McMurray Trader]

Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad
one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort
McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and
a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition
to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a
five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years
with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their
migrations and tribal feasts. We question, "Are you not lonely,
especially in the winter?" But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as
heroic. "Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians
are always coming and going, and they are full of interest."

We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees
when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness
consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is
divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the
black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox
would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but
varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral
alpacas, all of us,--something between a sheep and a goat. But no less
are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of
his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the
self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.

As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home.
The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind
Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow
from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that
she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and
depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an
assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due
to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss
Gordon translates. "I am delighted that ladies have come such a long
distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all
white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to
old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water,
the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children," and