ow fairly embarked, is the
greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth's great rivers
the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of
either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the
Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little
Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight
miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion
of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from
source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep
to two and a half to three miles.

From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom
exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as
"The Head of the Line." Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie,
when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was
at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains
bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with
muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of
water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second.
No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard
a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for
commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough "white coal"
rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The
Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range.
The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the
Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main
river through passes in that range.

At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated
on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on
their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course
the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.

We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River
and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o'clock we are at
Fort Simpson in latitude 62 deg., the old metropolis of the North. Fort
Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie,
the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of
the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it
was known in fur annals as "T