[1] This may be called prophetic. The ship of 1924 carrying the wireless apparatus round to the Arctic was caught in the ice and abandoned; but another set is being got ready, and should be at work before this book is many months old.
We have reached the north-west corner of the Dominion. The yearly steamer bringing supplies from British Columbia, round through Behring Sea, has just arrived. Inland, we catch a flying glimpse of Yukon Territory, which blazed into fame as the gold-seekers’ Mecca in 1898. Now, striking up the valley of the Mackenzie, we pass a string of outposts where the fur traders, the Mounted Police and the missionaries live and watch and trade and teach among the Indians. The braves no longer fight, but they live as they did by hunting and trapping the beaver and the rest of the fur bearing folk.
A noble valley this, now spreading wide, now narrowing to a canyon where the Ramparts rise hundreds of feet sheer up from the river’s edge, now opening again to show green meadows and woodland. Here, a mountainous region is densely clad with spruce; there, light birch and poplar restore life to a stretch of brulé; jack-pine and tamarack vary the scene; and yonder a gaunt escarpment of bare rock climbs to a height of 3,000 feet.
If we followed the Mackenzie through all its windings, we should find it the longest river in Canada, 2,500 miles to the head of the Finlay. Let us be content to strike a bee-line of 1,000 miles from the Arctic Sea to the Peace River.
Another noble valley this, and, where we strike it at the “head of steel,” dotted not with fur traders’ forts but with farmhouses, schools, and villages. Here is a Canadian farmer whom I saw a dozen years ago setting out from Edson, on a 300-mile drive through the backwoods to reach this “land of promise.” He has a great farm now, with 300 acres of fine wheat and oats, and the railway is almost at his door; when it pushes through to the coast he will be satisfied, he says. “But we’ve got a creamery at the Crossing, now, and that’s been a godsend. They reckoned on making 40,000 pounds of butter in a year, and they got up to that in three months. In the first two months they had paid the farmers $6,600 for cream, which brightened things up considerably—that year was dry as we had never known it up here before.” Another Peace River farmer is filling a silo with sunflower for his aristocratic herd of pure Jerseys.