This metropolis is one hundred and twenty years old.  Chipewyan was doing business at the same old stand before Toronto was the capital of Upper Canada, while Ottawa was still unheard of, and when of Chicago not even the Fort Dearborn nucleus had been built. 1788!  We wonder if the old ox that conveys our “cassette” and “pieces” up to the big gateway of The Company’s quadrangle was a drawer of wood and drinker of water at that date.  He looks as if he might have been.  George III was reigning in England when Fort Chipewyan was built, Arkwright was making his spinning jenny, and Watts experimenting with the steam-engine.  Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his pictures, Burns, a young man of twenty-nine, was busy with his ballads.  In London a little baby saw the light of day, whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron.  Three British boys might have been seen with arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, “dreaming greatly”—­Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and Wordsworth just eighteen.  Across the Channel the French Revolution was at its height.  Shelley and Keats were not yet born.  Down on the Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had gone through the birth-throes of nationhood.  It is a far call.

Scraping the yellow lichens off the old sun-dial, we adjust our bearings.  We are 111 deg.  West of Greenwich and in latitude 58 deg. 45’ North.  Our parallel carried eastward would strike the Orkneyan skerries and pass through Stromness.  All untouched by the development of that busy continent to the south which has grown up within its lifetime, Chipewyan is a little pearl of the periwigged days of the early Georges.  From its red sands, tamarack swamps, and mossy muskeg one almost expects to see arise the forms of those great of old who outfitted here, making Chipewyan the base of their northward explorations.  The ghostly company is a goodly one—­Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Simpson, and Sir John Franklin (their honorary prefixes coming to them in the after days as reward of their labors), Back and Richardson and Rae, and in later days that young stripling curate who was afterwards to be known throughout the world of letters as Bishop Bompas, the “Apostle of the North.”  Then there is the great unnamed horde who rested tired limbs at Chipewyan on their northward journeys, each on his own mission—­fur-traders and hunters of big game, devoted nuns and silent priests, the infrequent scientist, and the hundreds of Klondikers, their hearts hot with the greed for gold.  These all through the century have enjoyed as we now enjoy the spontaneous hospitality of this little bit of Britain which floats the Union Jack from its fort walls, and whose people, brown and white, when the belated news of the passing of Victoria the Great reached this her northern outpost, gathered on the beach and bewailed aloud their personal loss.  We seem to hear again the far-flung cry “The Queen is dead!  The Queen is dead!” from the half-breed runners coming in that Christmas Day across the winter ice.