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3

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us across. Unsaddling our horses, we
dumped the packs into the canoe, slapped
the animals on their flanks and drove them
into the stream.

Crossing the swollen Peace in the scooped
out log we rounded up our horses and rode
towards the post. From their circular lodge
doors the unwhipped Beavers stared at us
with insolent and unfriendly looks. Strong-
backed squaws were busy with their camp
duties; scraping skins, hauling water, carry-
ing piles of brush, or chopping wood. Piled
on tripods of poles was a heterogeneous col-
lection of dried meat, pack-saddles, skins,
gaudy rugs, copper pots, rifles and clothing.

We dismounted before a square of white-
washed buildings, another relic of Mounted
Police days, now bearing the sign of Revil-
lon Freres, and shook hands with the re-
nowned Harry Garbutt, whose place I was
taking since he was to guide an expedition
through the Laurier Pass.

JouRNEY’s END

Entering the log-walled dwelling I found
a reception committee of Chief Montaignais
and two score black-haired Beavers squatted
on the floor, each belted with an enormous
buffalo knife stuck in a_brass-studded
sheath, many wearing porcupine quill belts
and armlets, for which the tribe was famous.
The same bright, alert eyes and impudent
mien Id already noticed characterised all
these natives, whose hands were ever on the
go as they supplemented their words with
the sign language of the plains.

Yet even at Fort St. John I was not be-
yond the restless movement that was rapidly
filling the unoccupied places of this virgin
land. A few days later another party of
thirty or so pulled in, headed by ex-
Constable Jamieson, Mackie Smith and
MacKenzie—all bound for Hudson’s Hope
to take up homesteads, with the intention
of converting them into a townsite and
making a small fortune when the ra‘lroad
bridged the Peace at that particular spot.
And no one doubted that, in two or three
short years, it would.

That winter the covered wagon caravan

reached up into the mountains. Led by
some so-called Count who wasn’t above
paying his way peddling whiskey to the
thirsty at ten dollars a bottle, a score or so
of sleigh cabooses wound their way up the
frozen Peace till, stopped by the canyon,
they formed a settlement of their own at
Hudson’s Hope beyond the cabins of
Jamieson’s pioneer settlers.

Today many of those dim trails I rode
have been followed by the Iron Horse.
Where I kindled my campfires on Pouce
Coupe, and the once lonely reaches of
Grand Prairie, prosperous towns have risen
from the virgin soil. And over that narrow
pack-trail I followed with my Iroquois
guide, Napoleon, American jeeps, army
trucks and caissons thunder over the sixteen-
hundred mile Alaska Highway, hurtling
northward brown-shirted doughboys and
munitions to carry the war across the
Aleutian Island bridge to Hirohito.

Have those “covered wagon” days of
thirty years ago forever disappeared into
the limbo of the past? Or will the Alaska
Highway see a new trek, by a new genera-
tion in motorized trucks and trailers, into a
new empire opened up by the hand of Mars?

Copyright by Philip H. Godsell, F.R.G.S., 1943.

MARINE DRIVE SERVICE
STATION

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Transatlantic Steamship Lines
and All Air Lines
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NANAIMO, B. C.

The turbulent Peace River canyon, where Sir Alexander Mackenzie nearly met disaster when en route
to the Pacific. Dinosaur tracks are embedded in the rock, and coal abounds throughout this region.

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