“It was in seventeen eighty-nine,” said Rob, always accurate. “He was only a young Scotchman then, and they didn’t call him Sir Alexander at all until a good while later—after he had made some of his great discoveries. He put up the first post on Lake Athabasca—right here where our river discharges—and he went from there to the mouth of the Mackenzie River and back all in one season.”
“How did they travel?” demanded John. “They must have had nothing better than canoes.”
“Nothing else,” nodded Rob, “for they could have had nothing else. They just had birch-bark canoes, too, not as good as white men take into that country now. There were only six white men in the party, with a few Indians. They left Athabasca Lake—here it is on the map—on June third, and they got to the mouth of the great river in forty days. That certainly must have been traveling pretty fast! It was more than fifteen hundred miles—almost sixteen hundred. But they got back to Athabasca Lake in one hundred and two days, covering over three thousand miles down-stream and up-stream. Well, we’ve all traveled enough in these strong rivers to know how hard it is to go back up-stream, whether with the tracking-line or the paddle or the sail. They did it.”
“And now we’re here to see what it was that they did,” said Jesse, looking with some respect at the ragged line on the map which marked the strong course of the Mackenzie River toward the Arctic Sea.
“He must have been quite a man, old Alexander Mackenzie,” John added.
“Yes,” said Rob. “As you know, he came back to Athabasca and started up the Peace River in seventeen ninety-three, and was the first man to cross to the Pacific. We studied him over in there. But he went up-stream there, and we came down. That’s much easier. It will be easier going down this river, too, which was his first great exploration place.
“Now,” he continued, “we’ll be going down-stream, as I said, almost two thousand miles to the mouth of that river. Uncle Dick says we’ll be comfortable as princes all the way. We’ll have big scows to travel in, with everything fixed up fine.”
“Here,” said Jesse, putting his finger on the map hesitatingly, “is the place where it says ‘rapids.’ Must be over a hundred miles of it on this river, or even more.”
“That’s right, Jess,” commented John. “We can’t dodge those rapids yet. Uncle Dick says that the new railroad in the North may go to Fort McMurray at the foot of this great system of the Athabasca rapids. That would cut out a lot of hard work. If there were a railroad up there, a fellow could go to the Arctics almost as easy as going to New York.”