We are several days going down the Mackenzie to Fort Norman. Fifty-four miles north of here, and only sixty miles south of the arctic circle, is the first producing oil well in the Northwest Territories. The well was the cause of a miniature “oil rush” to this land that is frozen for nine months of the year. At this time no one knows how much oil there is here. The region may never be of any greater importance than it is now, or it may be another mighty oil field such as those in Oklahoma and Texas. But even if oil is found in paying quantities it will be many years before its exploitation will be commercially profitable. The nearest railway is twelve hundred miles away, and the river boats are of such shallow draft that they cannot carry heavy freight. A pipe line to Prince Rupert or Vancouver would mean an expenditure of almost one hundred million dollars, and to make such a line pay it would be necessary to produce thirty thousand barrels of oil daily. In the meantime, prospectors have come in from at directions, travelling overland as well as by river. One man made the fifteen-hundred-mile trip from Edmonton with a dog team, and others have mushed their way over the mountains from the Klondike. Two aviators of the Imperial Oil Company attempted to fly to Fort Norman. They were obliged to land several hundred miles to the south and both planes were smashed. However, by using the undamaged parts of one plane they were able to repair the other, except for a propeller. They finally collected a pile of sled runners from a near-by trading post, stuck them together with glue made by boiling down a moose hide, and with a hunting knife carved out a pair of propellers that enabled them to fly back the eight hundred miles to Peace River. On every hand I hear stories of how the vast Canadian Northwest is being opened up. Edmonton is at the gateway to the valleys of the Peace, the Athabaska, and the Mackenzie rivers, and each year sees more settlers penetrating the remote areas that once knew the white man only through the traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Arthur Conan Doyle has caught the spirit of this new Northwest in his “Athabaska Trail”: I’ll dream again of fields of grain that stretch from sky to sky, And the little prairie hamlets where the cars go roaring by, Wooden hamlets as I saw them--noble cities still to be---- To girdle stately Canada with gems from sea to sea. * * * * * I shall hear the roar of waters where the rapids foam and tear; I shall smell the virgin upland with its balsam-laden air, And shall dream that I am riding down the winding woody vale, With the packer and the pack horse on the Athabaska Trail. CHAPTER XXVII THE PASSING OF THE CATTLE RANGE