THE PEOPLE OF THE COAST 183 



Their advent on the coast has marked a considerable rise 

 in the price paid the people for furs. 



In the winter months the fur-traders make long sledge 

 journeys along the coast, buying the skins caught, or lay- 

 ing embargoes on them. The Rigolet dog-teams and the 

 Nachvak dog-teams have for years been famous along the 

 coast. The former, with their well-known owner, James 

 D. Fraser, here probably reach the acme of dog-driving, 

 while the famous Ford family have, between them, carried 

 the mail three hundred and fifty miles each way over these 

 barren, uninhabited shores, winter after winter, where no 

 man lives and no houses shelter them across mountain 

 fastnesses, over glaciated passes, and the still more dan- 

 gerous sea-ice, year after year, without serious accident. 

 The mail starts at Fort Chimo in Ungava Bay, then round 

 and along the Labrador coast to Davis Inlet. The mail 

 crosses the land to Nachvak Bay, and so on over a stretch 

 of fifteen hundred miles to Quebec. 



The life of a Hudson's Bay factor in Labrador does not 

 offer all the joys of civilization, but it offers a field to develop 

 courage, muscle, resourcefulness, and self-reliance to an 

 eminent degree. It makes men who shoot straight, fear 

 nothing, and live hard. It offers the simple life, with its 

 many advantages, and it breeds a hospitality, a brotherli- 

 ness to one's kind, a readiness to stand by any one in dis- 

 tress, that, in our complex life in cities and even villages, 

 we rarely find ourselves called on to exercise. Never has 

 a visitor travelled our coast, but his heart has gone out 

 equally to all the brave men of these two great organiza- 

 tions, the Moravian Missions and the Hudson's Bay 

 Company. 



