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Updated: June 10, 2025
It was then that I had my first day-dreams of the Northland of its forests, its rivers and lakes, its hunters and trappers and traders, its fur-runners and mounted police, its voyageurs and packeteers, its missionaries and Indians and prospectors, its animals, its birds and its fishes, its trees and its flowers, and its seasons.
In the first place, packeteers are supplied with plenty of grub for the trip; in the next place, if they had a gun they might go hunting and fooling around with it instead of attending to their business; and, moreover, it doesn't matter whether the mail travels two hundred or two thousand miles, there is no occasion for packeteers to carry firearms, for there are no highwaymen and no animals in this country that would make an offensive attack upon them."
"Yes, that's true," acknowledged the trader, "the packeteers do make great efforts to break records between posts.
Though I well knew that packeteers did not carry firearms, I asked Chief Factor Thompson just for the sake of getting the truth from him and giving it to the public: "How does the Hudson's Bay Company arm their packeteers?" "Arm them?" the Chief Factor laughed outright, "why, we always provide them with an axe." "Firearms, I mean." "Firearms! Why, they aren't allowed to carry firearms at all.
"Oh, the winter; for, when inward bound, it bears the Commissioner's instructions to the district chief factors; and, when outward bound, it contains information regarding the results and the progress of the fur-trade, and orders for additional supplies." "How many miles a day do the packeteers average on their winter trips?"
Why, your reverence, don't you know, packeteers never carries a gun?" the old man exclaimed with disgust, and then continued his story: "Not content with that, the brute starts to roll me over an' over. An' all the time I'm doin' me best to play dead. Now you needn't laff.
Yet the packeteers of the Mackenzie River mail cover their two thousand miles on snowshoes at an average rate of twenty-seven and a half miles a day, including all stoppages." "That is certainly splendid travelling. Some of the packeteers, I should judge, have made great records; haven't they?"
Again, while making camp near the Athabasca River, the packeteers had slung the packet in a tree, the usual place for it while in camp. During the night their fire spread and burned up the whole equipment except the tree, which, being green, received little more than a scorching. The packet was unharmed.
Packeteers have been drowned, frozen, burned, shot, smothered, and even eaten; but the packet has always reached its destination somehow." A sudden burst of laughter from the men at a neighbouring fire attracted the attention of Chief Factor Thompson, and glancing over, he remarked to me: "Telling yarns, eh! Let's go over and listen."
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