Gold and commerce have peopled the barren Alaskan wastes which were the scenes of this adventurous journey with its unique equipment and its cosmopolitan personnel of Eskimo, Lapp, and American.
While these men worked not for fame but for the lives of brother men, yet in Alaskan annals should stand forever recorded the heroic deeds and unselfish acts of Jarvis and McCall, of Bertholf and Lopp, and of that man among men—Eskimo Artisarlook.
THE MISSIONARY'S ARCTIC TRAIL
"Blest river of salvation!
Pursue thy onward way;
Flow thou to every nation,
Nor in thy richness stay;
Stay not till all the lowly
Triumphant reach their home;
Stay not till all the holy
Proclaim—The Lord is come!"
—S. F. Smith.
Among the heroic figures in the history of the human race there should be none to command greater admiration than the typical missionaries who, in foreign lands and among uncivilized tribes, have devoted their lives to the good of man and to the glory of God. Of the countless many through the ages may be named a few whose labors, actuated by a spirit of lofty endeavor, particularly appeal to the imagination and love of the people. Such men were Schwarz and Carey, in India; Livingstone, in Africa; Egede, in Greenland; Eliot and Whitney, in America. Of earnest missionaries in North America there are many worthy of special notice, and among these are not a few of French birth whose memories remain fragrant through heroic deeds and unselfish labors. Their work has entered into the life of the people, though Père Marquette is perhaps the only one whose deeds have affected the growth of a nation. Of French missionaries in late years whose activities have been exerted within the arctic circle may be mentioned M. Emile Petitot, who served fifteen years in the arctic regions of Canada, principally in the water-sheds of the Anderson, the Mackenzie, and the Yukon. Apart from his labors of piety and of love among the Indian tribes of northwestern Canada, M. Petitot, in a dozen or more volumes, has contributed largely to our knowledge of the customs, of the beliefs, of the methods of life, and of the human qualities of the aborigines among whom he has labored. Stationed on the shores of Great Slave Lake in 1863, in the autumn of the following year he descended the Mackenzie and proceeded via Fort Simpson for missionary labors at Fort Good Hope. With his experiences in such voyages, and especially with his visit to the shores of the polar sea, this tale is principally concerned.
Coming from the highly civilized and elaborately circumscribed life of France, M. Petitot was vividly impressed with the enormous and underlying difference in the methods of life in the two countries, the more so on account of his youth. He says of this: "It is well to know the advantages of an isolated life. There is an entire exemption from taxes, tithes, levies in kind, quit-rents, poll-taxes, tariffs, customs duties, town duties (octroi), inheritance-taxes, land rents, forced labor, etc., etc."
On the other hand he finds in the northern wilds "Perfect security, unchanging peacefulness, liberty to plant, to cut, to clear land, to mow, to reap, to fish, to hunt, to take and to give, to build and to tear down"—in short, unrestricted personal liberty of action as of thought.
In changing his station to the far north he made his first voyage down the magnificent Mackenzie, which in the area of its drainage basin, its outflow, its length, and its wondrous scenery is scarcely surpassed by any other river of the world. His first stage of travel brought him to Fort Simpson, where he came in contact with the chief factors or agents of the Hudson Bay posts to the north, who gathered there in early autumn to bring the winter furs and to obtain the annual supply of food and of trading goods known as their outfit. For these men it was the holiday season of the year, the only break in the fearful monotony of their isolated lives, when they see their kind and speak their native tongue.