12 
SCENES IN THE PACIFIC. 
venturous men travel from the mouth of Mackenzie’s river 
to York on Hudson’s Bay and to Canada. 
Their dwellings are usually constructed of logs in the 
form of our frontier cabins. They are generally surrounded 
by pickets, and in other respects arranged so as to resist any 
attack which the neighboring savages may make upon them. 
They are usually manned by an officer of the Company and 
a few Canadian Frenchmen. In these rude castles, rising 
in the midst of the frozen north, live the active and fearless 
gentlemen of the Hudson Bay Company. The frosts of the 
poles can neither freeze the blood nor the energy of men 
who spring from the little Island of Britain. The torrid, 
the temperate, and the frozen zones alike hear the language 
and acknowledge the power of that wonderful race. 
The food of these traders is as rude as their mode of life. At 
most of the Forts they live almost exclusively on the white 
and other kinds of fish ; no vegetables of any description are 
obtainable; an occasional deer or woods buffalo or musk ox is 
procured ; but seldom is their fare changed from the produce 
of the lakes and streams. At a few of their stations not even 
these can be had ; and the company is obliged to supply them 
with pemican. This is buffalo meat dried, finely pulverized, 
mixed with fat and service berries, and secured in leathern 
sacks. They transport this from latitudes forty-eight and 
nine to different places on Mackenzie’s river, and other parts 
of the extreme north. Wild fowls, geese and ducks afford 
another means of subsistence. At York and other posts in 
the neighborhood of lakes, large numbers of these fowl are 
taken in the summer season, and salted for winter use. But 
with all their painstaking, these gentlemen live but poorly ; 
on a diet of flesh alone, and that of an indifferent quality. 
Hardy men are these lords of the snow. Their realm em¬ 
braces one-ninth of the earth. This immense territory Mr. 
Simpson informed us has a great variety of surface. 
On the north-eastern portion lie extensive tracts of per¬ 
petually frozen mountains, cut by narrow valleys filled wit-h 
