BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Last Northern Frontier
THE third of the Canadian domain which lies between the sixtieth degree North latitude and the Arctic Ocean is the last frontier of America. From the beginnings of the fur trade in the 17th century until recent times the north country has been the far-off Empire of the Indian and Eskimo, the fur-trader and trapper, or, more recently, the mounted policeman, the missionary and the miner.- All is remoteness and vastness. A few ships making their way through the North-West Passage—the search • for which brought Sir John Franklin and his companions to their death—visit the scattered ports of the Arctic on the business of trade or governance. On the great rivers flowing from the interior, the Mackenzie, for example, a paddle-wheel steamer or two link the few widely-scattered knots of settlement. But the thousands of square miles of virgin forest in the interior, or of moss-covered tundra, . are scarcely known to man, and only the dog-team in winter or the canoe in summer, until the aeroplane arrived, allowed the Canadian trapper or Indian hunter to traverse this kingdom still within the sovereignty of the wild.
Here life is shaped, not by human beings, bronze colour or white, but by winds and waters and forests and frosts, and the ruling citizens are the birds and the animals. From the air, as Mr Malcolm MacDonald saw this country, it was a land of forest armies marching into the ice-gripped Arctic soil, of so many patches of dark brown and crystal blue water that it seemed "a vast nursery devoted to the rearing of lakes," and of endless miles of interwoven rivers and streams driving from the mountains and uplands, through red and blue-green granite into the Barren Lands and the sea. The human beings, in tiny settlements of log cabins, white Hudson Bay Company posts, or in Indian encampments and clusters of Eskimo tents or igloos, were so few that Mr. Malcolm MacDonald seems to have met them all ; they could be counted in hundreds, almost in scores, and the density of population is no more than one person to each io,000 square miles. The living beings who form the great popula- tions are the beavers, the muskrats, the caribou, the white fox and the multitudes of birds large and small. The numbers seem to run beyond the millions, and Mr. MacDonald quotes a namesake whose tent for seven days was passed by migrating caribou. He estimated that within the week more than 2oo,000 had passed, and when he left they were still passing. The largest herds are-supposed to reach a million head.
The High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in Canada visited the north-western portions of these lands in the summer of 1942 and again in 1943. His well-illustrated book is too modestly described as "little more than a description of a journey." It is in fact a very neat and most readable interweaving of personal experience and observation, of the history which brought the Europeans to these lands, of the animal, bird and forest life, and, above all, of the people, past and present, who, so to speak, united the north itself and made it part of the world. For the north is a community of its own, and those who live there, even in some degree those who have been there, however briefly, have a view of life distinguishing them from those who know only an urban and industrial society. Somehow, through his sympathetic and responsive imagination, Mr. MacDonald has caught this feeling of the north. He does not describe it or define it. But it suffuses his book and leaves the reader, as his own experience seems also to have left Mr. MacDonald, with the regret that even these last outposts of an untrammelled freedom must be brought within the expanding grasp of the machine-age.
For the Northland is no longer, as the phrase goes, "cut off" and "going down out" to Edmonton or Vancouver, as the northerner describes it, is not now a matter of months by canoe or dog-team. The aeroplane and the " bush-pilot " and the landing grounds which nature has so generously supplied on the lakes and rivers make travel . simple and provide the -means of communication for new settlements and new industries. Mineral development has been made possible, and great potential wealth is slowly being revealed. Pitchblende, for example—thirty-three tons of ore to make one ton of concentrate, and thirty-five tons Of concentrate to make one gramme of radium—is produced on Great Bear Lake. The war is also effecting its changes in the north. The event at Pearl Harbour and the Japanese landings on the islands off Alaska brought these lands within the ambit of world strategy, and the i,600 miles of highway between the American frontier and Fairbanks have been driven . with all the mechanical skill of American engineers through, the wilderness of mountains and forests, and a new air roule, with air- ports, constructed by the Canadian Government every hundred or two hundred miles, has been opened up to the Soviet Union.
Great changes which may. lead tiN a, new expansion of the settled and wealth-producing areas of Canada have thus begun, and Mr. MacDonald saw many evidences of them. But upon these he does not too long dwell. His book is largely about the northern people themselves, the trappers, who ev,en on their winter " trails " take a wireless along to keep informed of the progress of the war, the doctors who travel by dog-team to operate in a mission hospital or an igloo, the " old-timers " of the Trail of '98, the old Crow Indians north Of the Arctic Circle who from a village of a few dozen houses collected $393 to help Londoners during the blitz, the women who are wives, nurses, teachers, and missionaries of the trading and mining settlements. But his eye is scarcely less caught by the life and, habitations of the muskrat or beaver, he notes the most northerly home of the pelican and swan, the flash of that "celestial gem," the Mountain Blue-bird, and the " faerylike evolu- tions" of the Ruby-throated Humming Bird, "sipping nectar from the wild or garden flowers." To those of us who abide in more temperate zones, the Far North connotes coldness, remoteness, loneliness. And it is all of these_ But out of the people of the North, and out of the nautral beauty of their massive estate, Mr. -MacDonald has conjured a book that is comforting, human and warm. A readable,
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