TRANSFER FROM EUROPE TO AMERICA n 



is a world market — is at Nijni. For a year by flat-bottom raft 

 boat, by reindeer sled, and by long dusty Persian caravan, the 

 furs have been on their way to Nijni. The little place doubles 

 and quadruples in size like a mushroom city. By August, the 

 fair is open. Here, chiefly, are sold the furs of Asia — Persian and 

 Astrachan lamb, Mongolian goat, Siberian sable and ermine, the 

 great timber wolf, the rare squirrel-skin linings — gray almost to 

 silver, or black and glossy as jet — and a few, the very few of the 

 diminishing sea otter and seal. There, as Kipling says of the Suez, 

 East and West meet — the furs brought down by canoe and dog- 

 train from the Canadian Northwest jostle with the pelts brought by 

 reindeer and caravan from Siberia and Persia. 



Now come back to the question — Is the world facing a star- 

 vation in furs ? 



Take a map of the Northern fur country. Take a good look at 

 it — not just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian Government 

 have again and again advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, 

 millions of acres of free land. Latitudinally, that is perfectly true. 

 Wheat-wise, it isn't. When you go seventy miles north of Sas- 

 katchewan River (barring Peace River in sections) you are in a 

 climate that will grow wheat all right — splendid wheat, the hardest 

 and finest in the world. That is, twenty hours of sunlight — not 

 daylight but sunlight — force growth rapidly enough to escape 

 late spring and early fall frosts; but the plain fact of the matter 

 is, wheat land does not exist north of the Saskatchewan except in 

 sections along Peace River. What does exist ? Cataracts countless 

 — Churchill River is one succession of cataracts; vast rivers; lakes 

 unmapped, links and chains of lakes by which you can go from the 

 Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once lifting your canoe; quak- 

 ing muskegs — areas of amber stagnant water full of what the 

 Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and sand 

 overgrown with coarse goose grass and the "reed that grows like 

 a tree" — muskrat reed, a tasselled corn-like tufted growth sixteen 

 feet high — areas of such muskegs mile upon mile. I traversed one 



