Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay Company's steamer _Grahame_ meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats, weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The _Grahame_ has its advantages,--clean beds, white men's meals served in real dishes, and best of all, a bath!
On the _Grahame_ we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it. Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr. Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see only the surface and have to guess the depths.
As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56° 40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, "where we are at." In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and the lone Pribilof, "where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and the seals they breed for themselves." Crossing the junction of the Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789 traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in latitude 58° 36' North.