Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat
triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats,
and water transportation by steam was much less expensive than
transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was
only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation. One
of the native ships of the wilderness was the great _canot du Nord_
of the early voyageurs, a craft made of birch bark, thirty feet long,
of four feet beam and a depth of thirty inches, which would carry a
crew of ten men and a cargo of sixty-five packages of goods or furs,
each package weighing ninety pounds. This vessel reached the limits of
carrying capacity and of portability. Its crew could unload and repack
it, after a portage of a hundred yards, in less than twenty minutes.
Thousands of miles were covered annually by one of these vessels. The
crew which paddled it from Montreal to Winnipeg was then but half-way
on the journey to the Great Slave and Great Bear country, which had
been known from the beginning in the fur trade.