Down the Mackenzie and up the Yukon in 1906 - Elihu Stewart

SPRUCE TIMBER ON THE SLAVE RIVER

At 10 P.M. the steamer tied up for the night. This had been the hottest day yet experienced. The mercury stood at 100 in the shade at Chippewyan, but the appearance of the sky portended rain, and as we retired we heard rumblings of thunder and some lightning was to be seen. A little later, the welcome drops were heard pattering on the decks. All welcomed a relief from weather that would be more suitable to the tropics than to this latitude of 59 degrees north. On waking the following morning, July 5, we found the air refreshingly cool. It had rained nearly all night, and from this on we had no more such heat as we had heretofore experienced. At a distance of some fifteen miles from Chippewyan, the land becomes higher and is covered with timber, considerable quantities of which are seen from the river; the varieties being spruce, poplar, birch, tamarac and willow; some of the first named being of good quality, running in size up to twenty inches at the stump. This timber continues somewhat irregularly throughout the whole course of the Slave from here to Great Slave Lake.

At about twenty miles below Lake Athabaska, the Slave receives the Peace River, and the former at once becomes an immense stream, averaging perhaps a mile in width. The Peace itself is really a great river: rising on the eastern slope of that great Atlas chain of North America, the Rocky Mountains, it flows easterly and northerly for some 800 miles till finally at this junction its waters mingle with those coming from the same watershed via the Athabaska.

Ever since the mountain water overtook us, we had witnessed considerable drift timber, but immediately after passing the junction of the Peace this greatly increased; and cast up by previous floods on the shores, sand bars and islands were thousands upon thousands of spruce trees, sufficiently large for lumbering purposes.

The Peace River deserves more than a passing reference. It is much the largest of the many tributary streams whose waters find an outlet to the Arctic Sea through the Mackenzie. In fact, it and the Slave might be regarded as the Upper Mackenzie with Great Slave Lake as an immense expansion. It is something in the neighbourhood of 800 miles from where the Finlay and the Parsnip, under the shadow of the Rockies, join to form the Peace, and from here to its mouth it flows through a valley containing a large percentage of exceedingly fertile land. There have been different opinions as to the future of this valley as an agricultural district, but it is probable that with the exception of that portion near the source, where the elevation is considerable, the basin of the Peace will not be behind that of the North Saskatchewan in its yield of cereals and vegetables and quite equal to any portion of the great west as a grazing country, though it must be remembered that it is more or less wooded.

In the year 1902, I visited the Upper Peace, as before stated, and on September 16, at a point nearly 500 miles above the mouth, wheat was already cut, oats mostly cut, and I was informed that this was about the usual time of harvesting. I also saw at the Roman Catholic Mission, a few miles above Peace River Crossing, and almost opposite the mouth of Smokey River, potatoes, cabbage, beets, onions, pumpkins, tomatoes, muskmelons, etc., and also tobacco. The latter may not be equal to the famed Havanna leaf, but it possesses sufficient nicotine to gratify the appetite of those dependent on it for their supply.

The river at this point is considerably over a quarter of a mile wide, and the water at this season was clear and blue. The valley, which is here over two miles wide, about one mile on each side of the stream itself, is six or seven hundred feet lower than the table land above.