6 PEEFACE 



of the expedition it records, its publication having been 

 unavoidably delayed. It is now given to the public with the 

 assurance that, whilst he does not claim freedom from error, 

 which would be absurd, he took pains with it on the spot, and 

 can vouch, at all events, for its general accuracy. 



The writer, and doubtless some of his readers, can recall 

 the time when to go to " Peace Eiver " seemed almost like 

 going to another sphere, where, it was conjectured, life was 

 lived very differently from that of civilized man. And, 

 truly, it was to enter into an unfamiliar state of things; a 

 region in which a primitive people, not without faults or 

 depravities, lived on Nature's food, and throve on her unfail- 

 ing harvest of fur. A region in which they often left their 

 beaver, silver fox or marten packs — the envy of Fashion — 

 lying by the dog-trail, or hanging to some sheltering tree, 

 because no one stole, and took their fellow's word without 

 question, because no one lied. A very simple folk indeed, in 

 whose language profanity was unknown, and who had no 

 desire to leave their congenital solitudes for any other spot on 

 earth: solitudes which so charmed the educated minds who 

 brought the white man's religion, or traffic, to their doors, 

 that, like the Lotus-eaters, they, too, felt little craving to 

 depart. Tet they were not regions of sloth or idleness, but of 

 necessary toil ; of the laborious chase and the endless activities 

 of aboriginal life: the region of a people familiar with its 

 fauna and flora — of skilled but unconscious naturalists, who 

 knew no science. 



Such was the state of society in that remote land in its 

 golden age ; before the enterprising " free-trader " brought 

 with him the first-fruits of the Tree of Knowledge; long 

 before the half-crazed gold-hunters rushed upon the scene, 

 the " Klondikers " from the saloons and music-halls of Ifew 

 York and Chicago, to whom the incredible honesty of the 

 natives, the absence of money, and the strange barter in skins 

 (the wyan or aghti of the Indian) seemed like a phantas- 

 magoria — an existence utterly removed from " real " life — 



