steamboat and railroad they continued their journey to Montreal; where
together with the "returns" from many another of the Hudson's Bay
Company's thirty-four districts, they were reshipped in ocean-going
craft for England where eventually they were sold by auction in London.

A hundred years ago as many as ten brigades, each numbering twenty
six-fathom canoes, sometimes swept along those northern highways and
awoke those wild solitudes with the rollicking songs and laughter of
fifteen or sixteen hundred voyageurs; but alas for those wonderfully
picturesque days of bygone times! The steamboats and the railroads
have driven them away.

In my youth, however, I was fortunate enough to have travelled with the
last of those once-famous fur brigades; and also to have learned from
personal experience the daily life of the northern woods--the drama of
the forests--of which in my still earlier youth I had had so many
day-dreams; and now if in describing and depicting it to you I have
succeeded in imparting at least a fraction of the pleasure it gave me
to witness it, I am well repaid. But perhaps you are wondering about
the beautiful Athabasca?


ATHABASCA AND SON-IN-LAW

Some years later, while on my second visit to Fort Consolation, I not
only found a flourishing town of some four or five thousand inhabitants
built on Free Trader Spear's original freehold, but in the handsome
brick City Hall--standing in the original stump-lot--I met the old Free
Trader himself, now holding office as the Mayor of Spearhead City. Not
only had he become wealthy--rumour said he was already a