The Basin of Minas, in the Micmac Indian tradition, was the
beaver-pond and favorite abiding-place of their divinity, Glooscap. On
the great promontory of Cape Blomidon, which stretches northward to
enclose the Basin on its western side, he had his home. The ridge of
the cape turns sharply to the westward and ends in Cape Split,
alongside the Minas Channel. This formation has been compared to the
curved handle of a huge walking-stick, the long North Mountain
stretching far away being the stick. The Micmacs tell us that this
ridge, now bent around to the westward, was Glooscap's beaver-dam,
which he beneficently swung open, so that the surplus waters might run
out and not overflow the meadows around the Basin of Minas. In
swinging it around, however, the terminal cliff of Cape Split was
broken off, and now rises in a promontory four hundred feet high just
beyond the main ridge. Glooscap, we are told, began a conflict in the
Basin with the Great Beaver, and threw at him the five vast rocks now
known as the Five Islands on the northern shore to the eastward of
Parrsboro'. The Beaver was chased out of the Basin, westward through
the Minas Channel, and as a parting salute Glooscap threw his kettle
at him, which overturning, became Spencer's Island, on the northern
shore beyond Cape Split. The enormous tides run through the Minas
Channel at eight miles an hour, and they helped to drive the Great
Beaver over to St. John, where Glooscap finally conquered and killed
him.
The formation around the head of the Bay of Fundy is largely of rich
and fertile red lowlands, marsh and meadow, much of it being reclaimed
by dyking. The same formation is carried over the Chignecto isthmus,
east of the bay, where the Nova Scotia Peninsula is joined to the
mainland. This is only seventeen miles wide, and across it has been
projected the "Chignecto Ship Railway," designed to shorten by about
five hundred miles the passage of vessels around the Nova Scotia
Peninsula into the St. Lawrence. It is a system of railway tracks on
which the design was to carry ships over the isthmus. Vessels of two
thousand tons were to be lifted out of the water, placed in a huge
cradle, and drawn across by locomotives. The project, estimated as
costing $5,000,000, was stopped in partial completion for want of
funds. On the meadow land to the southward of the Basin of Minas is
Windsor on the Avon, a small shipping town, in which the most famous
building near the river is a broad and oddly-constructed one-story
house, called the Clifton Mansion, which was the home of the author of
_Sam Slick_--Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, a native of Windsor, who died
in 1865. Beyond is Ardoise Mountain, rising seven hundred feet and
having on its northern verge the great Aylesford sand-plain whereof
_Sam Slick_ says: "Plain folks call it, in a gin'ral way, the Devil's
Goose Pasture. It is thirteen miles long and seven miles wide; it
ain't just drifting sands, but it's all but that, it's so barren. It's
uneven or wavy, like the swell of the sea in a calm, and it's covered
with short, thin, dry, coarse grass, and dotted here and there with a
half-starved birch and a stunted, misshapen spruce. It is just about
as silent and lonesome and desolate a place as you would wish to see.
All that country thereabout, as I have heard tell when I was a boy,
was once owned by the Lord, the king and the devil. The glebe-lands
belonged to the first, the ungranted wilderness-lands to the second,
and the sand-plain fell to the share of the last--and people do say
the old gentleman was rather done in the division, but that is neither
here nor there--and so it is called to this day the Devil's Goose
Pasture." Over this sand-plain and the rocky, desolate ridge beyond,
runs the great railway train of the Provinces, on the route between
St. John and Halifax--dignified by the title of the "Flying Bluenose."
It crosses the bleak flanks of Ardoise Mountain and Mount Uniacke,
with its gold mines, through a region which the local chronicler
describes as having "admirable facilities for the pasturage of goats
and the procuring of ballast for breakwaters;" and then comes to the
pleasant shores of Bedford Basin, running several miles along its
beautiful western bank down to Halifax harbor.