THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
A STORY OF THE THREE RIVER COUNTRY
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF "THE RIVER'S END," ETC.
THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through thewilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over whichone must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of thegreat white North. It is still _Iskwatam_--the "door" which opens to thelower reaches of the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie. It issomewhat difficult to find on the map, yet it is there, because itshistory is written in more than a hundred and forty years of romanceand tragedy and adventure in the lives of men, and is not easilyforgotten. Over the old trail it was about a hundred and fifty milesnorth of Edmonton. The railroad has brought it nearer to that base ofcivilization, but beyond it the wilderness still howls as it has howledfor a thousand years, and the waters of a continent flow north and intothe Arctic Ocean. It is possible that the beautiful dream of thereal-estate dealers may come true, for the most avid of all thesportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the bumpyrailroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with lanterns, andwith them have come typewriters, and stenographers, and the art ofprinting advertisements, and the Golden Rule of those who sell handfulsof earth to hopeful purchasers thousands of miles away--"Do others asthey would do you." And with it, too, has come the legitimate businessof barter and trade, with eyes on all that treasure of the North whichlies between the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca and the edge of thepolar sea. But still more beautiful than the dream of fortunes quicklymade is the deep-forest superstition that the spirits of the wildernessdead move onward as steam and steel advance, and if this is so, theghosts of a thousand Pierres and Jacquelines have risen uneasily fromtheir graves at Athabasca Landing, hunting a new quiet farther north.
For it was Pierre and Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and hisJeanne, whose brown hands for a hundred and forty years opened andclosed this door. And those hands still master a savage world for twothousand miles north of that threshold of Athabasca Landing. South ofit a wheezy engine drags up the freight that came not so many monthsago by boat.
It is over this threshold that the dark eyes of Pierre and Jacqueline,Henri and Marie, Jacques and his Jeanne, look into the blue and thegray and the sometimes watery ones of a destroying civilization. Andthere it is that the shriek of a mad locomotive mingles with theirage-old river chants; the smut of coal drifts over their forests; thephonograph screeches its reply to _le violon_; and Pierre and Henri andJacques no longer find themselves the kings of the earth when they comein from far countries with their precious cargoes of furs. And they nolonger swagger and tell loud-voiced adventure, or sing their wild riversongs in the same old abandon, for there are streets at AthabascaLanding now, and hotels, and schools, and rules and regulations of akind new and terrifying to the bold of the old _voyageurs_.
It seems only yesterday that the railroad was not there, and a greatworld of wilderness lay between the Landing and the upper rim ofcivilization. And when word first came that a steam thing was eatingits way up foot by foot through forest and swamp and impassable muskeg,that word passed up and down the water-ways for two thousand miles, acolossal joke, a stupendous bit of drollery, the funniest thing thatPierre and Henri and Jacques had heard in all their lives. And whenJacques wanted to impress upon Pierre his utter disbelief of a thing,he would say:
"It will happen, m'sieu, when the steam thing comes to the Landing,when cow-beasts eat with the moose, and when our bread is found for usin yonder swamps!"
And the steam thing came, and cows grazed where moose had fed, andbread WAS gathered close to the edge of the great swamps. Thus didcivilization break into Athabasca Landing.
Northward from the Landing, for two thousand miles, reached the domainof the rivermen. And the Landing, with its two hundred and twenty-sevensouls before the railroad came, was the wilderness clearing-house whichsat at the beginning of things. To it came from the south all thefreight which must go into the north; on its flat river front werebuilt the great scows which carried this freight to the end of theearth. It was from the Landing that the greatest of all river brigadesset forth upon their long adventures, and it was back to the Landing,perhaps a year or more later, that still smaller scows and huge canoesbrought as the price of exchange their cargoes of furs.
Thus for nearly a century and a half the larger craft, with their greatsweeps and their wild-throated crews, had gone _down_ the river towardthe Arctic Ocean, and the smaller craft, with their still wilder crews,had come _up_ the river toward civilization. The River, as the Landingspeaks of it, is the Athabasca, with its headwaters away off in theBritish Columbian mountains, where Baptiste and McLeod, explorers ofold, gave up their lives to find where the cradle of it lay. And itsweeps past the Landing, a slow and mighty giant, unswervingly on itsway to the northern sea. With it the river brigades set forth. ForPierre and Henri and Jacques it is going from one end to the other ofthe earth. The Athabasca ends and is replaced by the Slave, and theSlave empties into Great Slave Lake, and from the narrow tip of thatLake the Mackenzie carries on for more than a thousand miles to the sea.
In this distance of the long water trail one sees and hears manythings. It is life. It is adventure. It is mystery and romance andhazard. Its tales are so many that books could not hold them. In thefaces of men and women they are written. They lie buried in graves soold that the forest trees grow over them. Epics of tragedy, of love, ofthe fight to live! And as one goes farther north, and still farther,just so do the stories of things that have happened change.
For the world is changing, the sun is changing, and the breeds of menare changing. At the Landing in July there are seventeen hours ofsunlight; at Fort Chippewyan there are eighteen; at Fort Resolution,Fort Simpson, and Fort Providence there are nineteen; at the Great Beartwenty-one, and at Fort McPherson, close to the polar sea, fromtwenty-two to twenty-three. And in December there are also these hoursof darkness. With light and darkness men change, women change, and lifechanges. And Pierre and Henri and Jacques meet them all, but alwaysTHEY are the same, chanting the old songs, enshrining the old loves,dreaming the same dreams, and worshiping always the same gods. Theymeet a thousand perils with eyes that glisten with the love ofadventure.
The thunder of rapids and the howlings of storm do not frighten them.Death has no fear for them. They grapple with it, wrestle joyously withit, and are glorious when they win. Their blood is red and strong.Their hearts are big. Their souls chant themselves up to the skies. Yetthey are simple as children, and when they are afraid, it is of thingswhich children fear. For in those hearts of theirs is superstition--andalso, perhaps, royal blood. For princes and the sons of princes and thenoblest aristocracy of France were the first of the gentlemenadventurers who came with ruffles on their sleeves and rapiers at theirsides to seek furs worth many times their weight in gold two hundredand fifty years ago, and of these ancient forebears Pierre and Henriand Jacques, with their Maries and Jeannes and Jacquelines, are theliving voices of today.
And these voices tell many stories. Sometimes they whisper them, as thewind would whisper, for there are stories weird and strange that mustbe spoken softly. They darken no printed pages. The trees listen tothem beside red camp-fires at night. Lovers tell them in the gladsunshine of day. Some of them are chanted in song. Some of them comedown through the generations, epics of the wilderness, remembered fromfather to son. And each year there are the new things to pass frommouth to mouth, from cabin to cabin, from the lower reaches of theMackenzie to the far end of the world at Athabasca Landing. For thethree rivers are always makers of romance, of tragedy, of adventure.The st
ory will never be forgotten of how Follette and Ladouceur swamtheir mad race through the Death Chute for love of the girl who waitedat the other end, or of how Campbell O'Doone, the red-headed giant atFort Resolution, fought the whole of a great brigade in his effort torun away with a scow captain's daughter.
And the brigade loved O'Doone, though it beat him, for these men of thestrong north love courage and daring. The epic of the lost scow--howthere were men who saw it disappear from under their very eyes,floating upward and afterward riding swiftly away in the skies--is toldand retold by strong-faced men, deep in whose eyes are the smolderingflames of an undying superstition, and these same men thrill as theytell over again the strange and unbelievable story of Hartshope, thearistocratic Englishman who set off into the North in all the glory ofmonocle and unprecedented luggage, and how he joined in a tribal war,became a chief of the Dog Ribs, and married a dark-eyed, sleek-haired,little Indian beauty, who is now the mother of his children.
But deepest and most thrilling of all the stories they tell are thestories of the long arm of the Law--that arm which reaches for twothousand miles from Athabasca Landing to the polar sea, the arm Of theRoyal Northwest Mounted Police.
And of these it is the story of Jim Kent we are going to tell, of JimKent and of Marette, that wonderful little goddess of the Valley ofSilent Men, in whose veins there must have run the blood of fightingmen--and of ancient queens. A story of the days before the railroadcame.