THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN

THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN


Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through the
wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over which
one must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of the
great white North. It is still _Iskwatam_--the "door" which opens to the
lower reaches of the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie. It is
somewhat difficult to find on the map, yet it is there, because its
history is written in more than a hundred and forty years of romance
and tragedy and adventure in the lives of men, and is not easily
forgotten. Over the old trail it was about a hundred and fifty miles
north of Edmonton. The railroad has brought it nearer to that base of
civilization, but beyond it the wilderness still howls as it has howled
for a thousand years, and the waters of a continent flow north and into
the Arctic Ocean. It is possible that the beautiful dream of the
real-estate dealers may come true, for the most avid of all the
sportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the bumpy
railroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with lanterns, and
with them have come typewriters, and stenographers, and the art of
printing advertisements, and the Golden Rule of those who sell handfuls
of earth to hopeful purchasers thousands of miles away--"Do others as
they would do you." And with it, too, has come the legitimate business
of barter and trade, with eyes on all that treasure of the North which
lies between the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca and the edge of the
polar sea. But still more beautiful than the dream of fortunes quickly
made is the deep-forest superstition that the spirits of the wilderness
dead move onward as steam and steel advance, and if this is so, the
ghosts of a thousand Pierres and Jacquelines have risen uneasily from
their graves at Athabasca Landing, hunting a new quiet farther north.

For it was Pierre and Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his
Jeanne, whose brown hands for a hundred and forty years opened and
closed this door. And those hands still master a savage world for two
thousand miles north of that threshold of Athabasca Landing. South of
it a wheezy engine drags up the freight that came not so many months
ago by boat.