I read also that "the last chapter of the fur romance has been
written." That is the point of view of the man who spends fifty weeks
in town and two weeks in the wilds. It is not the point of view of the
man who spends two weeks in town and fifty in the wilds; of the man who
goes out beyond the reach of law into strange realms the size of Russia
with no law but his own right arm, no defense but his own wit. Though
I have written history of the Hudson's Bay Company straight from their
own Minutes in Hudson's Bay House, London, I could write more of the
romance of the fur trade right in the present year than has ever been
penned of the company since it was established away back in the year
1670.
Space permits only two examples. You recall the Cambridge man who
thought it a short distance to go only fifty-five miles by dog-train
for a doctor. A more cultured, scholarly, perfect gentleman I have
never met in London or New York. Yet when I met his wife, I found her
a shy little, part-Indian girl, who had almost to be dragged in to meet
us. That spiritual face--such a face as you might see among the
preachers of Westminster or Oxford--and the little shy Indian girl-wife
and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not
to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the
story of heartache and tragedy--I asked myself, as we stood in our tent
door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under
a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their
beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those
northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has no end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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