. The flood of immigration hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the immigration policy of a government. It is the natural sequence of the economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least resistance to a more favourable situation. The people who are coming in are not dreamers but workers. "The world's greatest wheat-farm," says the economist. It is more than this: it is a human crucible, and we are witnessing here the birth-throes of an entirely new nation.



While seventy-five per cent of Canada's wheat-farmers are either Canadian, American, or British-born, and of the class that preserves the homogeneity of the race, every country on the map pays tribute to the plains. Austrians are here and Galicians, Hungarians and Belgians, Dutch and French and Germans, Italians and Polish, the Russian Doukhobortsi, Finns and Danes and Icelanders, Swedes in thousands and stalwart Norwegians. South Africans and West Indians are coming in with Bermudians and Jamaicans and the bearded Spaniard. Far off on the Pacific Coast, strangers are knocking at the western gate,—Chinese, Japanese, and Hindoos.



There is no Established Church in Canada; it is the freest land in the world. On his one hundred and sixty government-given acres, the new arrival may worship his God in his own way. The Greek Church in Winnipeg has a Bishop who one day each year makes holy water of the Red River when the Czar is performing the same blessing on the Neva. Down in Southern Alberta refugee Mormons from Salt Lake grow sugar-beets, revere the memory of Brigham Young, and multiply after their kind. Until within two years ago the expatriated Russian Doukhobors maintained a commonwealth of ten thousand souls, eschewing liquors and flesh-meats, making the prairie blossom into bumper harvests, and holding all things in common.

Winnipeg has three thousand Icelanders who, every August, take a day off to celebrate the fact that the Danish King, in 1874, granted a constitution to Iceland. When you ask them why they came to America, they say, "Did not our Lief Ericcson discover this continent, why shouldn't we come?" The Icelanders boast two members in the Manitoba legislature. A Mennonite is a member of the Parliament of Alberta. The first graduate of Wesley College in Winnipeg to find a place on the staff of his Alma Mater is also a Mennonite. Winnipeg has several, Roman Catholic Polish lawyers. Statistics prove that the young Jewish people of Western Canada patronise the public libraries more than any other class or race. All the citizens-in-the-making are closely interested in politics. Recently there was chronicled the formation in Winnipeg of a Syrian Liberal Club and a Syrian Conservative Club. Up in Edmonton the Galicians (Ruthenians?) have just organised a corps of volunteer militia to serve the Canadian country of their adoption.



The Americanisation of Canada? During the past seven years over three hundred and fifty thousand people have come to us from the United States. Is this American invasion to be feared politically? Western Canada has no more desirable citizens than those who come to us from the south. They are not failures, but are people who have made good, intent on making better. One generation at the most,—sometimes but a few years,—converts these into Canadian voters. The troubled English brother should remember that when "American" farmers in Canada pronounce on Canadian matters they do so constitutionally at the polls and as Canadian citizens. As Canadians we believe that our national institutions, though far from perfect, are in some respects superior to those of the United States. We believe they are at once more elastic, more responsive to the popular will, and more stable because more elastic. The west is gaining in political power as it gains in population and prosperity, and fortunately our government machinery has been well tested before it is called upon to feel the strain of our rapidly-increasing population. Canada may construct where older nations must reconstruct, and if we borrow an American institution or two, provided it be a good one, let no man hold up hands in holy horror. Japan has borrowed nationally whenever she saw, lying around loose, something she could use, and Japan is as Japanese at heart as she was in the days of the Tycoon and the two-sworded Samurai. Belgium to-day, after centuries of contiguity and intercourse, is not exactly France; and little Switzerland, surrounded by the Powers, will be Switzerland till the last curtain-fall.

"Is Canada loyal to England?" is a question that sometimes meets us. No, Canada is loyal to the British Empire of which she forms a part. Let England see to it that she, too, is loyal.

Canada has two hundred millions of arable acres south of the Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace, are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land. God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people in time will intermarry,—Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations. Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who will step out?

In the point of population, Canada begins the twentieth century where the United States began the nineteenth. The race is ours to run. Wise the nation, as is the individual, who can learn his lesson from a page torn out of his neighbour's book, learn what to follow and what to avoid. Our fore-elders who laid the foundations for us laid them four-square. As Canadians, we owe a debt to the Fathers of Confederation and their successors. In the West, our particular thanks are due to the Hudson's Bay Company, the R.N.W.M.P., and all those factors which established British law "in the beginning." Canada has never seen a lynching; we have had no Indian war; with but one weak-kneed exception there has been no attempt to hold up a train within our Western borders. This is the inheritance of the people of this generation, and on this foundation we must build. Our hope is in the children.

On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary. They were all singing "The Maple Leaf Forever." It is the lessons these children are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel wheat. In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed. Many signs are full of hope. Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children in school. Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post. At all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed out with them!

May I close with a purely personal note? At the end of a summer which had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my life. We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls, the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the Lake of the Woods country. I was anxious to get the story of the recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs. But the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve. We turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary. Looking in at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a blackboard problem. "If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a trench 82 yards long——." And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.

"You are interested?" queried the Father.

"Yes," I acknowledged, "I once taught school."

He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.

"I taught school for twenty-five years," I admitted.

We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he turned to me with, "And you taught school—for twen-ty five years?"

I nodded my head, and we went on. At the next landing the remark was repeated. At the foot of the stairs he excused himself and came back with the photographs which he presented to me with an Old World courtesy and dignity. Grasping my hand in farewell, once more the man of God wondered, "And for twen-ty five years you taught school. And you remain so—" He hesitated for the word, and I wondered what it would be. At last it came,—the tribute of one who expected to teach school all his life to one who had put in a quarter of a century at the work and still survived,—"You have taught school for twen-ty five years, and you remain so glad!"

And this is the keynote of what the summer has left with us. As Canadians, looking at this Western Canada which has arrived and thinking of the lands of Canada's fertile Northland far beyond, for the future we are full of optimism, and of the present we are glad.



ROUTES OF TRAVEL

ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO THE ARCTIC VIA THE ATHABASCA AND MACKENZIE RIVER SYSTEMS.

MILES PLACE PASSENGER FREIGHT TARIFF MODE OF TRAVEL TIMES TARIFF per cwt. 0 Edmonton 100 Athabasca Landing $8.00 $1.00 Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy Twice a week all year round

DOWN RETURN DOWN RETURN STREAM UPSTREAM STREAM UPSTREAM 0 Athabasca Landing Northern Transportation Co.'s SS. 120 Pelican Rapids $ 7.50 $ 7.50 $ .75 $ .75 Midnight Sun (when business offers) 165 Grand Rapids 10.00 15.00 1.50 1.50 or scows. From Athabasca Landing to Grand Rapids. 252 Fort McMurray 20.00 27.50 3.25 3.25 Scows from Grand Rapids to Fort McMurray 437 Fort Chipewyan 35.00 45.00 4.50 4.50 H.B. Co's SS. Grahame (sternwheel 539 Smith's Landing 45.00 55.00 5.50 5.50 river steamer, 130 ft. x 28 ft.; accommodates 30 passengers; blankets supplied; bathroom; meals served 50 From June to cents each; 150 lbs. baggage free). August inclusive[1] From Fort McMurray to Smith's Landing. 555 Fort Smith 48.00 58.00 6.25 6.25 H.B. Co. Transport, portage by teams from Smith's Landing to Fort Smith. 749 Fort Resolution 56.00 68.00 7.25 8.25 H.B. Co's SS. Mackenzie River 819 Hay River 59.00 73.00 7.75 9.25 (strong new sternwheel, lake and 869 Fort Rae 62.00 78.00 8.25 10.25 river steamer; accommodates 50 917 Fort Providence 65.00 82.00 8.25 10.25 passengers, same conditions as Grahame 1078 Fort Simpson 73.00 92.00 9.25 12.25 above). From Fort Smith to Fort 1214 Fort Wrigley 80.00 102.00 10.25 14.25 Macpherson. 1398 Fort Norman 87.00 112.00 11.25 16.25 1572 Fort Good Hope 93.00 122.00 12.25 18.25 1780 Arctic Red River 100.00 130.00 13.00 19.50 1854 Fort Macpherson 103.00 133.00 13.75 21.25 (Peel's River)

[Footnote 1: For further particulars regarding dates and rates, application should be made to the Hudson's Bay Company, Winnipeg; J.K. Cornwall, M.P.P., of the Northern Transportation Co. at Edmonton; or to A.G. Harrison, Secretary Edmonton Board of Trade, Edmonton, Alberta.]

ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO PEACE RIVER, VIA THE ATHABASCA RIVER (UP STREAM), LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LESSER SLAVE LAKE.

MILES PLACE PASSENGER FREIGHT TARIFF MODE OF TRAVEL TIMES TARIFF per cwt. 0 Edmonton 100 Athabasca Landing $8.00 $1.00 Mail stage, run by J.M. Kennedy Twice a week all year round

0 Athabasca Landing Northern Transportation Co.'s SS. 75 Mouth of Lesser Slave Midnight Sun (sternwheel river River $6.00 $ .80 steamer, 120 ft. long x 24 ft. beam; accomodates 35 in staterooms; passengers supply their own blankets; meals served 50 cents each; freight-carrying capacity 50 tons). From Athabasca Landing to Mouth of Lesser Slave River.

THE END