In spite of the cry of the end of fur, more furs are marketed in the world than ever before in the history of the race—forty million dollars' worth; twenty millions of which are handled in New York and Chicago and St. Louis and St. Paul; some five millions passing through Edmonton and Winnipeg and Montreal and Quebec; three millions for home consumption, two millions plus for export. Some years ago I went through all the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company in London from 1670 to 1824 and have transcripts of those Minutes now in my library. In not a single year did the fur record exceed half a million dollars' worth. Compare that to the American traffic to-day of twenty millions, or to the three and four hundred thousand dollar cargoes that each of the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillons' ships bears to Europe from Canada yearly.
"How much can a good Indian hunter make in a season?" I asked a fur-trader of the Northwest, because in nearly all accounts written about furs, you read a wail of reproach at milady for wearing furs when trapping entails such hardship and poverty on the part of the hunter.
"A good hunter easily earns six hundred dollars or seven hundred dollars a winter if he will go out and not hang around the minute he gets a little ahead. It takes from three thousand dollars to four thousand dollars to outfit a small free-trader to go up North on his own account. This stock he will turn over three or four times at a profit of one hundred per cent. on the supplies. For example, ten dollars cash will buy a good black otter up North. In trade, it will cost from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars. On the articles of trade, the profit will be fifty per cent. The otter will sell down at Edmonton for from twenty dollars to thirty dollars. It's the same of muskrat. At the beginning of the season when the kits are plentiful and small, the trader pays nine cents for them up North. Down at the fur market he will get from twenty-five to sixty cents for them, according to size. There were one hundred and thirty-two thousand muskrat came to one firm of traders alone in Edmonton one year, which they will sell at an advance of fifty per cent."
"How much fur comes yearly to Edmonton?" I asked an Edmonton trader. If you look at the map you will see that Edmonton is the jumping off place to three of the greatest fur fields of North America—down MacKenzie River to the Arctic, up Peace River to the mountain hinterland between the Columbia and the Yukon, east through Athabasca Lake to the wild barren land inland from Churchill and Hudson Bay.
"Well, we can easily calculate that. I know about how much is brought in to each of the traders there."
I took pencil while he gave me the names. It totaled up to six hundred thousand dollars' worth for 1908. When you consider that in its palmiest old days of exclusive monopoly the Hudson's Bay Company never sold more than half a million dollars' worth of furs a year, this total for Edmonton alone does not sound like a scarcity of furs.
III
The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the hunting to extinction of fur-bearing animals? I do not think so.
Take a map of the northern fur country. Take a good look at it—not just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian government has again and again advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of square miles of free land. Latitudinally, that is perfectly true. Wheat-wise, it isn't. When you go one hundred miles north of Saskatchewan River (barring Peace River in sections) you are in a climate that will grow wheat all right—splendid wheat, the hardest and finest in the world. That is, twenty hours of sunlight—not daylight but sunlight—force growth rapidly enough to escape late spring and early fall frosts; but the plain fact of the matter is, wheat land does not exist far north of the Saskatchewan except in sections along Peace River. What does exist? Cataracts countless—Churchill River is one succession of cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs—areas of amber stagnant water full of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and sand overgrown with coarse goose grass and "the reed that grows like a tree," muskrat reed, a tasseled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet high—areas of such muskeg mile upon mile. I traversed one such region above Cumberland Lake seventy miles wide by three hundred long where you could not find solid camping ground the size of your foot. What did we do? That is where the uses of a really expert guide came in; we moored our canoe among the willows, cut willows enough to keep feet from sinking, spread oilcloth and rugs over this, erected the tents over all, tying the guy ropes to the canoe thwarts and willows, as the ground would not hold the tent pegs.
It doesn't sound as if such regions would ever be overrun by settlement—does it? Now look at your map, seventy miles north of Saskatchewan! From the northwest corner up by Klondike to the southeast corner down in Labrador is a distance of more than three thousand miles. From the south to north is a distance of almost two thousand miles. I once asked a guide with a truly city air—it might almost have been a Harvard air—if these distances were "as the crow flies." He gave me a look that I would not like to have a guide give me too often—he might maroon a fool on one of those swamp areas.