barren grounds of Fort Providence; around lie the desolate
shores of the great_ Slave Lake. _Twice in the year news comes from the
outside world-news many, many months old--news borne by men and dogs
through 2000 miles of snow; and yet even there the gun that brings down
the moose and the musk-ox has been forged in a London smithy; the blanket
that covers the wild Indian in his cold camp has been woven in a Whitney
loom; that knife is from Sheffield; that string of beads from Birmingham.
Let us follow the ships that sail annually from the Thames bound for the
supply of this vast region. It is early in June when she gets clear of
the Nore; it is mid-June when the Orkneys and Stornaway are left behind;
it is August when the frozen Straits of Hudson are pierced; and the end
of the month has been reached when the ship comes to anchor off the
sand-barred mouth of the Nelson River. For one year-the stores that she has
brought lie in the warehouses of York factory; twelve months later they
reach Red River; twelve months later again they reach Fort Simpson on the
Mackenzie. That rough flint-gun, which might have done duty in the days
of the Stuarts, is worth many a rich sable in the country of the Dogribs
and the Loucheaux, and is bartered for skins whose value can be rated at
four times their weight in gold; but the gun on the banks of the Thames
and the gun in the pine woods of the Mackenzie are two widely different
articles. The old rough flint, whose bent barrel the Indians will often
straighten between the cleft of a tree or the crevice of a rock, has been
made precious by the labour of many men; by the trackless wastes through
which it has been carried; by winter-famine of those who have to vend it;
by the years which elapse between its departure from the work shop and
the return of that skin of sable or silver-fox for which it has been
bartered. They are short-sighted men who hold that because the flint-gun
and the sable possess such different values in London, these articles
should also possess their relative values in North America, and argue
from this that the Hudson Bay Company treat the Indians unfairly; they
are short-sighted men, I say, and know not of what they speak. That old
rough flint has often cost more to put in the hands of that Dogrib hunter
than the best finished central fire of Boss or Purdey. But that is not
all that has to be said about the trade of this Company. Free trade may
be an admirable institutio