Title:  The Valley Of Silent Men A Story of the Three River Company

Author:  James Oliver Curwood

Release Date:  December, 2003 [Etext #4707] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 5, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN

A STORY OF THE THREE RIVER COUNTRY

BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Author of “The river’s end,” Etc.

THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN

Before the railroad’s thin lines of steel bit their way up through the wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over which one must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of the great white North.  It is still Iskwatam—­the “door” which opens to the lower reaches of the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie.  It is somewhat difficult to find on the map, yet it is there, because its history is written in more than a hundred and forty years of romance and tragedy and adventure in the lives of men, and is not easily forgotten.  Over the old trail it was about a hundred and fifty miles north of Edmonton.  The railroad has brought it nearer to that base of civilization, but beyond it the wilderness still howls as it has howled for a thousand years, and the waters of a continent flow north and into the Arctic Ocean.  It is possible that the beautiful dream of the real-estate dealers may come true, for the most avid of all the sportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the bumpy railroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with lanterns, and with them have come typewriters, and stenographers, and the art of printing advertisements, and the Golden Rule of those who sell handfuls of