The Valley of Silent Men | Page 2

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.
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 sometimes watery ones of a destroying civilization. And
there it is that the shriek of a mad locomotive mingles with their
age-old river chants; the smut of coal drifts over their forests; the
phonograph screeches its reply to le violon; and Pierre and Henri and
Jacques no longer find themselves the kings of the earth when they
come in from far countries with their precious cargoes of furs. And they
no longer swagger and tell loud-voiced adventure, or sing their wild
river songs in the same old abandon, for there are streets at Athabasca
Landing now, and hotels, and schools, and rules and regulations of a
kind new and terrifying to the bold of the old voyageurs.
It seems only yesterday that the railroad was not there, and a great
world of wilderness lay between the Landing and the upper rim of
civilization. And when word first came that a steam thing was eating its
way up foot by foot through forest and swamp and impassable muskeg,
that word passed up and down the water-ways for two thousand miles,
a colossal joke, a stupendous bit of drollery, the funniest thing that
Pierre and Henri and Jacques had heard in all their lives. And when
Jacques wanted to impress upon Pierre his utter disbelief of a thing, he
would say:
"It will happen, m'sieu, when the steam thing comes to the Landing,
when cow-beasts eat with the moose, and when our bread is found for
us in yonder swamps!"
And the steam thing came, and cows grazed where moose had fed, and

bread 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, and at Fort McPherson, close to the polar sea, from
twenty-two to twenty-three. And in December there are also these
hours of darkness. With light and darkness men