To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the whites was a revelation. Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first lessons from the Klondike miners.
And what of the men who followed the gleam? Some reached Dawson. These were few. Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still. In the old books of the H.B. Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is "a band of Indians cast up from the east," "the Express from the North cast up at a late hour last night." On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from that point, hundreds of gold-miners are "cast up" on every interior shore. Acting as attachés to Hudson's Bay posts, engaging as free traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us. Round the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still prays for her absent son. A silence like this once entered upon is hard to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about him the garment of the recluse. Outcropping from the strata in striking individuality, they belong to a different race to the plodding people of the Hudson's Bay posts, and are interesting men wherever you meet them. Keen of vision, slow of speech, and with that dreamy look which only those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet places,—they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and dropped here and there over the white map of the North.
CHAPTER IV
DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
"Set me in the urge and tide-drift
Of the streaming hosts a-wing!
Breast of scarlet, throat of yellow,
Raucous challenge, wooings mellow—