The Red Man--Leave Battle River--The Red Deer Hills--A long Ride--Fort
Pitt--The Plague--Hauling by the Tail--A pleasant Companion--An easy
Method of Divorce--Reach Edmonton.
EVER, towards the setting sun drifts the flow of Indian migration; ever
nearer and nearer to that glorious range of snow-clad peaks which the red
man has so aptly named "the Mountains of the Setting Sun." It is a
mournful task to trace back through the long list of extinct tribes the
history of this migration. Turning over the leaves of books belonging to
that "old colonial time" of which Longfellow speaks, we find strange
names of Indian tribes now utterly unknown, meetings of council and
treaty making with Mohawks and Oneidas and Tuscaroras.
They are gone, and scarcely a trace remains of them. Others have left in
lake and mountain-top the record of their names. Erie and Ottawa, Seneca
and Cayuga tell of forgotten or almost forgotten nations which a century
ago were great and powerful. But never at any time since first the white
man was welcomed on the newly-discovered shores of the Western Continent
by his red brother, never has such disaster and destruction overtaken
these poor wild, wandering sons of nature as at the moment in which we
write. Of yore it was the pioneers of France, England, and Spain with
whom they had to contend, but now the whole white world is leagued in
bitter strife against the Indian. The American and Canadian are only
names that hide beneath them the greed of united Europe. Terrible deeds
have been wrought out in that western land; terrible heart-sickening
deeds of cruelty and rapacious infamy--have been, I say? no, are to this
day and hour, and never perhaps more sickening than now in the full blaze
of nineteenth-century civilization. If on the long line of the American
frontier, from the Gulf of Mexico to the British boundary, a Single life
is taken by an Indian, if even a horse or ox be stolen from a settler,
the fact is chronicled in scores of-journals throughout the United
States, but the reverse of the story we never know. The countless deeds
of perfidious robbery, of ruthless murder done by white savages out in
these Western wilds never find the light of day. The poor red man has no
telegraph, no newspaper, no type, to tell his sufferings and his woes. My
God, what a terrible tale could I not tell of these dark deeds done by
the white savage against the far nobler red man! From southernmost Texas
to most northern Montana there is but one universal remedy for Indian
difficulty--kill him. Let no man tell me that such is not the case. I
answer, I have heard it hundreds of times: "Never trust a redskin unless
he be dead." "Kill every buffalo you see," said a Yankee colonel to me
one day in Nebraska; "every buffalo dead is an Indiaan gone;" such
things are only trifles. Listen to this cute feat of a Montana trader. A
store-keeper in Helena City had some sugar stolen from him. He poisoned
the sugar next night and left his door open. In the morning six Indians
were found dead outside the town. That was a cute notion, I guess; and
yet there are other examples worse than that, but they are too revolting
to tell. Never mind; I suppose they have found record somewhere else if
not in this world, and in one shape or another they will speak in due
time. The Crees are perhaps the only tribe of prairie Indians who have as
yet suffered no injustice at the hands of the white man. The land is
still theirs, the hunting-rounds remain almost undisturbed; but their
days are numbered, and already the echo of the approaching wave of
Western immigration is sounding through the solitudes of the Cree
country.
It is the same story from the Atlantic to the Pacific. First the White
man was the welcome guest, the honoured visitor; then the greedy hunter,
the death-dealing vender of fire-water and poison; then the settler and
exterminator--every where it has been the same story.
This wild man who first welcomed the new-comer is the only perfect
socialist or communist in the world. He holds all things in common with
his tribe--the land, the bison, the river, and the moose. He is starving,
and the rest of the tribe want food. Well, he kills a moose, and to the
last bit the coveted food is shared by all. That war-party has taken one
hundred horses in the last raid into Blackfoot or Peagin territory; well,
the whole tribe are free to help themselves to the best and fleetest
steeds before the captors will touch one out of the band. There is but a
scrap of beaver, a thin rabbit, or a bit of sturgeon in the lodge; a
stranger comes, and he is hungry; give him his share and let him be first
served and best attended to. If one child starves in an Indian camp you
may know that in every lodge scarcity is universal and that every stomach
is hungry. Poor, poor fellow! his virtues are all his own; crimes he may
have, and plenty, but his noble traits spring from no book-learning, from
no school-craft, from the preaching of no pulpit; they come from the
instinct of good which the Great Spirit has taught him; they are the
whisperings from that lost world whose glorious shores beyond the
Mountains of the Setting Sun are the long dream of his life. The most
curious anomaly among the race of man, the red man of America, is passing
away beneath our eyes into the infinite solitude. The possession of the
same noble qualities which we affect to reverence among our nations makes
us kill him. If he would be as the African or the Asiatic it would be all
right for him; if he would be our slave he might live, but as he won't
be that, won't toil and delve and hew for us, and will persist in
hunting, fishing, and roaming over the beautiful prairie land which the
Great Spirit gave him; in a word, since he will be free we kill him. Why
do I call this wild child the great anomaly of the human race? I will
tell you. Alone amongst savage tribes he has learnt the lesson which the
great mother Nature teaches to her sons through the voices of the night,
the forest, and the solitude. This river, this mountain, this measureless
meadow speak to him in a language of their own. Dwelling with them, he
learns their varied tongues, and his speech becomes the echo of the
beauty that lies spread around him. Every name for lake or river, for
mountain or meadow, has its peculiar significance, and to tell the Indian
title of such things is generally to tell the nature of them also. Ossian
never spoke with the voice of the mist-shrouded mountain or the wave-beat
shores of the isles more thoroughly than does this chief of the Blackfeet
or the Sioux speak the voices of the things of earth and air amidst which
his wild life is cast.
I know that it is the fashion to hold in derision and mockery the idea
that nobility, poetry, or eloquence exist in the wild Indian. I know that
with that low brutality which has ever made the Anglo-Saxon race deny its
enemy the possession of one atom of generous sensibility, that dull
enmity which prompted us to paint the Maid of Orleans a harlot, and to
call Napoleon the Corsican robber--I know that that same instinct glories
in degrading the savage, whose chief crime is that he prefers death to
slavery; glories in painting him devoid of every trait of manhood, worthy
only to share the fate of the wild beast of the wilderness--to be shot
down mercilessly when seen. But those bright spirits who have redeemed
the America of to-day from the dreary waste of vulgar greed and ignorant
conceit which we in Europe have flung so heavily upon her; those men
whose writings have come back across the Atlantic, and have become as
household words among us--Irving, Cooper, Longfellow--have they not found
in the rich store of Indian poetry the source of their choicest thought?
Nay, I will go farther, because it may be said that the a poet would be
prone to drape with poetry every subject on which his fancy lighted, as
the sun turns to gold and crimson the dullest and the dreariest clouds:
but Search the books of travel amongst remote Indian tribes, from
Columbus to Catlin, from Charlevoix to Carver, from Bonneville to
Pallisser the story is ever the same. The traveller is welcomed and made
much of; he is free to come and go; the best food is set before him; the
lodge is made warm and bright; he is welcome to stay his lifetime if he
pleases. "I swear to your majesties," writes Columbus--alas! the red
man's greatest enemy--"I swear to your majesties that there is not in the
world a better people than these, more affectionate, affable, or mild."
"At this moment," writes an American officer only ten years back, "it is
certain a man can go about throughout the Blackfoot territory without
molestation, except in the contingency of being mistaken at night for an
Indian." No, they are-fast going, and soon they will be all gone, but in
after-times men will judge more justly the poor wild creatures whom
to-day we kill and vilify; men will go back again to those old books of
travel, or to those pages of "Hiawatha" and "Mohican," to find that far
away from the border-land of civilization the wild red man, if more of
the savage, was infinitely less of the brute than was the white ruffian
who destroyed him.
I quitted the camp at Battle River on the 17th November, with a large
band of horses and a young Cree brave who had volunteered his services
for some reason of his own which he did not think necessary to impart to
us. The usual crowd of squaws, braves in buffalo robes, naked children,
and howling dogs assembled to see us start. The Cree led the way mounted
on a ragged-looking pony, then came the baggage-sleds, and I brought up
the rear on a tall horse belonging to the Company. Thus we held our way
in a north-west direction over high-rolling plains along the north bank
of the Saskatchewan towards Fort Pitt.
On the morning of the 18th we got away from our camping thicket of
poplars long before the break of day. There was no track to guide us, but
the Cree went straight as an arrow over hill and dale and frozen lake.
The hour that preceded the dawn was brilliant with the flash and glow of
meteors across the North-western sky. I lagged so far behind to watch
them that when day broke I found myself alone, miles from the party. The
Cree kept the pace so well that it took me some hours before I again
Caught sight of them. After a hard ride of six-and-thirty miles, we
halted for dinner on the banks of English Creek. Close beside our
camping-place a large clump of spruce-pine stood in dull contrast to the
snowy surface. They looked like old friends to me--friends of the
Winnipeg and the now distant Lake of the Woods; for from Red River to
English Creek, a distance of 750 miles, I-had seen but a solitary
pine-tree. After a short dinner We resumed our rapid way, forcing the
pace with a view of making Fort Pitt by night-fall. A French half-breed
declared he knew a short cut across the hills of the Red Deer, a wild
rugged tract of country lying on the north of the Saskatchewan. Crossing
these hills, he said, we would strike the river at their farther side,
and then, passing over on the ice, cut the bend which the Saskatchewan
makes to the north, and, emerging again opposite Fort Pitt, finally
re-cross the river at that station. So much for the plan, and now for its
fulfilment.
We entered the region of the Red Deer Hills at about two o'clock in the
afternoon, and continued at a very rapid pace in a westerly direction for
three hours. As we proceeded the country became more broken, the hills
rising steeply from narrow V-shaped valleys, and the ground in many
places covered with fallen and decaying trees--the wrecks of fire and
tempest. Every where throughout this wild region lay the antlers and
heads of moose and elk; but, with the exception of an occasional large
jackass-rabbit, nothing living moved through the silent hills. The ground
was free from badger-holes; the day, though dark, was fine; and, with a
good horse under me, that two hours gallop over, the Red Deer Hills was
glorious work. It wanted yet an hour of sunset when we came suddenly upon
the Saskatchewan flowing in a deep narrow valley between steep and lofty
hills, which were bare of trees and bushes and clear of snow. A very wild
desolate scene it looked as I surveyed it from a projecting spur upon
whose summit I rested my blown horse. I was now far in advance of the
party who occupied a parallel ridge behind me. By signs they intimated
that our course now lay to the north; in fact, Daniel had steered very
much too ar south, and we had struck the Saskatchewan river a long,
distance below the intended place of crossing. Away we went again to the
north, soon losing sight of the party; but as I kept the river on my left
far below in the valley I knew they could not cross without my being
aware of it. Just before sun set they appeared again in sight, making
signs that they were about to descend into the valley and to cross the
river. The valley here was five hundred feet in depth, the slope being
one of the steepest I had ever seen. At the bottom of this steep descent
the Saskatchewan lay in its icy bed, a large majestic-looking river three
hundred yards in width. We crossed on the ice without accident, and
winding up the steep southern shore gained the level plateau above. The
sun was going down, right on our forward track. In the deep valley below
the Cree and an English half-breed were getting the horses and
baggage-sleds over the river. We made signs to them to camp in the
valley, and we ourselves turned our tired horses towards the west,
determined at all hazards to reach the fort that night. The Frenchman led
the way riding, the Hudson Bay officer followed in a horse-sled, I
brought up the rear on horseback. Soon it got quite dark, and we held on
over a rough and bushless plateau seamed with deep gullies into which we
descended at hap hazard forcing our weary horses with difficulty up the
opposite sides. The night got later and later, and still no sign of Fort
Pitt; riding in rear I was able to mark the course taken by our guide,
and it soon struck me that he was steering wrong; our correct course lay
west, but he seemed to be heading gradually to the North, and finally,
began to veer even towards the East. I called out to the Hudson Bay man
that I had serious doubts as to Daniel's knowledge of the track, but I
was assured that all was correct. Still we went on, and still no sign of
fort or river. At length the Frenchman suddenly pulled Up and asked us to
halt while he rode on and surveyed the country, because he had lost the
track, and didn't know where he had got to. Here was a pleasant prospect!
without food, fire, or covering, out on the bleak plains, with the
thermometer at 20 degrees of frost! After some time the Frenchman
returned and declared that he had altogether lost his way, and that there
was nothing for it but to camp where we were, and wait for daylight to
proceed. I looked around in the darkness. The ridge on which we stood was
bare and bleak, with the snow drifted off into the valleys. A few
miserable stunted willows were the only signs of vegetation, and the wind
whistling through their ragged branches made up as dismal a prospect as
man could look at. I certainly felt in no very amiable mood with the men
who had brought me into this predicament, because I had been overruled in
the matter of leaving our baggage behind and in the track we had been
pursuing. My companion, however, accepted the situation with apparent
resignation, and I saw him commence to unharness his horse from the sled
with the aspect of a man who thought a bare hill-top without food, fire,
or clothes was the normal state of happiness to which a man might
reasonably aspire at the close of an eighty-mile march, with out laying
himself open to the accusation of being over effeminate.
Watching this for some seconds in silence, I determined to shape for
myself a different course. I dismounted, and taking from the sled a shirt
made of deer-skin, mounted again my poor weary horse and turned off alone
into the darkness. "Where are you going to?" I heard my companions
calling out after me. I was half inclined not to answer, but turned in
the saddle and holloaed back, "To Fort Pitt, that's all." I heard behind
me a violent bustle, as though they were busily engaged in yoking up the
horses again, and then I rode off as hard as my weary horse could go. My
friends took a very short time to harness up again, and they were soon
powdering along through the wilderness. I kept on for about half an hour,
steering by the stars due west; suddenly I came out upon the edge of a
deep valley, and by the broad white band beneath recognized the frozen
Saskatchewan again. I have at least found the river, and Fort Pitt, we
knew, lay somewhere upon the bank. Turning away from the river, I held on
in a south-westerly direction for a considerable distance, passing up
along a bare snow-covered valley and crossing a high ridge at its end. I
could hear my friends behind in the dark. But they had got, I think, a
notion that I had taken leave of my senses, and they were afraid to call
out to me. After a bit I bent my course again to the west, and steering
by my old guides, the stars, those truest and most unchanging friends of
the wanderer, I once more struck the Saskatchewan, this time descending
to its level and crossing it on the ice.
As I walked along, leading my horse, I must admit to experiencing a
sensation not at all pleasant. The memory of the crossing of the South
Branch was still too strong to admit of over-confidence in the strength
of the ice, and as every now and again my tired horse broke through the
upper crust of snow and the ice beneath cracked, as it always will when
weight is placed on it for the first time, no matter how strong it may
be, I felt by no means as comfortable as I would have wished. At last the
long river was passed, and there on the opposite shore lay the cart track
to Fort Pitt. We were close to Pipe-stone Creek, and only three miles
from the Fort.
It was ten o'clock when we reached the closely-barred gate of this Hudson
Bay post, the inhabitants of which had gone to bed. Ten o'clock at night,
and we had started at six o'clock in the morning. I had been fifteen
hours in the saddle, and no less than ninety miles had passed under my
horse's hoofs, but so accustomed had I grown to travel that I felt just
as ready to set out again as though only twenty miles had been traversed.
The excitement of the last few hours steering by the stars in an unknown
country, and its most successful denouement, had put fatigue and
weariness in the background; and as we sat down to a well-cooked supper
of buffalo steaks and potatoes, with the brightest eyed little lassie,
half Cree, half Scotch, in the North-west to wait upon us, while a great
fire of pine wood blazed and crackled on the open hearth, I couldn't help
saying to my companions, "Well, this is better than your hill-top and the
fireless bivouac in the rustling willows."
Fort Pitt was free from small-pox, but it had gone through a fearful
ordeal: more than one hundred Crees had perished close around its
stockades. The unburied dead lay for days by the road-side, till the
wolves, growing bold with the impunity which death among the hunters ever
gives to the hunted, approached and fought over the decay ing bodies.
From a spot many marches to the south the Indians had come to the fort in
midsummer, leaving behind them a long track of dead and dying men over
the waste of distance. "Give us help," they cried, "give us help, our
medicine-men can do nothing against this plague; from the white man We
got it, and it is only the white man who can take it away from us."
But there was no help to be given, and day by day the wretched band grew
less. Then came another idea into the red man's brain: "If we can only
give this disease to the white man and the trader in the fort," thought
they, "we will cease to suffer from it ourselves;" so they came into the
houses dying and disfigured as they were, horrible beyond description to
look at, and sat down in the entrances of the wooden houses, and
stretched themselves on the floors and spat upon the door-handles. It was
no use, the fell disease held them in a grasp from which there was no
escape, and just six weeks before my arrival the living remnant fled away
in despair.
Fort Pitt stands on the left or north shore of the Saskatchewan River,
which is here more than four hundred yards in width. On the opposite
shore immense bare, bleak hills raise their wind-swept heads seven
hundred feet above the river level. A few pine-trees show their tops some
distance away to the north, but no other trace of wood is to be seen in
that vast amphitheatre of dry grassy hill in which the fort is built. It
is a singularly wild-looking scene, not without a certain beauty of its
own, but difficult of association with the idea of disease orepidemic, so
pure and bracing is the air which sweeps over those great grassy uplands.
On the 20th November I left Fort Pitt, having exchanged some tired horses
for fresher ones, but still keeping the same steed for the saddle, as
nothing, better could be procured from the band at the fort. The snow had
now almost disappeared from the ground, and a Red River cart was once
more taken into use for the baggage. Still keeping along the north shore
of the Saskatchewan, we now held our way towards the station of Victoria,
a small half-breed settlement situated at the most northerly bend which
the Saskatchewan makes in its long course from the mountains to Lake
Winnipeg. The order of march was ever the same; the Cree, wrapped in a
loose blanket, with his gun balanced across the shoulder of his pony,
jogged on in front, then came a young half-breed named Batte notte, who
will be better known perhaps to the English reader when I say that he was
the son of the Assineboine guide who conducted Lord Milton and Dr.
Cheadle through the pine forests of the Thompson River. This youngster
employed himself by continually shouting the name of the horse he was
driving--thus "Rouge!" would be vigorously yelled out by his tongue, and
Rouge at the same moment would be vigorously belaboured by his whip;
"Noir!" he would again shout, when that most ragged animal would be
within the shafts; and as Rouge and Noir invariably had this ejaculation
of their respective titles coupled with the descent of the whip upon
their respective backs, it followed that after a while the mere mention
of the name conveyed to the animal the sensation of being licked. One
horse, rejoicing in the title of "Jean l'Hereux," seemed specially
selected for this mode of treatment. He was a brute of surpassing
obstinacy, but, as he bore the name of his former owner, a French
semi-clerical maniac who had fled from Canada and joined the Blackfeet,
and who was regarded by the Crees as one of their direst foes, I rather
think that the youthful Battenotte took out on the horse some of the
grudges that he owed to the man. Be that as it may, Jean l'Hereux got
many a trouncing as he laboured along the sandy pine-covered ridges
which rise to the north-west of Fort Pitt.
On the night of the 21st November we reached the shore of the Eggo Lake,
and made our camp in a thick clump of aspens. About midday on the
following day we came in sight of the Saddle Lake, a favourite
camping-ground of the Crees, owing to its inexhaustible stores of finest
fish. Nothing struck me more as we thus pushed on rapidly along the Upper
Saskatchewan than the absence of all authentic information from stations
farther west. Every thing was rumour, and the most absurd rumour. "If you
meet an old Indian named Pinguish and a boy without a name at Saddle
Lake," said the Hudson Bay officer at Fort Pitt to me, "they may give you
letters from Edmonton, and you may get some news from them, because they
lost letters near the lake three weeks ago, and perhaps they may have
found them by the time you get there." It struck me very forcibly, after
a little while, that this "boy without a name" was a most puzzling
individual to go in search of. The usual interrogatory question of
"What's your name?" would not be of the least use to find such a
personage, and to ask a man if he had no name, as a preliminary question,
might be to insult him. I therefore fell back upon Pinguish, but could
obtain no intelligence of him whatever. Pinguish had apparently never
been heard of. It then occurred to me that the boy without the name might
perhaps be a remarkable character in the neighbourhood, owing to his
peculiar exception from the lot of humanity; but no such negative person
had ever been known, and I was constrained to believe that Pinguish and
his mysterious partner had fallen victims to the small-pox or had no
existence; for at Saddle Lake the small-pox had worked its direst fury,
it was still raging in two little huts close to the track, and when we
halted for dinner near the south end of the lake the first man who
approached was marked and seared by the disease. It was fated that this
day we were to be honoured by peculiar company at our dinner. In addition
to the small-pox man, there came an ill-looking fellow of the name of
Fayel, who at once proceeded to make himself at his ease beside us. This
individual bore a deeper brand than that of small-pox upon him, inasmuch
as a couple of years before he had foully murdered a comrade in one of
the passes of the Rocky Mountains when returning from British Columbia.
But this was not the only intelligence as to my companions that I was
destined to receive upon my arrival on the following day at Victoria.
"You have got Louis Battenotte, with you, I see," said the Hudson Bay
officer in charge.
"Yes," I replied.
"Did he tell you any thing about the small-pox?"
"Oh yes; a great deal; he often spoke about it."
"Did he say he had had it himself?"
"No."
"Well, he had," continued ny host, "only a month ago, and the coat and
trousers that he now wears were the same articles of clothing in which he
lay all the time he had it," was the pleasant reply.
After this little revelation concerning Battenotte and his habiliments, I
must admit that I was not quite as ready to look with pleasure upon his
performance of the duties of cook, chambermaid, and general valet as I
had been in the earlier stage of our acquaintance; but a little
reflection made the hole thing right again, convincing one of the fact
that travelling, like misery, "makes one acquainted with strange
bedfellows," and that luck has more to do with our lives than we are wont
to admit. After leaving Saddle Lake we entered a very rich and beautiful
country, completely clear of snow and covered deep in grass and vetches.
We travelled hard, and reached at nightfall a thick wood of pines and
spruce-trees, in which we made a cosy camp. I had brought with me a
bottle of old brandy from Red River in case of illness, and on this
evening, not feeling all right, I drew the cork while the Cree was away
with the horses, and drank a little with my companion. Before we had
quite finished, the Cree returned to camp, and at once declared that he
smelt grog. He became very lively at this discovery. We had taken the
precaution to rinse out the cup that had held the spirit, but he
nevertheless commenced a series of brewing which appeared to give him
infinite satisfaction. Two or three times did he fill the empty cup with
water and drain it to the bottom, laughing and rolling his head each time
with delight, and in order to be sure that he had got the right one he
proceeded in the same manner with every cup we possessed; then he
confided to Battenotte that he had not tasted grog for a long time
before, the last occasion being one on which he had divested himself of
his shirt and buffalo robe, in other words, gone naked, in order to
obtain the coveted fire-water.
The weather had now become beautifully mild, and on the 23rd of November
the thermometer did not show even one degree of frost. As we approached
the neighbourhood of the White Earth River the aspect of the country
became very striking: groves of spruce and pine crowned the ridges; rich,
well-watered valleys lay between, deep in the long white grass of the
autumn. The track wound in and out through groves and wooded declivities,
and all nature looked bright and beautiful. Some of the ascents from the
river bottoms were so steep that the united efforts of Battenotte and the
Cree were powerless to induce Rouge or Noir, or even Jean l'Hcreux, to
draw the cart to the summit. But the Cree was equal to the occasion. With
a piece of shanganappi he fastened L'Hereux's tail to the shafts of the
cart-shafts which had already between them the redoubted Noir. This new
method of harnessing had a marked effect upon L'Hereux; he strained and
hauled with a persistency and vigour which I feared must prove fatal to
the permanency of his tail in that portion of his body in which nature
had located it, but happily such was not the case, and by the united
efforts of all parties the summit was reached.
I only remained one day at Victoria, and the 25th of November found me
again en route for Edmonton. Our Cree had, however, disappeared. One
night when he was eating his supper with his scalping-knife--a knife, by
the way, with which he had taken, he informed us, three Black feet scalps
--I asked him why he had come away with us from Battle River. Because he
wanted to get rid of his wife, of whom he was tired, he replied. He had
come off without saying any thing to her. "And what will happen to the
wife?" I asked. "Oh, she will marry another brave when she finds me
gone," he answered, laughing at the idea. I did not enter into the
previous domestic events which had led to this separation, but I presume
they were of a nature similar to those which are not altogether unknown
in more civilized society, and I make no hesitation in offering to our
legislators the example of my friend the Cree as tending to simplify the
solution, or rather the dissolution, of that knotty point, the separation
of couples who, for reasons best known to themselves, have ceased to
love. Whether it was that the Cree found in Victoria a lady suitad to his
fancy, or whether he had heard of a war-party against the Sircies, I
cannot say, but he vanished during the night of our stay in the fort, and
we saw him no more.
As we journeyed on towards Edmonton the country maintained its rich and
beautiful appearance, and the weather continued fine and mild. Every
where nature had written in unmistakable characters the story of the
fertility of the soil over which we rode--every where the eye looked upon
panoramas filled with the beauty of lake and winding river, and grassy
slope and undulating woodland. The whole face of the country was indeed
one vast park. For two days we passed through this beautiful land,-and on
the evening of the 28th November drew near to Edmonton. My party had been
increased by the presence of two gentlemen from Victoria, a Wesleyan
minister and the Hudson Bay official in charge of the Company's post at
that place. Both of these gentlemen had resided long in the Upper
Saskatchewan, and were intimately acquainted with the tribes who inhabit
The vast territory from the Rocky Mountains to Carlton House. It was late
in the evening, just one month after I had started from the banks of the
Red River, that I approached the high palisades of Edmonton. As one who
looks back at evening from the summit of some lofty ridge over the long
track which he has followed since the morning, so now did my mind travel
back over the immense distance through which I had ridden in twenty-two
days of actual travel and in thirty-three of the entire journey-that
distance could not have been less than 1000 miles; and as each camp scene
rose again before me, with its surrounding of snow and storm-swept
prairie and lonely clump of aspens, it seemed as though something like
infinite space stretched between me and that far-away land which one word
alone can picture, that one word in which so many others centre--Home.