Besides, the Company had not forgotten those legends of minerals in the North which had lured Captain Knight to his death. Chippewyan Indians still came to Churchill with huge masses of amorphous copper strung on necklaces or battered into rough pots and pans and cooking utensils. Whence came that copper? Oddly enough, the world cannot answer that question yet. The Indians said from “a Far-Away-Metal River” that ran to a vast sea where the tide ebbed and flowed. Once more hopes of finding a Northwest Passage rose; once more hopes of those metals that had led Knight to ship-wreck. Norton suggested that this time the search should be made by land. Serving as a clerk on a brig at Churchill was a well-educated young Englishman already mentioned—Samuel Hearne. The yearly boats that came to Churchill in 1769, commissioned Hearne for this expedition, whose ostensible object was the finding of the Metal River now known as the Coppermine but whose real object was the occupation of a vast region not yet preempted by the Canadians. The story of Hearne’s travels would fill a volume. Norton, the governor, was a curious compound of ability and sham, strength and vice. Born of an Indian mother and English father, he seemed to have inherited all the superstitions of one and vices of the other. He was educated in England and married an English woman. Yet when he came to the wilderness, he had a seraglio of native wives that would have put a Mormon to the blush. These he kept apart in rudely but gorgeously furnished apartments to which he alone possessed the keys. At the mess-room table, he wearied the souls of his officers by long-winded and saintly sermons on virtue which were expounded as regularly as the night supper came round. Did some blackleg expiating dissipations by life in the wilds judge Norton’s sermons by his conduct and emulate his example rather than his precepts, Norton had the culprit tied to the triangle and flogged till his back was raw. An Indian is never a hypocrite. Why would he be? His code is to do as he wishes, to follow his desires, to be stronger than his enemies, to impose on the weak. He has no religion to hold a higher example up like a mirror that reflects his own face as loathsome, and he has no science to teach him that what religion calls “evil” means in the long run, wretchedness and rottenness and ruin. But the hypocrisy in Norton was the white man strain—the fig leaf peculiar to civilized man—living a lie so long that he finally believes the lie himself. Knowledge of white man’s science, Norton had; but to the Indian in him, it was still mystery; “medicine,” a secret means to kill an enemy, arsenic in medicine, laudanum in whiskey, or poison that caused convulsions to an Indian who refused either a daughter for the seraglio or beaver at Norton’s terms. A white man who could wield such power was to the Indians a god, and Norton held them in the hollow of his hand. Equally successful was the