The Foreigner: A Tale of Saskatchewan

Chapter XI: The Edmonton Trail

142 S traight across the country, winding over plains, around sleughs, threading its way through bluffs, over prairie undulations, fording streams and crossing rivers, and so making its course northwest from Winnipeg for nine hundred miles, runs the Edmonton trail. Macmillan was the last of that far-famed and adventurous body of men who were known all through the western country for their skill, their courage, their endurance in their profession of freighters from Winnipeg to the far outpost of Edmonton and beyond into the Peace River and Mackenzie River districts. The building of railroads cut largely into their work, and gradually the freighters faded from the trails. Old Sam Macmillan was among the last of his tribe left upon the Edmonton trail. He was a master in his profession. In the packing of his goods with their almost infinite variety, in the making up of his load, he was possessed of marvellous skill, while on the trail itself he was easily king of them all. Macmillan was a big silent Irishman, raw boned, hardy, and with a highly developed genius for handling ox or horse teams of any size in a difficult bit of road, and possessing as well a unique command of picturesque and varied profanity. These gifts he considered as necessarily Chapter XI The Edmonton Trail 143 related, and the exercise of each was always in conjunction with the other, for no man ever heard Macmillan swear in ordinary conversation or on commonplace occasions. But when his team became involved in a sleugh, it was always a point of doubt whether he aroused more respect and admiration in his attendants by his rare ability to get the last ounce of hauling power out of his team or by the artistic vividness and force of the profanity expended in producing this desired result. It is related that on an occasion when he had as part of his load the worldly effects of an Anglican Bishop en route to his heroic mission to the far North, the good Bishop, much grieved at Macmillan’s profanity, urged upon him the unnecessary character of this particular form of encouragement. “Is it swearing Your Riverence objects to?” said Macmillan, whose vocabulary still retained a slight flavour of the Old Land. “I do assure you that they won’t pull a pound without it.” But the Bishop could not be persuaded of this, and urged upon Macmillan the necessity of eliminating this part of his persuasion. “Just as you say, Your Riverence. I ain’t hurried this trip and we’ll do our best.” The next bad sleugh brought opportunity to make experiment of the new system. The team stuck fast in the black muck, and every effort to extricate them served only to imbed them more hopelessly in the sticky gumbo. Time passed on. A dark and lowering night was imminent. The Bishop grew anxious. Macmillan, with whip and voice, encouraged his team, but all in vain. The Bishop’s anxiety increased with the approach of a threatening storm. “It is growing late, Mr. Macmillan, and it looks like rain. Something must be done.” “It does that, Your Lordship, but the brutes won’t pull half their own weight without I speak to them in the way they are used to.” The good man was in a sore strait. Another half hour passed, and 144 still with no result. It was imperative that his goods should be brought under cover before the storm should break. Again the good Bishop urged Macmillan to more strenuous effort. “We can’t stay here all night, sir,” he said. “Surely something can be done.” “Well, I’ll tell Your Lordship, it’s one of two things, stick or swear, and there’s nothing else for it.” “Well, well, Mr. Macmillan,” said the Bishop resignedly, “we must get on. Do as you think best, but I take no responsibility in the matter.” At which Pilate’s counsel he retired from the scene, leaving Macmillan an untrammelled course. Macmillan seized the reins from the ground, and walking up and down the length of his six-horse team, began to address them singly and in the mass in terms so sulphurously descriptive of their ancestry, their habits, and their physical and psychological characteristics, that when he gave the word in a mighty culminating roar of blasphemous excitation, each of the bemired beasts seemed to be...