At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on their north side but show a steep face to the south.  Along our course the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.

We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel.  By ten o’clock we are at Fort Simpson in latitude 62 deg., the old metropolis of the North.  Fort Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie, the river being a mile and a half wide at this point.  The foundation of the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was known in fur annals as “The Forks of the Mackenzie.”

Simpson is essentially a has-been.  We look upon the warehouses of its quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing.  In those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes with red tape and gold braid.  Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold stories well worth the reading!  We would fain linger and dream in front of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in fossicking round the old buildings.  We seek for threads which shall unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone.  In a rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company.  It gives us a sorry feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history so long ago add their share to the general desolation.  In a journal of the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum.  He writes,

[Illustration:  Hudson’s Bay House, Fort Simpson]

“I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice, bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or reptiles would be acceptable.  They may either be skinned or placed in rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of the body to admit the spirits to the intestines.”

Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most tickles my fancy.