Here, too, on every important water-way, Athabasca and the Liard
and the MacKenzie, into the land of winter night and midnight
sun extend fur trading posts. We think of these northern streams
as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with mean log villages on their
banks. The fur posts of the sub-Arctics are not imposing with
picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe was feared
here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the world,
with two tributaries each more than 1000 miles in length. It
has a width of a mile, and a succession or rapids that rival the St.
Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's,
and half a dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New
England states without raising a sand bar.
The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is
a wilderness of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of
a continent. Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses, are fur
posts.
Such is the realm of the northern fur trade to-day.
