Lords of the North

I think, perhaps, the reason good enterprises fail so often where evil ventures succeed, is that the good man blunders forward, trusting to the merits of his cause, where the ev...

My uncle accompanied our flotilla as far as Lachine and occupied a place in my division of canoes. Many were the admonitions he launched out like thunderbolts whenever his craft...

I question if Norse heroes of the sea could boast more thrilling adventure than the wild buffalo hunts of American plain-rangers. A cavalcade of six hundred men mounted on mettl...

Nature is not unlike a bank. When drafts exceed deposits comes a protest, and not infrequently, after the protest, bankruptcy. From the buffalo hunt to the recapture of Fort Dou...

Beyond the Sault, the fascinations of the west beckoned like a siren. Vast waterways, where a dozen European kingdoms could be dropped into one lake without raising a sand-bar,...

When the prima-donna of some vauntful city trills her bird-song above the foot-lights, or the cremona moans out the sigh of night-winds through the forest, artificial townsfolk...

Though many years have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of 1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced waiting, I still hear the roaring of...

"So he laughs at our warrant?" exclaimed Duncan Cameron. "Hut-tut! We'll teach him to respect warrants issued under authority of 43d King George III.," and the dictator of Fort...

I suppose there are times in the life of every one, even the strongest--and I am not that--when a feather's weight added to a burden may snap power of endurance. I had reached t...

Time was when Fort Douglas rang as loudly with mirth of assembled traders as ever Fort William's council hall. Often have I heard veterans of the Hudson's Bay service relate how...

Next morning Le Grand Diable would set out for the north. This night, then, was my last chance to rescue Miriam. "Do your do before morning!" How Laplante's words echoed in my e...

He who would hear that paradox of impossibilities--silence become vocal--must traverse the vast wastes of the prairie by night. As a mother quiets a fretful child, so the illimi...

"You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off," ejaculated Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with ferocious emphasis. I had been relating my experience with the campers; and was...

The warriors had spoken truth to the Mandanes. Le Grand Diable was not in the Sioux lodges. I had been at the encampment for almost a week, daily expecting the warriors' return,...

For an hour, or more, I had been lounging about the sitting-room of a club in Quebec City, waiting for my friend, who had promised to join me at dinner that night. I threw aside...

The whole thing was so unexpected that for one moment not a man in the room drew breath. Then the colonel sprang up with the bellow of an enraged bull, overturning the table in...

A more desolate existence than the life of a fur-trading winterer in the far north can scarcely be imagined. Penned in some miserable lodge a thousand miles from human companion...

As well play pussy-wants-a-corner with a tiger as make-believe war with an Indian. In both cases the fun may become ghastly earnest with no time for cry-quits. So it was with th...

How many shapeless terrors can spring from the mind of man I never knew till Eric and the priest left me alone in the Mandane village. Ever, on closing my eyes, there rolled and...

What tempted me to moor opposite the ruins of Fort Gibraltar? What tempts the fly into the spider's web and the fish with a wide ocean for play-ground into one small net? I know...

I frequently passed that window above the stoop next day. Once I saw a face looking down on me with such withering scorn, I wondered if the disgraceful scene with Louis Laplante...

The men began arguing about the degrees of whiteness in a squaw's skin. Those, married to native women, averred that differences of complexion were purely matters of temperament...

For a week Hamilton and I had been busy in our respective lodges getting peltries and personal belongings into shape for return to Red River. On Saturday night, at least I count...

"But I am alarmed, for you're all wrong! Lord, boy, why didn't ye stay with that peppery Scotchman? What did Frances mane by lettin' you out to-night?" and he shaded the light o...

Even at the hour of our triumph, we Nor'-Westers knew that we had yet to reckon with Lord Selkirk; and a speedy reckoning the indomitable nobleman brought about. The massacre at...

The _Bois-Brulés_ and Indian marauders, who gathered to our camp, were drunk with the most intoxicating of all stimulants--human blood. This flush of victory excited the redskin...

How came it that a Catholic priest lay under a Protestant roof? How comes it that the new west ever ruthlessly strips reality naked of creed and prejudice and caste, ever breaks...

The ransom price was at once collected. Next morning, Little Fellow, on a fresh mount with a string of laden horses on each side, went post haste back to the Sioux.

To unravel a ball of yarn, with which kittens have been making cobwebs, has always seemed to me a much easier task than to unknot the tangled skein of confused influences, that...