About ten o’clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye.  We have seen present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.  We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet photographed by the light of the Aurora.  As we leave Fort Simpson, the Mackenzie’s channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we proceed.  For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due northwest, running four miles an hour.  The banks look low, but when the pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over.  At the Great Bend we impinge against two peaks, Mt.  Camsell and Mt.  Stand Alone, and here the Nahanni joins the Mackenzie.  The great river takes a due north course for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.

[Illustration:  Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora]

At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow the mighty flood to flow between.  We feel, as the boatman did on Lake Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping.  A ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed view, and says nothing.  Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who understand.  Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North!  They have that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so blatantly dub “progress.”

It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence we intrude.  Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road to the ocean.  These banks were once marked by the mammoth.  Previous to the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.

Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded, and of its treasures the world knows naught!  They await man’s development and acceptance—­banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and unguessed.  Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into its delta channels.  Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the Mackenzie, practically nothing is known.  There remain in these streams hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to the inconnu and the Indian.