Alexander Mackenzie.—The first sign of Spring.—Spanker the suspicious.—Cerf-vola contemplates cutlets.—An Indian hunter.—“Encumbrances.”—Furs and finery.—A “dead fall.”—The fur trade at both ends.—An old fort.—A night attack.—Wife-lifting.—Cerf-vola in difficulties and boots.—The Rocky Mountains at last.
About eighty years ago a solitary canoe floated on the waters of the Peace River. Eight sturdy Iroquois or Canadians moved it with dexterous paddle; in the centre sat the figure of a European, busy with field-book and compass.
He was a daring Scotchman from the isles, by name Alexander Mackenzie. He was pushing his way slowly to the West; before him all was vague conjecture. There was a mighty range of mountains the Indians said—a range through which the river flowed in a profound chasm—beyond that all was mystery; but other wild men, who dwelt westward of the chasm in a land of mountains, had told them tales of another big river flowing toward the mid-day sun into the lake that had no shore.
This daring explorer built himself a house not far below the spot where my recreant crew had found a paradise in the wilderness; here he passed the winter. Early in the following spring he continued his ascent of the river. He was the first Englishman that ever passed the Rocky Mountains. He was the first man who crossed the Northern Continent.
His footsteps were quickly followed by men almost as resolute. Findlay, Frazer, and Thompson soon carried the fortunes of the North-West Company through the defiles of the Peace River; and long before Jacob Astor had dreamt his dream of Columbian fur trade, these men had planted on the wild shores of New Caledonia and Oregon the first germs of English domination; little dreaming, doubtless, as they did so, that in after-time, between dulness upon one side and duplicity on the other, the fruits of their labour and their sufferings would pass to hostile hands.
From its earliest days, the fur trade of the North had been carried on from bases which moved northward with the tide of exploration. The first French adventurers had made Tadousac, at the mouth of the rock-shadowed Saguenay, the base of their operations; later on, Montreal had been their point of distribution; then Mackenaw, between Lakes Michigan and Huron. With the fall of French dominion in 1762 the trade passed to English hands, and Fort William on Lake Superior, and Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, became in time centres of fur trade.
It was from the latter place that Mackenzie and his successors pushed their explorations to the distant shores of Arctic and Pacific Oceans. Among the earlier posts which these men established in the Great Wilderness was this fort, called Dunvegan, on the Peace River. A McLeod, of Skye, founded the post, and named it after the wild, storm-swept fortalice which the chief of his race in bygone times had reared upon the Atlantic verge. As Dunvegan was then, so it is to-day; half a dozen little houses roofed with pine-bark; in front, the broad river in its deep-cut gorge; behind, an abrupt ridge 700 feet in height, at the top of which a rolling table-land spreads out into endless distance.
Unlike the prairies of the Saskatchewan, this plateau is thickly interspersed with woods and thickets of pine and poplar. Its many lakes are free from alkali, and the varied growth of willows which they sustain, yield ample sustenance to the herds of moose which still roam the land. The deep trough through which the river flows increases with singular regularity as the traveller ascends the stream. Thus at Vermilion the banks are scarcely thirty feet above low-water level; 200 miles higher up they rise to 350 feet; at Dunvegan they are 720; and 100 miles still further west they attain an elevation of 900 and 1000 feet. Once upon the summit, however, no indication of ruggedness meets the eye. The country spreads into a succession of prairies, lakes, and copses, through which the traveller can ride with ease, safe from the badger-holes which form such an objectionable feature in more southern prairies. At times the river-bed fills up the entire bottom of the deep valley through which it runs; but more frequently a wooded terrace lies between the foot of the ridge and the brink of the water, or the land rises to the upper level in a series of rounded and less abrupt ascents. The soil is a dark sandy loam, the rocks are chiefly lime and sandstone, and the numerous slides and huge landslips along the lofty shores, render visible strata upon strata of many-coloured earths and layers of rock and shingle, lignite and banded clays in rich succession. A black, bituminous earth in many places forces its way through rock or shingle, and runs in long, dark streaks down the steep descent. Such is the present aspect of the Peace River, as lonely and silent it holds its long course, deep furrowed below the unmeasured wilderness.
April had come; already the sun shone warmly in the mid-day hours; already the streams were beginning to furrow the grey overhanging hills, from whose southern sides the snow had vanished, save where in ravine or hollow it lay deep, drifted by the winter winds; but the river was not to be thus easily roused from the sleep into which the Arctic cold had cast it. Solid under its weight of ice, four feet in thickness, it would yet lie for days in motionless torpor. Snow might fly from sky and hill-top, prairie and forest might yield to the soft coming spring; but like a skilful general grim winter only drew off his forces from outlying points to make his last stand in the intrenchments of the frozen river.
From the summit of the steep hill, whose scarped front looks down upon the little huts of Dunvegan, the eye travels over many a mile of wilderness, but no hill top darkens the far horizon; and the traveller, whose steps for months have followed the western sun, feels half inclined to doubt the reality of the mountain barrier he has so long looked in vain for. So it seemed to me, as I scanned one evening the long line of the western sky from this lofty ridge.