Page 1 (1/1)

Originally Published by Grosset & Dunlap, New York

1921

Now in the Public Domain Chapter

Preface

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 ould enter into the reat 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 edy and adventure in the lives of otten Over the old trail it was about a hundred and fifty ht 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 co cars with lanterns, and with theraphers, 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 coitimate 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 steahosts of a thousand Pierres and Jacquelines have risen uneasily fro 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 e world for two thousandSouth of it a wheezy engine drags up the freight that cao by boat

It is over this threshold that the dark eyes of Pierre and Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his Jeanne, look into the blue and the gray and the so civilization And there it is that the shriek of a e-old river chants; the sraph screeches its reply to le violon; and Pierre and Henri and Jacques no longer find thes of the earth when they cooes of furs And they no longer swagger and tell loud-voiced adventure, or sing their wild river songs in the sa now, and hotels, and schools, and rules and regulations of a kind new and terrifying to the bold of the old voyageurs