[Illustration: A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson]
We have had occasion to speak of the splendid service rendered to Northern and Western Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company and by the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. A third factor through the years has been building Empire with these. Are we not as a people too prone to minimise the great nation-building work performed by the scattered missionaries in the lone lands beyond the railway? Ostensibly engaged in the work of saving souls, Canadian missionaries, both Roman and English, have opened the gates of commerce, prosecuted geographical discovery, tried to correct social evils, and added materially to our store of exact science. Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman, the last thing you ask is, "To what church does he belong?" Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton. The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide the field between them.
The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan scribe merely as "a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the Portage." In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago, only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world's map has ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson's Bay forts, and substituting for Europe's vineyards and pleasant vales an unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.