years'
exile on the desert coast of Labrador. Donald Smith came out of the
wilderness to become the Lord Strathcona of to-day. Sir Alexander
Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts. A clerk in a
counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit
setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for
furs. Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper
Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he
fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions
is murdered, a second lamed, a third wounded. In all this Alexander
Mackenzie was successful while still in the prime of his manhood,--not
more than thirty years of age; and the reward of his success was to be
exiled to the sub-arctics of the Athabasca, six weeks' travel from
another fur post,--not a likely field to play the hero. Yet Mackenzie
emerged from the polar wilderness bearing a name that ranks with
Columbus and Carrier and La Salle.

[Illustration: Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer.]

Far north of the Missouri beyond the borderlands flows the
Saskatchewan. As far north again, beyond the Saskatchewan, flows
another great river, the Athabasca, into Athabasca Lake, on whose blue
shores to the north lies a little white-washed fort of some twenty log
houses, large barn-like stores, a Catholic chapel, an Episcopal
mission, and a biggish residence of pretence for the chief trader.
This is Fort Chipewyan. At certain seasons Indian tepees dot the
surrounding plains; and bronze-faced savages, clad in the ill-fitting
garments of white people, shamble about the stores, or sit haunched
round the shady sides of the log houses, smoking long-stemmed pipes.
These are the Chipewyans come in from their hunting-grounds; but for
the most part the fort seems chiefly populated by regiments of husky
dogs, shaggy-coated, with the sharp nose of the fox, which spend the
long winters in harness coasting the white wilderness, and pass the
summers basking lazily all day long except when the bell rings for fish
time, when half a hundred huskies scramble wildly for the first meat
thrown.

A century ago Chipewyan was much the same as to-day, except that it lay
on the south side of the lake. Mails came only once in two years
instead of monthly, and rival traders were engaged in the merry game of
slitting each other's throats. All together, it wasn't exactly the
place f