DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 27 



It seems unbelievable but appears to be the fact that 

 even with this treatment a majority of the dogs do live 

 through the summer somehow. I was told that Indians 

 whose dogs are left behind as the boats go down stream, 

 will later in the summer when they are journeying back 

 up stream inquire for their dogs from village to village, 

 and that they usually manage to pick up most of them 

 before they get to their home settlements. 



At McMurray the steamer Grahame was waiting for us. 

 She was so much like an ordinary river steamer of the 

 Mississippi or Ohio that she is not worth describing. We 

 made our journey in her rapidly and comfortably down 

 the rest of the Athabasca, then across Athabasca Lake 

 and down to the head of the sixteen-mile series of rapids 

 known as the Smith Portage. 



At the head of Smith Rapids is a fur trading post 

 which was then called Smith's Landing after a man who 

 has left his impression upon Canadian history and upon 

 Canada partly in the form of place names. These place 

 names in turn preserve his history by the way they 

 change. He used to be plain Donald Smith and at that 

 stage Smith's Landing and a good many other places 

 were named after him. Then he became Sir Donald 

 Smith and many places bear that name, among them 

 none so famous at present as Mount Sir Donald in the 

 Rockies that is each year admired through the windows 

 of moving trains by about two hundred and fifty thou- 

 sand travelers over the Canadian Pacific Railway. When 

 his power was at the greatest and when he had become 

 one of the leading figures in the British Empire and in the 

 world, this same man was Lord Strathcona, after whom 

 are named hotels and parks, villages and cities, rivers 



