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Transportation in the North, as It Has Been from the Beginning Down to the Advent of the Airplane; Because of Limited Carrying Capacity and Speed the Dogs Are Being Displaced
By JAMES MONTAGNES
"THEY'RE off!" That phrase signifies a race. Make it an airplane race. Make its starting point New York. Watch two pontoon-equipped cabin monoplanes wing their way upward from the waters of Long Island sound. See them head for Montreal and then disappear in the distance.
They stop at the biggest city in the Dominion. Their arrival is a few hours apart, since they did not start together. They refuel, are custom-inspected, stand the gaze of hard financiers, and then they taxi over the waters of the St. Lawrence in their hop for Shirley air station near Ottawa. Another rest, the pilots are but beginning their race. Those first 700 miles were the easiest. Now they head for Winnipeg, 1,000 miles westward. It's a big hop, but it is also a big race—for gold.
Winnipeg finds the two pilots a little fagged out. Stewart J. Cheeseman is at the stick of one plane, while Capt. Charles Sutton flies the other.
Then they set their compass for The Pas, 500 miles northwest. That is the last place of civilization they will see. Here Cheeseman will pick up some prospectors. From now on the race really becomes a race. It is the sprint. The last lap. A jump of 1,200 miles until Chesterfield Inlet, at the top of the western shore of Hudson Bay, comes into sight. And it is Chesterfield Inlet and the surrounding millions of acres of rock-strewn country that are the final goal of these two modern marathoners. There they will meet their supply ships, the "Morso" and the "Michael and Patrick."
Gold and diamonds are what those prospectors, being rushed to the subarctic by sea and air, expect to find in that lonely land. Adventurers all, from the financiers in the big city, who are backing them with millions of dollars, to the newest of the mining engineers in the rival parties, they have started on one of the biggest commercial adventures of recent years. For two years they will fly over that land which is unexplored as yet, and will bring out of the earth minerals in quantities as yet entirely unknown.
One concern felt so certain about the
