WAS gathered close to the edge of the great swamps. Thus did
civilization break into Athabasca Landing.

Northward from the Landing, for two thousand miles, reached the domain
of the rivermen. And the Landing, with its two hundred and twenty-seven
souls before the railroad came, was the wilderness clearing-house which
sat at the beginning of things. To it came from the south all the
freight which must go into the north; on its flat river front were
built the great scows which carried this freight to the end of the
earth. It was from the Landing that the greatest of all river brigades
set forth upon their long adventures, and it was back to the Landing,
perhaps a year or more later, that still smaller scows and huge canoes
brought as the price of exchange their cargoes of furs.

Thus for nearly a century and a half the larger craft, with their great
sweeps and their wild-throated crews, had gone _down_ the river toward
the Arctic Ocean, and the smaller craft, with their still wilder crews,
had come _up_ the river toward civilization. The River, as the Landing
speaks of it, is the Athabasca, with its headwaters away off in the
British Columbian mountains, where Baptiste and McLeod, explorers of
old, gave up their lives to find where the cradle of it lay. And it
sweeps past the Landing, a slow and mighty giant, unswervingly on its
way to the northern sea. With it the river brigades set forth. For
Pierre and Henri and Jacques it is going from one end to the other of
the earth. The Athabasca ends and is replaced by the Slave, and the
Slave empties into Great Slave Lake, and from the narrow tip of that
Lake the Mackenzie carries on for more than a thousand miles to the sea.

In this distance of the long water trail one sees and hears many
things. It is life. It is adventure. It is mystery and romance and
hazard. Its tales are so many that books could not hold them. In the
faces of men and women they are written. They lie buried in graves so
old that the forest trees grow over them. Epics of tragedy, of love, of
the fight to live! And as one goes farther north, and still farther,
just so do the stories of things that have happened change.

For the world is changing, the sun is changing, and the breeds of men
are changing. At the Landing in July there are seventeen hours of
sunlight; at Fort Chippewyan there are eighteen; at Fort Resolution,
Fort Simpson, and Fort Providence there are nineteen; at the Great Bear
twenty-one,