“We are off. Fort Smith is next. Fast water. Pilot Boniface in bow. River very wide below the Mountain Rapids, and wanders very much—every which way. Shallow so the boats have trouble. They say no one could run the big water below Pelican Island off to the right. Crossed the river in a wide circle. Could hear roar of heavy rapids on both sides. Boniface says if the water was high we would run the big rapids on the left straight through, but we cannot do it now. Our channel is crooked like a double letter S, and I don’t see how he follows it. It takes fancy steering.
“We are following what they call the old Hudson’s Bay channel. This carries us to the right-hand side of the river, and it looks a mile or two across. Storm came up and we got wet. Over to the left we could see lights. They said it was the steamboat Mackenzie River lying at her moorings at Fort Smith. Jolly glad to get done with this work.
“Dark and wet and late. Went on board steamboat. Quite a post here. A good many strangers besides the Company people. Well, here we are at the head of the Mackenzie River, or the Big Slave, as they call it here. I’m pretty glad.”
VIII
ON THE MACKENZIE
The three young companions stood in the bright sunlight on the high bank of Fort Smith at the foot of which lay the steamer which was to carry them yet farther on their northwest journey. About them lay the scattered settlements at the foot of the Grand Traverse between the Slave and the Mackenzie. Off to the right, along the low bed of the river, lay the encampment of the natives, waiting for the “trade” of the season. Upon the other hand were the log houses of the Company employees, structures not quite so well built, perhaps, as those at Chippewyan, but adapted to the severity of this northern climate.
At the foot of the high embankment, busy among the unloaded piles of cargo which had been traversed from the disembarkment point of Smith’s Landing, trotted in steady stream the sinewy laborers, the same half-breeds who everywhere make the reliance of the fur trade in the upper latitudes. They were carrying now on board the Mackenzie River, as the steamboat was named, the usual heavy loads of flour, bacon, side-meat, sugar, trade goods, all the staples of the trade, not too expensive in their total.
There were to be seen also the human flotsam and jetsam of this northern country—miners, prospectors, drifters, government employees, and adventurers—all caught here as though in the cleats of a flume, at this focusing-point at the foot of the wild northern waters.