“THE COMING OF THE PEDLARS” CONTINUED--THIRTY YEARS OF EXPLORATION--THE ADVANCE UP THE SASKATCHEWAN TO BOW RIVER AND HOWSE PASS--THE BUILDING OF EDMONTON--HOW MACKENZIE CROSSED TO THE PACIFIC. While fifty or a hundred men yearly ascended Red River as far as Grand Forks, and the Assiniboine as far as Qu’ Appelle, the main forces of the Nor’Westers--the great army of wood-rovers and plain rangers and swelling, blustering bullies and crafty old wolves of the North, and quiet-spoken wintering partners of iron will, who said little and worked like demons--were destined for the valley of the Saskatchewan that led to the Rockies. Like a great artery with branches south leading over the height of land to the Missouri and branches north giving canoe passage over the height of land to the Arctic, the Saskatchewan flowed for twelve hundred miles through the fur traders’ stamping ground, freighted with the argosies of a thousand canoes. From the time that the ice broke up in May, canoes were going and coming; canoes with blankets hoisted on a tent pole for sail; canoes of birch bark and cedar dugouts; canoes made of dried buffalo skin stitched and oiled round willow withes the shape of a tub, and propelled across stream by lapping the hand over the side of the frail gun’els. Indians squatted flat in the bottom of the canoes, dipping paddles in short stroke with an ease born of life-long practice. White men sat erect on the thwarts with the long, vigorous paddle-sweep of the English oarsman and shot up and down the swift-flowing waters like birds on wing. The boats of the English traders from Hudson Bay were ponderously clumsy, almost as large as the Mackinaws, which the Company still uses, with a tree or rail plied as rudder to half-punt, half-scull; rows of oarsmen down each side, who stood to the oar where the current was stiff, and a big mast pole for sails when there was wind, for the tracking rope when it was necessary to pull against rapids. Where rapids were too turbulent for tracking, these boats were trundled ashore and rolled across logs. Little wonder the Nor’Westers with their light birch canoes built narrow for speed, light enough to be carried over the longest portage by two men, outraced with a whoop the Hudson’s Bay boats whenever they encountered each other on the Saskatchewan! Did the rival crews camp for the night together, French bullies would challenge the Orkneymen of the Hudson’s Bay to come out and fight. The defeated side must treat the conquerors or suffer a ducking. [Illustration: Chippewyan and Mackenzie River as drawn in Mackenzie’s Voyages, 1789.]