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Notes to Pages 158-160 281driven by Turner (Lain I6). It was this location that Vyvyan andDorrien Smith reached. As a fur trade post, the new location"remained open for only three years, as the HBC withdrew fromthe area completely in 1893" (Coates 71). A regular Church ofEngland mission was started there in 1882 (Hamilton 146). In1893, Susan Mellet (1870-1962), with experience teaching inIreland's Ragged Schools, arrived in the Yukon and was sent toRampart House by the first bishop of Selkirk, WilliamCarpenter Bompas. There she met and later married Rev R.].Bowen, a young English clergyman (Backhouse 122). CharlesCamsell, who met Cadzow when he reached Rampart House bythe Rat River on 4 September 1905, found it "situated in a drawon the north side of the river. The location of the Post was characteristicof Arctic habitations, with its back to the hills on thenorth and facing south across the river in order to get the fullbenefit of the sunlight on the short winter days" (200).(Photographs of the settlement as it looked in the early I970sappear in Harrington 42-3.) In the mid-1920s, RampartHouse was ceding its centrality to Old Crow as the premierGwitchin settlement. Robert Bruce suggests that after the deathof Dan Cadzow, around 1926, "no one down there trading sothat's why people moved I think" (Rampart 52, 53).Thornthwaite and AllingtonSgtArthur B. Thornthwaite was born in Surrey, England in1901, and served with the force 1919-47. His service took hiInto the Yukon in the sumIner of 1924, and to the cOInInand ofRampart House in the SuInmer Of1926, replacing CharlieYoung. Young was the officer in charge in lateJune, when theMuries andJess Rust visited the settlement (Rust 20), but theyfound Thornthwaite there and Young "gone to Dawson" whenthey passed on their return from Old Crow River on 15 August(Rust 76). In 1927, Thornthwaite Inarried Helen, one of thetwo nurses at the Hudson Stuck Memorial Hospital in FortYukon, whom Vyvyan and Gwendolen Smith Inet later in themonth. Thornthwaite's posting took the couple to Old Crow,where they remained until 1933. They retired to Victoria,where he was still living in 1992 (Batchelor; Glen Gordon).Under Thornthwaite's cOInmand at RaInpart House in1926 was Const Charles Ellingson, who had joined the RCMPin 1921. Vyvyan and Sherwood Platt, whose party was warmlyhosted by him at RaInpart House 26-7 August 1926, Inisspelledhis naIne. Platt wrote it as "Ellingston" (30). Margaret Muriedescribed Ellingson as "a young Norwegian giant" whosestature conformed to the depiction of Inounties found in thestories of the AInerican author JaInes Oliver Curwood (278;2nd ed. 225).Mr Allington rigged up a mast and sail and we began to workacross the current diagonally. I watched Gwen's face ofhorrorThe statement that Dorrien Smith's knowledge of sailing wassuperior to Ellingson's appears only in the book, where itbecomes one of a succession of incidents highlighting thewOInen's COInpetence and growing confidence once they hadpassed the test of the "malignant Rat," and once-indeed, forthe first time since leaving England-they themselves began tonavigate a craft in water. Vyvyan's observation that the bishopwas unshaven also appears only in the book, where he becomesone of many eccentric northern characters who Inake up thesubstance ofVyvyan's adventure. Her field notes do not blaIneEllingson for the idea of the mast and do not offer the basis forthe paragraph about Sittichinli's idealisIn.there was the Moose, ... one of the Jackson Brothers onboard and also Bishop Stringer, the Bishop of the YukonThe Jackson brother Inet on 23July by Vyvyan and DorrienSmith was perhapsJim, for on 26 August just above RampartHouse, Sherwood Platt's party met FrankJackson comingupriver with "his huge outfit including 2 other white men andmany Indians, dogs, and supplies" (Platt 30). JimJackson ismentioned by Mary Kassi in her oral history of La PierreHouse; she also connrIns that Moose was the name of their boat.Lydia Thomas, in her oral history, notes that Frank, whoserved on the patrol that hunted down AlbertJohnson inFebruary I931, died at La Pierre House andJiIn at Old Crow,but Moses Tizya claims thatJim died at Fort Yukon (LaPierre 17,35,145).Born in Bruce County, Ontario, Isaac O. Stringer (1866-1934) was ordained deacon in the Church of England aftercompleting his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1892. Heworked as a missionary out of Fort McPherson from 1892 to1893, travelling throughout the area, as far west as La PierreHouse and as far north as Herschel Island. Ordained priest in1893 and married to fellow Ontarion Sarah Ann Alexander(1869-1955; known as Sadie) in 1896, he nrst travelled toHerschel Island in 1893 and established a Inission there thenext year. In 1901, eye problems forced Stringer to accept the