And then, for a quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay somewhere among the shadows of the Pole.  In the struggle with the terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the primitive, garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and covering their feet with the walrus mucluc and the moosehide moccasin.  They forgot the world and its ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and searched unceasingly for the yellow lure.  They crisscrossed the land in every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been.  They struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through temperatures that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty degrees below, living, in the grim humour of the land, on “rabbit tracks and salmon bellies.”

To-day, a man may wander away from the trail for a hundred days, and just as he is congratulating himself that at last he is treading virgin soil, he will come upon some ancient and dilapidated cabin, and forget his disappointment in wonder at the man who reared the logs.  Still, if one wanders from the trail far enough and deviously enough, he may chance upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself.  On the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander, the possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a deserted cabin, but upon an occupied one.

As an instance of this, and of the vastness of the land, no better case need be cited than that of Harry Maxwell.  An able seaman, hailing from New Bedford, Massachusetts, his ship, the brig Fannie E. Lee, was pinched in the Arctic ice.  Passing from whaleship to whaleship, he eventually turned up at Point Barrow in the summer of 1880.  He was north of the Northland, and from this point of vantage he determined to pull south of the interior in search of gold.  Across the mountains from Fort Macpherson, and a couple of hundred miles eastward from the Mackenzie, he built a cabin and established his headquarters.  And here, for nineteen continuous years, he hunted his living and prospected.  He ranged from the never opening ice to the north as far south as the Great Slave Lake.  Here he met Warburton Pike, the author and explorer—­an incident he now looks back upon as chief among the few incidents of his solitary life.