Wintering on the Peace 105

after which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to travel.
By the seventeenth the Falls or Chutes of the Peace were
reached where the river is about four hundred yards wide
with a drop of about twenty-five feet. A portage of eight
hundred paces at the lower end and about six hundred at
the upper with a mile intervening takes the traveller to the
navigable waters above.

Whether Mackenzie had any conception of the vast
power possibilities of these falls, or the likelihood of the
establishment here, in the future, of one of the great cities
of the North American continent, it is difficult to say. He
was a man of ideas, but no development in the world’s history
in any way comparable to the sudden rise of large cities all
over the American continent since his time had ever occurred.
Cities in the old world were the slow accretion of centuries.
If such thoughts looking to the future ever crossed his mind
when passing such fine sites, he undoubtedly thought that
future too remote to justify any references to such possibilities.
One recalls Champlain’s reflection when he crossed the
Isthmus of Panama and noted with the eye of the engineer
the importance of this route to the commerce of the world,
and realised the certainty of a canal eventually joining the
two oceans. Flitting adumbrations of the crowded days to
come must have disturbed Mackenzie’s reflections time and
again in the course of his travels in the great North-West,
at many points where the confused rhythms of hurrying
feet will echo when the capitals of Europe are duplicated
throughout this vast region, traversed for the first time by
this inspired son of the wild Hebrides.

A snow-clad landscape greeted them in the morning,
and as if to meet their eagerness a wind sprang up and
enabled them to make good headway against the current by
sailing. Cheerful fires of dry poplar blazed that night at