Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

This district is dotted with settlements along the route of the railway from Edmonton. It has telephone and telegraph connections with southern Alberta, and a half dozen weekly newspapers are published in its various towns. There are all together a hundred or more schools. The largest settlement is Grande Prairie, near the British Columbia border, but the oldest is the town of Peace River, which lies in a thickly wooded region on the banks of the Peace. It is two hundred and fifty miles northwest of Edmonton. The trip, which was formerly over a wagon trail and took two or three weeks, can now be made by rail in twenty-six hours.

Steamboats ply up and down Peace River for hundreds of miles, the route downstream to Fort Smith being used by many trappers and prospectors bound for the far Northwest. The trip takes one past the historic old post of Fort Vermilion, two hundred and fifty miles beyond Peace River town. To the northeast of Vermilion is said to be a herd of wood buffalo, probably the last of their species roaming wild.

A shorter route from Edmonton to the Northwest, and one that has grown in popularity since oil has been found along the Mackenzie, is down the Athabaska River, through Great Slave Lake, and down the Mackenzie to Fort Norman, the trading post for the oil region.

Let us imagine ourselves taking a trip over this route, which penetrates to the very heart of the Northwest Territories. The train leaves Edmonton only once a week. It usually starts Tuesday morning, and we should reach “End of Steel,” on the bank of the Clearwater River, the following day. Here we take one of the little motor boats that push along the freight scows carrying supplies to the trading posts during the open season, and chug down that stream for twenty miles to its junction with the Athabaska at Fort McMurray.

At Fort McMurray we take a steamer and go down the Athabaska and across the lake of that name. The river loses its identity when it empties into the lake, the river that joins Lake Athabaska and Great Slave Lake being known as the Slave. The latter stream at times flows through land soaked in oil. This “tar sand,” as it is called, has been used as paving material in Edmonton, and is said to have outlasted asphalt. It is probable that when better transportation facilities are available it will be commercially valuable.

Just before reaching Fort Smith, halfway between Lake Athabaska and Great Slave Lake, we leave our boat and ride in wagons over a portage of fifteen miles. Fort Smith is just across the Alberta boundary. It is the capital of the Northwest Territories. Here the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is all-powerful, and it must be satisfied that the traveller going farther north has food and other essentials sufficient for his trip. In this land, where supplies are brought in only once a year, no chances are taken on allowing inexperienced prospectors to become public burdens.

Two hundred miles north of Fort Smith we reach Great Slave Lake, the fourth largest inland body of water on the North American continent. It is almost three hundred miles long, and the delta that is being pushed out at the mouth of the Slave River may some day divide the lake into two parts. Great Slave Lake is drained by the mighty Mackenzie, down which we float on the last lap of our journey. This river is as long as the Missouri, and carries a much larger volume of water. It is like the mighty waterways of Siberia.

We are several days going down the Mackenzie to Fort Norman. Fifty-four miles north of here, and only sixty miles south of the arctic circle, is the first producing oil well in the Northwest Territories. The well was the cause of a miniature “oil rush” to this land that is frozen for nine months of the year. At this time no one knows how much oil there is here. The region may never be of any greater importance than it is now, or it may be another mighty oil field such as those in Oklahoma and Texas. But even if oil is found in paying quantities it will be many years before its exploitation will be commercially profitable. The nearest railway is twelve hundred miles away, and the river boats are of such shallow draft that they cannot carry heavy freight. A pipe line to Prince Rupert or Vancouver would mean an expenditure of almost one hundred million dollars, and to make such a line pay it would be necessary to produce thirty thousand barrels of oil daily.

In the meantime, prospectors have come in from at directions, travelling overland as well as by river. One man made the fifteen-hundred-mile trip from Edmonton with a dog team, and others have mushed their way over the mountains from the Klondike. Two aviators of the Imperial Oil Company attempted to fly to Fort Norman. They were obliged to land several hundred miles to the south and both planes were smashed. However, by using the undamaged parts of one plane they were able to repair the other, except for a propeller. They finally collected a pile of sled runners from a near-by trading post, stuck them together with glue made by boiling down a moose hide, and with a hunting knife carved out a pair of propellers that enabled them to fly back the eight hundred miles to Peace River.

On every hand I hear stories of how the vast Canadian Northwest is being opened up. Edmonton is at the gateway to the valleys of the Peace, the Athabaska, and the Mackenzie rivers, and each year sees more settlers penetrating the remote areas that once knew the white man only through the traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Arthur Conan Doyle has caught the spirit of this new Northwest in his “Athabaska Trail”: