them, though, on occasion, from the early days, wandering
trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way
than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled
the job. It was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am
prouder of it right now than anything else I have ever done.

"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been
explored. There are big valleys there where the white man has
never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand
years ... almost, for they have had some contact with the
whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and
that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them
and farm them.

"And now the girl. I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a
river in California--uncharted--and unnamed. It was a noble
valley, now shut in by high canyon walls, and again opening out
into beautiful stretches, wide and long, with pasture
shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted with flowers, and
with clumps of timberspruce--virgin and magnificent. The dogs
were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and played
out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds
and drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late
fall, but the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was
supposed to be in sub-arctic America, and high up among the
buttresses of the Rockies, and yet there was that everlasting
spread of flowers. Some day the white settlers will be in there
and growing wheat down all that valley.

"And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the