George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids.  His brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in three days—­a distance of two hundred miles at least.  Once, when the river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling upward in the night.  The rivermen tell of George Loutit’s quarreling with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his adversary out of the window.  When he heard him slump, George immediately thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away.  He arrived there in time for noon luncheon next day.

At the H.B.  Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge.  A French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is peltries and not souls that Pierre is after.  His forebears were Irish McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs it.

Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such entries as these:—­“Wyllie at the forge,” “Wyllie making nails,” “Wyllie straightening the fowling-pieces,” “Wyllie making sled-runners,” “This day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian.”  We step into the old man’s smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a “Good mornin’,” in richest Doric.  The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan.  He was born in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World.  Coming out to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without seeing a city in America.  Torontonians think the hub of the universe is their capital on Lake Ontario.  A smart young man from Toronto filtered in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, “Came from the Old Country, didn’t you?  What did you think of Toronto?” “Naething, I didna see the place.”

Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone.  In the forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north, Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west.  To him these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into luxuriousness with all its weakening influence.  “It was much better in the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil.  Nowadays, when we have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are coming out!”