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 employé 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.
Papillon, a Beaver Brave