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Cover created by Transcriber, using an illustration from the original book, and placed into the Public Domain.

DOG-TRAIN FOR THE NORTH.

Frontispiece.

The Wild North Land
THE STORY OF A WINTER JOURNEY WITH
DOGS ACROSS NORTHERN NORTH AMERICA

BY LIEUTENANT-GENERAL
SIR WILLIAM FRANCIS BUTLER, G.C.B.
AUTHOR OF
“THE GREAT LONE LAND” AND “RED CLOUD, THE SOLITARY SIOUX”

“I cannot rest from travel. I will drink life to the lees.”
“I am become a name for always roaming with a hungry heart.”

WITH FIFTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS AND A MAP

TORONTO
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF
CANADA, LTD.
1910

SIR WILLIAM BUTLER’S WILD NORTH LAND.

Part of
BRITISH
NORTH AMERICA
to illustrate
“THE WILD NORTH LAND”

Weller & Graham L^{td}. Litho, London

BURNS & OATES.

[(Larger)]

PREFACE.

People are supposed to have an object in every journey they undertake in this world. A man goes to Africa to look for the Nile, to Rome to see the Coliseum or St. Peter’s; and once, I believe, a certain traveller tramped all the way to Jerusalem for the sole purpose of playing ball against the walls of that city.

As this matter of object, then, seems to be a rule with travellers, it may be asked by those who read this book, what object had the writer in undertaking a journey across the snowy wilderness of North America, in winter and alone? I fear there is no answer to be given to the question, save such as may be found in the motto on the title-page, or in the pages of the book itself.

About eighteen months ago I was desirous of entering upon African travel. A great explorer had been lost for years in the vast lake-region of Southern Central Africa, and the British Nation—which, by the way, becomes singularly attached to a man when he is dead, or supposed to be dead—grew anxious to go out to look for him.

As the British Nation could not all go out at once, or together, it endeavoured to select one or two individuals to carry out its wishes.

It will be only necessary to state here, that the British Nation did not select the writer of this book, who forthwith turned his attention from African tropic zones to American frigid ones, and started out upon a lonely cruise.

Many tracks lay before me in that immense region I call “The Wild North Land.” Former wandering had made me familiar with the methods of travel pursued in these countries by the Indian tribes, or far-scattered fur-hunters. Fortunate in recovering possession of an old and long-tried Esquimaux dog—the companion of earlier travel—I started in the autumn of 1872 from the Red River of the North, and, reaching Lake Athabasca, completed half my journey by the first week of March in the following year. From Athabasca I followed the many-winding channel of the frozen Peace River to its great cañon in the Rocky Mountains, and, journeying through this pass—for many reasons the most remarkable one in the whole range of the Rocky Mountains—reached the north of British Columbia in the end of May. From thence, following a trail of 350 miles through the dense forests of New Caledonia, I emerged on the 3rd of June at the frontier station of Quesnelle on the Frazer River, still 400 miles north of Victoria.

In the ensuing pages the story of that long tramp—for it was mostly performed on foot—will be duly set forth. Written by camp fire, or in cañon, or in the little log-house of a northern fur fort, when dogs and men rested for a day or two in the long icy run, that narrative will be found, I fear, to bear many indications of the rough scenes ’mid which it has been penned; but as, on a former occasion, many critics passed in gentle silence over the faults and failings of another story of travel in the Great Lone Land, so now it may be my fortune to tell to as kindly an audience, this record of a winter’s walk through more distant wilds—for in truth there has been neither time for revision nor correction.

Fortune, which eighteen months ago denied me African adventure, offers it now with liberal hand.

I reached the Atlantic from the Pacific shore to find an expedition starting from England against Ashantee; and long ere this story finds a reader I hope to be pushing my way through the mangrove swamps which lie between the Gold Coast and Coomassie. To others even must fall the task of correcting proofs, while I assume my part in the correction and revision of King Koffi Kancalli, and the administration to his subjects of that proof of British prowess which it has been deemed desirable to give them.

Meantime, my old friends Chief Kar-ka-konias, Kalder, and Cerf-vola, will be absent from this new field; but, nevertheless, there will be present many companions of former travel, and one Chief under whose command I first sought the Great Lone Land as the threshold to remoter regions.

W. F. Butler.

London,
September 21st, 1873.

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE
WILD NORTH LAND.

CHAPTER I.

The Situation at Home.—The West again.—A Land of Silence.

There had never been so many armies in England. There was a new army, and there was an old army; there was an army of militia, an army of volunteers, and an army of reserve; there were armies on horse, on foot, and on paper. There was the army of the future—of which great things were predicted—and far away, lost in a haze of history (but still more substantial than all other armed realities, present or future), there lay the great dead army of the past.

It was a time when everybody had something to do with military matters, everybody on the social ladder, from the Prime Minister on the topmost round to the mob-mover on the lowest.

Committees controlled the army, Departments dressed it, Radicals railed at it, Liberals lectured upon it, Conservatives condemned it, Peers wrote pamphlets upon it, Dukes denounced it, Princes paraded it, and every member of Parliament who could put together half a dozen words with tolerable grammatical fluency had something to say about it.

Surely such a period must have been one in which every soldier would have recognized the grandeur and importance of his profession, and clung with renewed vigour to a life which seemed of moment to the whole British nation. But this glowing picture of the great “nation of shopkeepers,” suddenly fired by military ardour, had its reverse.

The stream of advancement slowly stagnating under influences devised to accelerate it, the soldier wearied by eternally learning from masters the lesson he could have taught, the camp made a place of garrison routine and not of military manœuvre, the uniform harness which had galled a Burton, a Palgrave, a Ruxton, and a Hayward, from ranks where the spirit of adventurous discovery sickened under chilling regulation—this harness made more unrelaxingly irksome; a system of promotion regulated by money—the offspring, it is true, of foul corruption, but which had become not a little purified by lapse of time; this system, supplanted by one of selection theoretically pure, but destined to fall into that lowest of all corruptions, the influence of political jobbery: all this formed the leading features in that order of things, old and new, which the spectacle of a neighbouring nation, struck suddenly to the ground by a mighty army, had caused the panic-stricken British people to overhaul and to reconstruct.

Taken any way one can, an army on paper is not a satisfactory profession. It is subject to sudden and unlooked-for bursts of military zeal; it is so bent upon nervously asserting itself fit for anything; it is from its nature so much akin to pen, ink, and envelope of a common-place type; it has such disagreeable methods of garrisoning the most pestilential spots upon the earth, and abandoning to republican bluster whole continents called colonies; those who shape its destinies are so ready to direct it against matchlock monarchs and speared soldiery; while arms are folded before those conflicts which change the past and future of the centuries; all these considerations go a great way towards making the profession of arms, on paper, at any time an anomaly.

But when there was also present to the memory of one who thus regarded the new order of military life, the great solitudes, the inland oceans, the desolate wilds, the gloomy forests of a far-away land, through which his former wanderings had carried him; when thought re-sought again those vast regions of the earth where Nature has graven her image in characters so colossal, that man seems to move slowly amidst an ocean frozen rigid by lapse of time, frozen into those things we name mountains, rivers, prairies, forests; man a mere speck, powerless so far to mark his presence, in blur of smoke, in noise of city, in clash of crank, or whirl of wheel: when these things came back in pictures touched by the soft colours Memory loves to limn with, there were not wanting dull professional outlooks and dearth of service to turn the footsteps gladly into the old regions again, there to trace new paths through the almost exhaustless waste which lies between the lonely prairies of the Saskatchewan and the icy oceans of the North.

What shall we call this land to those who follow us into its depths?

It has prairies, forests, mountains, barren wastes, and rivers; rivers whose single lengths roll through twice a thousand miles of shoreland; prairies over which a rider can steer for months without resting his gaze on aught save the dim verge of the ever-shifting horizon; mountains rent by rivers, ice-topped, glacier-seared, impassable; forests whose sombre pines darken a region half as large as Europe; sterile, treeless wilds whose 400,000 square miles lie spread in awful desolation. How shall it all be called?

In summer, a land of sound, a land echoing with the voices of birds, the ripple of running water, the mournful music of the waving pine-branch; in winter, a land of silence, a land hushed to its inmost depths by the weight of ice, the thick-falling snow, the intense rigour of a merciless cold—its great rivers glimmering in the moonlight, wrapped in their shrouds of ice; its still forests rising weird and spectral against the Aurora-lighted horizon; its notes of bird or brook hushed as if in death; its nights so still that the moving streamers across the northern skies seem to carry to the ear a sense of sound, so motionless around, above, below, lies all other visible nature.

If then we call this region the land of stillness, that name will convey more justly than any other the impress most strongly stamped upon the winter’s scene.

CHAPTER II.

Powder versus Primroses.—The American Lounger.—“Home, Sweet Home.”

It was just time to leave London. The elm-trees in the parks were beginning to put forth their earliest and greenest leaves; innumerable people were flocking into town because custom ordained that the country must be quitted when the spring is at its finest; as though the odour of primroses had something pestilential about it, and anything in the shape of violets except violet powder was terribly injurious to feminine beauty.

Youthful cosmopolites with waxed moustaches had apparently decided to compromise with the spring, and to atone for their abandonment of the country by making a miniature flower-garden of their button-holes. It was the last day of April, and ere the summer leaves had yellowed along the edge of the great sub-Arctic forest, my winter hut had to be hewn and built from the pine-logs of the far-distant Saskatchewan.

In the saloon or on the after-deck of a Cunard steamship steering west, one sees perhaps more of America’s lounging class than can be met with on any other spot in the world; the class is a limited one, in fact it may be a matter of dispute, whether the pure and simple lounger, as we know him in Piccadilly or Pall Mall, is to be found in the New World; but a three, or six, or twelve months’ visit to Europe has sufficiently developed the dormant instincts of the class in the New York or Boston man of business, to give colour to the assumption that Columbia possesses a lounger.

It is possible that he is a lounger only for the moment. That one glimpse of Bunker, one echo of Wall Street, will utterly banish for ever the semblance of lounging; but for the present the Great Pyramid minus Bunker’s Hill, the Corso minus Wall Street, have done something towards stamping him with the air and manner of the idler. For the moment he sips his coffee, or throws his cigar-end overboard, with a half-thoughtful, half-blasé air; for the moment he has discovered that the sun does not rise and set exclusively in the United States, and that there were just a few shreds and patches of history in the world prior to the declaration of American independence: still, when the big ship has steamed on into the shallow waters which narrow into Sandy Hook or Plymouth Sound, and the broad panorama twixt Long Island and Staten, or Plymouth and Nahant opens on the view, the old feeling comes back with the old scenes again.

“Sir, the Bay of New York closely resembles the Bay of Naples.” There is not the slightest use in telling him that it is quite as like the Bey of Tunis, or the Hospodar of Bulgaria—so we let it be.

“There, sir, is Bunker’s Hill.”

“Ah, indeed!” drawled a genuine British lounger, with that superb ignorance only to be attained after generations of study, as he quietly scanned the ridge through his lazily-arranged eye-glass. “Bunker—who was Bunker? and what did he do on his hill?”

Yet, ere we hasten away to the North, another word anent our cousin. These things are, after all, the exception; the temptation to tell a good story, or what we may deem such, must not blind us to the truth; the other side of the question must not be forgotten. An English traveller in America will have so much to thank American travel for that he can well afford to smile at such things.

It was an American who painted for us the last scenes of Moorish history, with a colouring as brilliant as that which the Hall of the Lions could boast of in the old days of Grenada’s glory. To-day an American dwelling in Rome recalls for us in marble the fierce voluptuous beauty of the Egyptian Queen. Another catches the colouring of Claude, in his “Twilight in the Wilderness.” And if, as I have somewhere heard, it is to the writer of the ballad-song that true poetic fame belongs, that song which is heard at lonely camp-fires, which is sung by sailors at the wheel as the canvas-clouded ship reels on under the midnight gloom through the tumbling seas,—the song which has reached the heart of a nation, and lives for ever in the memory of a people,—then let us remember, when we listen to those wondrous notes on whose wings float the simple words, “Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home;” let us remember the land whose memory called them forth from the heart of an American exile.

And now we must away.

CHAPTER III.

Fort Garry under new aspects.—Social Societies.—An Old Friend.—“Pony” the perverse.

The long, hot, dusty American summer was drawing to a close. The sand-fly had had his time, the black-fly had run his round, the mosquito had nearly bitten himself to death, and during that operation had rendered existence unbearable to several millions of the human race. The quiet tranquil fall-time had followed the fierce wasting summer, and all nature seemed to rest and bask in the mellow radiance of September.

It was late in the month of September, 1872, when, after a summer of travel in Canada and the United States, I drew near the banks of the Red River of the North. Two years had worked many changes in scene and society; a railroad had reached the river; a “city” stood on the spot where, during a former visit, a midnight storm had burst upon me in the then untenanted prairie. Three steamboats rolled the muddy tide of the winding river before their bluff, ill-shapen bows. Gambling-houses and drinking-saloons, made of boards and brown paper, crowded the black, mud-soaked streets. A stage-coach ran north to Fort Garry 250 miles, and along the track rowdyism was rampant. Horse-stealing was prevalent, and in the “city” just alluded to two murderers walked quietly at large. In fine, the land which borders the Red River, Minnesota, and Dakota, had been thoroughly civilized.

But civilization had worked its way even deeper into the North-west. The place formerly known as Fort Garry had civilized into the shorter denomination of “Garry;” the prairie around the Fort had corner lots which sold for more hundreds of dollars than they possessed frontage-feet; and society was divided in opinion as to whether the sale which called forth these prices was a “bogus” one or not.

Representative institutions had been established in the new province of Manitoba, and an election for members of Parliament had just been concluded. Of this triumph of modern liberty over primeval savagery, it is sufficient to say, that the great principle of freedom of election had been fully vindicated by a large body of upright citizens, who, in the freest and most independent manner, had forcibly possessed themselves of the poll-books, and then fired a volley from revolvers, or, in the language of the land, “emptied their shooting-irons” into another body of equally upright citizens, who had the temerity to differ with them as to the choice of a political representative.

Civilization had also developed itself in other ways. Several national societies had been founded, and were doing prosperously. There was a St. George’s Society and a St. Andrew’s Society, and, I think, also a St. Patrick’s Society. Indeed the memory of these saints appears to be held in considerable reputation in the New World. According to the prospectus and programme of these societies, charity appears to be the vital principle of each association: sick Scotchmen, emigrating English, and indigent Irish, were all requested to come forward and claim relief at the hands of the wealthier sons of St. Andrew, St. George, and St. Patrick. Charity, which is said to begin at home, and which, alas! too frequently ends there also, having thus had its commencement in the home circle, seemed determined to observe all home-like institutions; and the annual dinner was of necessity a very important item in the transactions of each society.

Amidst all these changes of scene and society there was one thing still unchanged on the confines of the Red River. Close to the stream, at the place known as the Point of Frogs, an old friend met me with many tokens of recognition. A tried companion was he through many long days of wintry travel. There, as fresh and hearty as when I had parted from him two years before, stood Cerf-vola, the Esquimaux dog who had led my train from Cumberland, on the Lower Saskatchewan, across the ice of the great Lakes. Of the four dogs he alone remained. Two years is a long time in the life of any dog, but still a longer period in that of a hauling-dog; and Cerf-vola’s comrades of that date, Muskeymote, Cariboo, and Tigre had gone the way of all earthly things.

To become the owner of this old friend again, and of his new companions Spanker and Pony, was a work of necessity; and I quitted the Point of Frogs by the steamboat “Selkirk” with three hauling-dogs in my possession. Strong and stout as of yore; clean-limbed, long-woolled, deep-chested; with ears pointed forward and tail close curled over his broad back, Cerf-vola still stood the picture of an Esquimaux.

Of the other two dogs, Pony was a half-breed, and Spanker, sharp, keen, and restless, was like his leader, a pure Husky; but, unlike the older dog, his nature was wild and fierce: some malignant guardian of his youth had despoiled him of the greater part of his tail, and by doing so had not a little detracted from his personal appearance.

CERF-VOLA, THE ESQUIMAUX DOG.

As these three animals will be my constant companions during many months, through many long leagues of ice and snow, I have here sketched their outward semblance with some care. Civilization and a steamboat appeared to agree but poorly with my new friends. Spanker, failing in making his teeth emancipate his own neck, turned all his attention towards freeing his companion, and after a deal of toil he succeeded in gnawing Pony loose. This notable instance of canine abnegation (in which supporters of the Darwinian theory will easily recognize the connecting link between the Algerine captives assisting each other to freedom, &c., &c., after the manner of the Middle Ages), resulted in the absconding of the dog Pony, who took advantage of the momentary grounding of the steamer to jump on shore and disappear into the neighbouring forest.

It was a wild, tempestuous night; the storm swept the waters of the Red River until at length the steamboat was forced to seek her moorings against the tree-lined shore. Here was a chance of recovering the lost dog. Unfortunately the boat lay on the Dakota side, and the dog was at large somewhere on the Minnesota shore, while between the stormy water heaved in inky darkness. How was the capture to be effected?

As I stood on the lower deck of the steamboat, pondering how to cross the dark river, a man paddled a small skiff close to the boat’s side. “Will you be good enough to put me across the river?” I asked.

“I’ve no darned time to lose a night like this,” he answered, “but if you want to cross jump in.” The lantern which he carried showed the skiff to be half-filled with water, but the chance was too good to be lost. I sprang in, and we shot away over the rough river. Kneeling in the bottom of the boat I held the lantern aloft, while my gruff comrade paddled hard. At last we touched the shore; clambering up the wet, slippery bank, I held the light amidst the forest; there, not twenty paces distant, stood Pony.

“Pony, poor fellow, good dog, come, Pony, cess, cess, poor old boy.” Alas! all the alluring dogisms by which we usually attract the animal were now utterly useless, and the more I cried “Here, here,” the more the wretch went there, there. Meanwhile my boating friend grew impatient; I could hear him above the storm shouting and cursing at me with great volubility: so I made my way back to the shore, gave him his lantern, and went back into the forest, while he shot out into the darkness of the river.

Every now and again I heard the brute Pony close to me in the brushwood. For some time I wandered on; suddenly a light glimmered through the wet trees: approaching the light I found it to issue from an Indian wigwam, and at my summons two or three half-clad creatures came out. There was a dog lost in the woods, would they get lights and help me to catch him? a dollar would be the reward. The dollar threw a new light upon the matter. Burning brands were instantly brought forth from the wigwam fire, but with little result; the vagabond Pony, now utterly scared out of all semblance of dog wit, sought safety in the deepest recesses of the forest, from whence he poured forth howls into the night. I returned to the river, and with the aid of my wigwam friends regained the steamboat. Half an hour later the man on watch saw a dark object swimming around the boat; it was the lost dog. Cerf-vola, tied in the rain as a lure, had continued to howl without intermission, and the vagrant Pony had evidently come to the conclusion that there were worse places on a wet autumnal night than the warm deck of the steamboat “Selkirk.”

In the earliest days of October all phases of civilization were passed with little regret; and at the Rat Creek, near the southern shore of Lake Manitoba, I bid good-bye to society. The party was a small one—a member of the Imperial Legislature, well known in Ireland, now en route to get a glimpse of the great solitudes ere winter had closed in, his servant, mine own, five horses, and two carts.

CHAPTER IV.

The Wilderness.—A Sunset-Scene.—A white Savage.—Cerf-vola the Untiring.—Doggerel for a Dog.—The Hill of the Wolverine.—The Indian Paradise.—I plan a Surprise.—Biscuits and Water.

It was the 4th of October, bright with the warmth of the fading summer—that quiet glow which lingers over the face of nature, like the hectic flush upon a dying beauty, ere the wintry storms come to kill.

Small and insignificant, the Musk-Rat Creek flows on towards Lake Manitoba amidst bordering thickets of oak and elm trees. On each side, a prairie just beginning to yellow under the breath of the cold night wind; behind, towards the east, a few far-scattered log-houses smoke, and a trace of husbandry; the advanced works of that army whose rear-guard reaches to the Vistula; before, towards the west, the sun going down over the great silent wilderness. How difficult to realize it! How feeble are our minds to gauge its depths!

He who rides for months through the vast solitudes sees during the hours of his daily travel an unbroken panorama of distance. The seasons come and go; grass grows and flowers die; the fire leaps with tiger bounds along the earth; the snow lies still and quiet over hill and lake; the rivers rise and fall, but the rigid features of the wilderness rest unchanged. Lonely, silent, and impassive; heedless of man, season, or time, the weight of the Infinite seems to brood over it. Once only in the hours of day and night a moment comes when this impassive veil is drawn from its features, and the eye of the wanderer catches a glimpse of the sunken soul of the wilderness; it is the moment which follows the sunset; then a deeper stillness steals over the earth, colours of wondrous hue rise and spread along the western horizon. In a deep sea of emerald and orange of fifty shades, mingled and interwoven together, rose-coloured isles float anchored to great golden threads; while, far away, seemingly beyond and above all, one broad flash of crimson light, the parting sun’s last gift, reddens upwards to the zenith. And then, when every moment brings a change, and the night gathers closer to the earth, and some waveless, nameless lake glimmers in uncertain shore-line and in shadow of inverted hill-top; when a light that seems born of another world (so weirdly distant is it from ours) lingers along the western sky, then hanging like a lamp over the tomb of the sun, the Evening Star gleams out upon the darkening wilderness.

It may be only a fancy, a conceit bred from loneliness and long wandering, but at such times the great solitude has seemed to me to open its soul, and that in its depths I read its secrets.

Ten days dawned and died; the Mauvais Bois, the Sand Ridges, western shore of an older world’s immense lake, the Pine Creek, the far-stretching hills of the Little Saskatchewan rose, drew near, and faded behind us. A wild, cold storm swept down from the north, and, raging a day and a night, tore the yellow leaves from the poplar thickets, and scared the wild fowl far southward to a warmer home.

Late on the 10th of October we reached the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post of Beaver Creek, the western limit to the travels of my friend. Here, after a stay of three days and a feast of roasted beaver, we parted; he to return to Killarney, St. Stephen’s, and Denominational Education—a new name for the old feud between those great patriot armies, the Ins and the Outs; I to seek the lonely lands where, far beyond the distant Saskatchewan, the great Unchagah, parent of a still mightier stream, rolls through remote lakes and whispering pines its waters to the Polar Seas.

With one man, three horses and three dogs, and all those requisites of food, arms, and raiment with which a former journey had familiarized me, I started on the 14th of October bound for the North-west. I was virtually alone; my companion was a half-breed taken at chance from the wigwam at the scene of the dog Pony’s midnight escapade on the Red River. Chance had on this occasion proved a failure, and the man had already shown many symptoms of worthlessness. He had served as a soldier in an American corps raised by a certain Hatch, to hold in check the Sioux after the massacre of Minnesota in 1862. A raid made by nine troopers of this corps, against an Indian tent occupied by some dozen women and children, appears to have been the most noteworthy event in the history of Hatch’s Battalion. Having surrounded the wigwam in the night, these cowards shot the miserable inmates, then scalping and mutilating their bodies they returned to their comrades, bearing the gory scalp-locks as trophies of their prowess.

Hatch is said to have at once forwarded to Washington a despatch, announcing “a decisive victory over the Sioux by the troops under his command.” But a darker sequel to the tale must remain in shadow, for, if the story told to a Breton missionary rests on a base of truth, the history of human guilt may be searched in vain for a parallel of atrocity.

I had other companions besides this ci-devant trooper, of a far more congenial nature, to share my spare time with. A good dog is so much a nobler beast than an indifferent man that one sometimes gladly exchanges the society of one for that of the other.

A great French writer has told us that animals were put on earth to show us the evil effects of passions run riot and unchecked. But it seems to me that the reverse would be closer to the truth. The humanity which Napoleon deemed a dog taught to man on Bassano’s battle-field is not the only virtue we can learn from that lower world which is bound to us by such close ties, and yet lies so strangely apart from us. Be that as it may, a man can seldom feel alone if he has a dog to share his supper, to stretch near him under the starlight, to answer him with tail-wag, or glance of eye, or prick of ear.

Day after day Cerf-vola and his comrades trotted on in all the freedom which summer and autumn give to the great dog family in the north. Now chasing a badger, who invariably popped into his burrow in time to save his skin; now sending a pack of prairie grouse flying from the long grass; now wading breast-deep into a lake where a few wild ducks still lingered, loath to quit their summer nesting-haunts.

Of all the dogs I have known Cerf-vola possessed the largest share of tact. He never fought a pitched battle, yet no dog dared dispute his supremacy. Other dogs had to maintain their leadership by many a deadly conflict, but he quietly assumed it, and invariably his assumption was left unchallenged; nay, even upon his arrival at some Hudson Bay fort, some place wherein he had never before set foot, he was wont to instantly appoint himself director-general of all the Company’s dogs, whose days from earliest puppyhood had been passed within the palisades. I have often watched him at this work, and marvelled by what mysterious power he held his sway. I have seen two or three large dogs flee before a couple of bounds merely made by him in their direction, while a certain will-some-one-hold-me-back? kind of look pervaded his face, as though he was only prevented from rending his enemy into small pieces by the restraining influence which the surface of the ground exercised upon his legs.

His great weight no doubt carried respect with it. At the lazy time of the year he weighed nearly 100 pounds, and his size was in no way diminished by the immense coat of hair and fine fur which enveloped him. Had Sir Boyle Roche known this dog he would not have given to a bird alone the faculty of being in two places at once, for no mortal eye could measure the interval between Cerf-vola’s demolishment of two pieces of dog-meat, or Pemmican, flung in different directions at the same moment.

Thus we journeyed on. Sometimes when the sheen of a lake suggested the evening camp, while yet the sun was above the horizon, my three friends would accompany me on a ramble through the thicket-lined hills. At such times, had any Indian watched from sedgy shore or bordering willow copse the solitary wanderer who, with dogs following close, treaded the lonely lake shore, he would have probably carried to his brethren a strange story of the “white man’s medicine.” He would have averred that he had heard a white man talking to a big, bushy-tailed dog, somewhere amidst the Touchwood Hills, and singing to him a “great medicine song” when the sun went down.

And if now we reproduce for the reader the medicine song which the white man strung together for his bushy-tailed dog, we may perhaps forestall some critic’s verdict by prefixing to it the singularly appropriate title of

DOGGEREL.

And so, old friend, we are met again, companions still to be,

Across the waves of drifted snow, across the prairie sea.

Again we’ll tread the silent lake, the frozen swamp, the fen,

Beneath the snow-crown’d sombre pine we’ll build our camp again:

And long before the icy dawn, while hush’d all nature lies,

And weird and wan the white lights flash across the northern skies;

Thy place, as in past days thou’lt take, the leader of the train,

To steer until the stars die out above the dusky plain;

Then on, thro’ space by wood and hill, until the wintry day

In pale gleams o’er the snow-capped ridge has worn itself away,

And twilight bids us seek the brake, where midst the pines once more

The fire will gleam before us, the stars will glimmer o’er.

There stretch’d upon the snow-drift, before the pine log’s glare,

Thy master’s couch and supper with welcome thou wilt share,

To rest, unless some prowling wolf should keep thee watchful still,

While lonely through the midnight sounds his wail upon the hill.

And when the storm raves around, and thick and blinding snow

Comes whirling in wild eddies around, above, below;

Still all unmoved thou’lt keep thy pace as manfully as when

Thy matchless mettle first I tried in lone Pasquia’s glen.

Thus day by day we’ll pierce the wilds where rolls the Arctic stream,

Where Athabasca’s silent lakes, through whispering pine-trees gleam.

Until, where far Unchagah’s flood by giant cliffs is crown’d,

Thy bells will feed the echoes, long hungering for a sound.

Old dog, they say thou hast no life beyond this earth of ours,

That toil and truth give thee no place amidst Elysian bowers.

Ah well, e’en so, I look for thee when all our danger’s past,

That on some hearth-rug, far at home, thou’lt rest thy limbs at last.

A long distance of rolling plain, of hills fringed with thickets, of treeless waste, and lakes spreading into unseen declivities, stretches out between the Qu’Appelle and Saskatchewan rivers. Roamed over by but few bands of Indians, and almost bereft of the larger kind of game, whose bleached bones cover it thickly, this expanse lies in unbroken solitude for more than three hundred miles. Through it the great trail to the north lays its long, winding course; but no other trace of man is to be found; and over lake and thicket, hill and waste, broods the loneliness of the untenanted.

Once it was a famous field of Indian fight, in the old days when Crees and Assineboine strove for mastery. Now it has almost lost the tradition of battle, but now and again a hill-top or a river-course, whose French or English name faintly echoes the Indian meaning, tells to the traveller who cares to look below the surface some story of fight in bygone times.

The hill of the Wolverine and the lonely Spathanaw Watchi have witnessed many a deed of Indian daring and Indian perfidy in days not long passed away, but these deeds are now forgotten, for the trader as he unyokes his horses at their base, and kindles his evening fire, little recks of such things, and hails the hill-top only as a landmark on his solitary road.

Alone in a vast waste the Spathanaw Watchi lifts his head, thickets and lakes are at his base, a lonely grave at top, around four hundred miles of horizon; a view so vast that endless space seems for once to find embodiment, and at a single glance the eye is satiated with immensity. There is no mountain range to come up across the sky-line, no river to lay its glistening folds along the middle distance, no dark forest to give shade to foreground or to fringe perspective, no speck of life, no track of man, nothing but the wilderness. Reduced thus to its own nakedness, space stands forth with almost terrible grandeur. One is suddenly brought face to face with that enigma which we try to comprehend by giving to it the names of endless, interminable, measureless; that dark inanity which broods upon a waste of moorland at dusk, and in which fancy sees the spectral and the shadowy.

VIEW FROM THE SPATHANAW WATCHI.

Yet in this view from the Spathanaw there is nothing dimly seen; the eye travels to the farthest distance without one effort of vision, and, reaching there, rests untired by its long gaze. As the traveller looks at this wonderful view he stands by the grave of an Indian, and he sees around him for four hundred miles the Indian Paradise. It was from scenes such as this, when the spring had covered them with greensward, and the wild herds darkened them by their myriads, that the shadowy sense of a life beyond the tomb took shape and form in the Red man’s mind.

It was the 25th of October when I once more drew near to the South Saskatchewan.

Amidst its high wooded banks the broad river rippled brightly along, as yet showing no trace of that winter now so close at hand. Two years before, all but a few days, I had reached this same river, then shored by dense masses of ice; and now, as I looked from the southern shore, the eye had no little difficulty in tracing through the lingering foliage of the summer the former point of passage, where on the cold November morning my favourite horse had gone down beneath the ice-locked river.

Crossing to the southern shore I turned eastward through a rich undulating land, and riding hard for one day reached the little mission station of Prince Albert, midway between the Red River and the Rocky Mountains.

Those who have followed me through former wanderings may remember a spot where two large rivers unite after many hundred miles of prairie wandering, and form one majestic current on the edge of the Great Northern Forest. To this spot, known as the “Grand Forks of the Saskatchewan,” I was now journeying, for there, while the autumn was yet younger, two friends had preceded me to build at the point of confluence a hut for our residence during the early winter.

The evening of the 28th of October found me pushing hastily through a broad belt of firs and pines which crosses the tongue of land between the rivers some ten miles from their junction; beyond this belt of trees the country opened out, but, as it finally narrowed to the point of confluence, the dark pine-clumps, outliers of the dense Northern Forest, again rose into view. With these features a previous visit had made me acquainted; but the night had now closed in ere yet the fir forest had been passed, and the rain, which all day had been ceaseless, settled down with darkness into a still heavier torrent. As we emerged from the pines my baggage-cart suddenly broke down, and there only remained the alternative of camping by the scene of the disaster, or pushing on for the river junction on foot.

Unfortunately the prospect of unexpectedly walking in upon my friends, housed in the depths of the wilderness, amidst the wild rain-storm of the night, proved too strong a temptation; and having secured the cart as best we could against weather and wolves, we set out into the darkness. For more than an hour we walked hard through undulating ground intermixed with swamps and beaver dams, until at length the land began to decline perceptibly.

Descending thus for nearly a mile we came suddenly upon a large, quick-running river, whose waters chafed with sullen noise against boulder-lined shores, and hissed under the wild beating of the rain. With cautious steps we groped our way to the edge and cast a dry branch into the flood; it floated towards the left; the river, then, must be the South Saskatchewan. Was the junction of this river with the northern branch yet distant? or was it close at hand? for if it was near, then my home was near too.

Making our way along the shore we held on for some time, until suddenly there rose before us a steep bank, at the base of which the current ran in whirling eddies. To climb up a high bank on our left, and thus flank this obstacle, next became our toil; soon we found ourselves in a dense wood where innumerable fallen trees lay in endless confusion. For another hour we groped our way through this labyrinth in a vain attempt to reach the upper level, until at last, exhausted by hours of useless toil, wet, hungry, and bruised, I gave the reluctant word to camp.

To camp, what a mockery it seemed without blankets or covering save our rain-soaked clothes, without food save a few biscuits. The cold rain poured down through leafless aspens, and shelter there was none. It was no easy matter to find a dry match, but at length a fire was made, and from the surrounding wood we dragged dead trees to feed the flames. There is no necessity to dwell upon the miserable hours which ensued! All night long the rain hissed down, and the fire was powerless against its drenching torrents. Towards morning we sunk into a deep sleep, lying stretched upon the soaking ground.

At last a streak of dawn broke over the high eastern shore, the light struggled for mastery with the surrounding darkness and finally prevailed, and descending to the river showed the broad current sweeping on to the north-east. Quitting without regret our cheerless bivouac, we climbed with stiff limbs the high overhanging bank, and gained the upper level. Far away the river still held its course to the north-east, deep sunken 300 feet below the prairie level: we were still distant from the Forks.

Retracing our steps through miles of fallen timber we reached the cart, but the morning had worn on to mid-day before our long-wished-for breakfast smoked in the kettle. Three hours later on, during an evening which had cleared sufficiently to allow the sun to glint through cloud rifts on pine forest and prairie, I reached the lofty ridge which overlooks the Forks of the Saskatchewan.

CHAPTER V.

The Forks of the Saskatchewan.—A perverse Parallel.—Diplomatic Bungling.—Its results.

Two hundred and fifty feet above water level, the narrow tongue of land rises over the junction of the two Saskatchewan rivers. Bare and level at top, its scarped front descends like a wall to the rivers; but land-slip and the wear of time have carried down to a lower level the loose sand and earth of the plateau, and thickly clustering along the northern face, pines, birch, and poplar shroud the steep descent. It is difficult to imagine a wilder scene than that which lay beneath this projecting point.

From north-west and from south-west two broad rivers roll their waters into one common channel, two rivers deep furrowed below the prairie level, curving in great bends through tree-fringed valleys. One river has travelled through eight hundred miles of rich rolling landscape; the other has run its course of nine hundred through waste and arid solitudes; both have had their sources in mountain summits where the avalanche thundered forth to solitude the tidings of their birth. And here at this point, like two lives, which, coming from a distance, are drawn together by some mysterious sympathy, and blended into one are henceforth to know only the final separation, these rivers roll their currents into one majestic stream, which, sinking into a deep gorge, sweeps eastward through unbroken pine forest. As yet no steamboat furrows the deep water; no whistle breaks the sleeping echoes of these grim scarped shores; the winding stream rests in voiceless solitude, and the summer sun goes down beyond silent river reaches, gleaming upon a virgin land.

Standing at this junction of the two Saskatchewan rivers, the traveller sees to the north and east the dark ranks of the great sub-Arctic forest, while to the south and west begin the endless prairies of the middle continent. It is not a bad position from whence to glance at the vast region known to us as British North America.

When the fatal error at Saratoga had made room for diplomatists of Old and New England, and removed the arbitrament of rebellion from the campaign to the council, those who drew on the part of Great Britain the boundary-lines of her transatlantic empire, bungled even more conspicuously in the treaty-chamber than her generals had failed in the field. Geographical knowledge appears ever to have been deemed superfluous to those whose business it was to shape the destinies of our colonial dominions, and if something more tangible than report be true, it is not many months since the British members at a celebrated conference stared blankly at each other when the free navigation of a river of more than two thousand miles in length was mooted at the Council Board. But then, what statesman has leisure to master such trifles as the existence of the great river Yukon, amid the more important brain toil of framing rabbit laws, defining compound householders, and solving other equally momentous questions of our Imperial and Parochial politics? However to our subject. When in 1783 the great quarrel between Britain and her Colonies was finally adjusted, the northern boundary of the United States was to follow the 49th parallel of latitude from the north-west angle of the Lake of the Woods to the river Mississippi, and thence down that river, &c., &c.

Nothing could possibly have been more simple, a child might comprehend it; but unfortunately it fell out in course of time that the 49th parallel was one of very considerable latitude indeed not at all a parallel of diplomatic respectability, or one that could be depended on, for neither at one end or the other could it be induced to approach the north-west angle of the Lake of the Woods or the river Mississippi. Do all that sextant, or quadrant, or zenith telescope could, the 49th parallel would not come to terms.

Doggedly and determinedly it kept its own course; and, utterly regardless of big-wig or diplomatic fogie, it formed an offensive and defensive alliance with the Sun and the Pole Star (two equally obstinate and big-wig disrespectful bodies), and struck out for itself an independent line.

Beyond the Mississippi there lay a vast region, a region where now millions (soon to be tens of millions) draw from prairie and river flat the long-sleeping richness of the soil. Then it was a great wilderness, over which the dusky bison and his wilder master roamed, in that fierce freedom which civilization ends for ever.

To the big-wigs at the Council Board this region was a myth—a land so far beyond the confines of diplomatic geography that its very existence was questioned. Not so to the shrewd solicitor, admiral, auctioneer, general conveyancer, and Jack-of-all-trades in one, who guided the foreign policy of the United States.

Unencumbered by the trappings of diplomatic tradition, he saw, vaguely perhaps, but still with prescient knowledge, the empire which it was possible to build in that western wild; and as every shifting scene in the outside world’s politics called up some new occasion for boundary rearrangement, or treaty rectification, he grasped eagerly at a fresh foothold, an additional scrap of territory, in that land which was to him an unborn empire, to us a half-begotten wilderness. Louisiana, purchased from Napoleon for a trifle, became in his hands a region larger than European Russia, and the vast water-shed of the Missouri passed into the Empire of the United States.

Cut off from the Mississippi, isolated from the Missouri, the unlucky boundary traversed an arid waste until it terminated at the Rocky Mountains.

Long before a citizen of the United States had crossed the Missouri, Canadian explorers had reached the Rocky Mountains and penetrated through their fastnesses to the Pacific; and British and Canadian fur traders had grown old in their forts across the Continent before Lewis and Clark, the pioneers of American exploration, had passed the Missouri. Discovered by a British sailor, explored by British subjects, it might well have been supposed that the great region along the Pacific slope, known to us as Oregon, belonged indisputably to England; but at some new treaty “rectification,” the old story was once more repeated, and the unlucky 49th parallel again selected to carry across the Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, the same record of British bungling and American astuteness which the Atlantic had witnessed sixty years earlier on the rugged estuary of the St. Croix.

For the present our business lies only with that portion of British territory east of the Rocky Mountains, and between them, the Bay of Hudson and the Arctic Ocean.

From the base of the great range of the Rocky Mountains, the Continent of British America slopes towards North and East, until, unbroken by one mountain summit, but in a profound and lasting desolation, it dips its shaggy arms and ice-bound capes into a sea as drear and desolate.

Two great rivers, following of necessity this depression, shed their waters into the Bay of Hudson. One is the Saskatchewan, of which we have already spoken; the other, that river known by various names—“English,” because the English traders first entered the country by it; “Beaver,” from the numbers of that animal trapped along it in olden time; “Churchill,” because a fort of that name stands at its estuary; and “Missinipi,” or “much water,” by the wild races who dwell upon it. The first river has a total length of 1700 miles; the last runs its course through worthless forest and primeval rock for 1200 miles.

“OUR HUT AT THE FORKS OF THE SASKATCHEWAN”

CHAPTER VI.

Our Winter Home.—A Welcome.—I start again.—The Hunter’s Camp.—In quest of Buffalo on the Plains.—“Lodge-poling” leads to Love.

At the foot of the high ridge which marks the junction of the two Saskatchewans, deep in pines and poplars, through which vistas had been cut to give glimpses along the converging rivers, stood the winter hut of which I have already spoken. From its chimney blue smoke curled up amongst the trees into the lower atmosphere, and the sound of wood-cutting came ringing from below, a token of labour not yet completed in our wild and secluded resting-place.

I stood for a moment looking down on this scene—a home in the great wilderness—and then a loud shout echoed into the valley to carry tidings of our arrival to the inmates of the hut. In an instant it was answered from below, and the solitudes rang with many a note of welcome, while half a dozen dogs bayed furious defiance at my pack, already become boisterously jubilant on the ridge above. When friends meet thus, after long travel and separation, there are many questions to ask and to answer, and the autumn evening had worn to midnight ere the pine-log fire threw its light upon a silent hut.

The winter season was now at hand; our house was nearly completed, our stores put away, our dogs kennelled; but one most pressing want had yet to be supplied—our winter stock of meat had to be gathered in, and there was no time to lose about obtaining it.

It was the last of October, just one day after my arrival at the Forks, when we turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. They were said to be a long way off—200 miles nearer to the setting sun—out somewhere on that great motionless ocean, where no tree, no bush breaks the vast expanse of prairie; land to which the wild men of the West and those who lead wild lives there have turned for many an age in search of that food which nature once so generously scattered over the plains of Central North America.

Journeying slowly towards the west—for already the snow had begun to fall in many storms, and the landscape had become wrapt in its winter mantle—we reached in five days one of those curious assemblages of half-breed hunters which are to be found in winter on the borders of the great plains.

Huts promiscuously crowded together; horses, dogs, women, children, all intermixed in a confusion worthy of Donnybrook Fair; half-breed hunters, ribboned, tasselled, and capôted, lazy, idle, and, if there is any spirit in the camp, sure to be intoxicated; remnants and wrecks of buffalo lying everywhere around; robes stretched and drying; meat piled on stages; wolf-skins spread over framework; women drawing water and carrying wood; and at dusk from the little hut the glow of firelight through parchment windows, the sound of fiddle scraped with rough hunter hand, and the quick thud of hunter heel as Louison, or Bâtiste, or Gabriel foot it ceaselessly upon the half-hewn floors.

Unquestionably these French half-breeds are wild birds—hunters, drinkers, rovers, rascals if you will—yet generous and hospitable withal; destined to disappear before the white man’s footprint, and ere that time has come owing many of their vices to the pioneer American, whose worst qualities the wild man, or semi-wild man, has been ever too sure to imitate.

After a delay of three days in this hunter’s camp, which by some strange anomaly was denominated “la mission,” its sole claim to that title being the residence of a French priest in the community, we started on our journey further west.

The winter had now regularly set in; the broad South Saskatchewan was rolling thick masses of ice down its half-closed channel, the snow-covering had deepened on the landscape, the wind blew keenly over the prairie. Many of our horses had been too poor to take upon this journey, and the half-breed whom I had brought from Red River, dreading the exposure of the plains, had taken advantage of the hunter’s camp to desert our service; so another man had been engaged, and, with three fresh horses and an urchin attendant in the shape of a little half-breed, designated by our new man as “l’homme capable,” and for whose services he demanded only the moderate sum of five shillings per diem, we held our course along the South Saskatchewan towards the Great Prairie.

Xavier Bâtoche was a fair sample of his class. The blood of four nationalities mingled in his veins. His grandfather had been a French Canadian, his grandmother a Crow squaw; English and Cree had contributed to his descent on his mother’s side. The ceremony of taking a wife in the early days of the north-west fur trade was not an elaborate performance, or one much encumbered by social or religious preliminaries. If it did not literally fulfil the condition of force implied by the word “taking,” it usually developed into a question of barter; a horse, a flint gun, some white cloth and beads, could purchase the hand and heart of the fairest squaw in Prairie land. If she did not love after one of these valuable “presents” had been made to her father, the lodge-poles were always handy to enforce that obedience necessary to domestic happiness—admirable idea, the roof-tree contributed to the peace of the hearth-stone, and jealousy fled before a “lodge-poling.” To return to Bâtoche; Crow and Cree, French and English, had contrived to produce a genial, good-humoured, handsome fellow; the previous year had been one of plenty, buffalo had once more appeared in vast herds on the prairies of the Saskatchewan; wolf-skins, robes, and pemmican had fetched high prices, and Bâtoche was rich and prosperous.

Two days’ journeying brought us to the edge of the great prairie; silent, vast, and desolate it spread away into unseen space; the snow but scantily covered the yellow grass, and the November wind sighed mournfully through the wrecks of summer vegetation as it sped along its thousand leagues of unmeasured meadow. At the last copse of poplar and willow we halted for a day, to bake bread and cut wood sufficient for a week’s food and fuel, and then we launched our ocean ships—horses and sleds—out into the great meadow.

CHAPTER VII.

An Ocean of Grass.—The Red Man.—Whence comes he?—The Buffalo.—Puritans and Pioneers.—The Red Man’s Friend.

The general term “prairie” comprises many varieties of open landscape. There are the level, alluvial prairies of Illinois, long since settled and colonized; there are the low, fertile prairies of the Red River, where the rich black mould, fallow under five months of snow, puts forth the rank luxuriance of a hot-bed during the half tropic heat of summer; there are the sandy prairies of the Assineboine and Qu’Appelle, intermixed with clusters of aspen and of willow, and broken by lakes and saline ponds: but above each and all—exceeding all other prairies and open spaces—wild, treeless, and ocean-like in everything save motion, there stands forth in dreary grandeur the Great Prairie.

What the Irish Sea, the Channel, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean are to the Atlantic, so are these various outlying regions of plain to the vast rigid ocean of the central continent. It is true that on the Red River, or the Qu’Appelle, or along the line I have lately passed, one may frequently “get out of sight of land;” there are spaces where no tree or bush breaks the long monotony of the sky-line; but all these expanses are as nothing compared to the true prairie.

The unending vision of sky and grass, the dim, distant, and ever-shifting horizon; the ridges that seem to be rolled upon one another in motionless torpor; the effect of sunrise and sunset, of night narrowing the vision to nothing, and morning only expanding it to a shapeless blank; the sigh and sough of a breeze that seems an echo in unison with the solitude of which it is the sole voice; and, above all, the sense of lonely, unending distance which comes to the voyageur when day after day has gone by, night has closed, and morning dawned upon his onward progress under the same ever-moving horizon of grass and sky.

Only two wild creatures have made this grassy desert their home.

Back, since ages at whose birth we can only guess, but which in all human probability go deeper into the past than the reign of Arab in Yemen, or Kirghis in Turkestan, the wild red man has roamed these wastes: back into that dark night which hangs for ever over all we know or shall know of early America. “The time before the white man came,” what a measureless eternity lies hidden under the words! This prairie was here when the stones of the pyramid were unhewn, and the site of Babylon was a river meadow—here as it is to-day, treeless, desolate, and storm-swept. But where and whence came the wild denizens of the waste? Who shall say? Fifty writers have broached their various theories, a hundred solutions have been offered. The missionary claims them as the lost tribes of Israel, one ethnologist finds in them a likeness to the Tartar, another sees the Celtic eye, another the Roman nose, another traces them back to Japan, or China, or Australasia; the old world is scarcely large enough to give them room for their speculations. And what say we? Nothing; or if aught, a conjecture perhaps more vague and shadowy than the rest. It has seemed to us when watching this strange, wild hunter, this keen, untutored scholar of nature, this human creature that sickens beneath our civilization, and dies midst our prosperity—it has seemed to us that he was of a race older and more remote than our own, a stock coeval with a shadowy age—a remnant, perchance, of an earlier creation which has vanished from the earth, preserved here in these wilds—a waif flung by the surge of time to these later ages of our own.

This New World is older than our old one. Its 30,000 feet in depth of Arzoic rock tell us of an age when nought of living form moved over the iron earth. And here, probably first of all, the molten sands rose above the boiling floods, and cooled and crusted into a chaotic continent.

These are but idle speculations; still the antiquity of the Indian race rests upon other foundations. Far to the south, where the prairies rise into the lofty plateau of New Mexico, ruined monuments, weed-grown, and hidden beneath ivy and trailing parasites, stand like spectres from the tomb of time. Before these mouldering rock-hewn cities conjecture halts; the past has drawn over them a veil that no research can pierce, no learning solve. Inscrutable as the vestiges of an earlier earth they stand, the lonely, ruined wrecks of the Red man’s race.

So much for the earlier existence of the human dweller on the prairie; to us he is but a savage—the impediment to our progress—the human counterpart of forests which have to be felled, mountains which must be tunnelled, rivers whose broad currents are things to conquer; he is an obstacle, and he must be swept away. To us it matters not whether his race dwelt here before a Celt had raised a Druid altar. The self-styled heirs to all the centuries reck little of such things.

And now let us turn for a moment to that other wild creature which has made its dwelling on the Great Prairie.

Over the grassy ocean of the west there has moved from time immemorial a restless tide. Backwards and forwards, now north, now south—now filling the dark gorges of the Rocky Mountains—now trailing into the valleys of the Rio del Norte—now pouring down the wooded slopes of the Saskatchewan, surged millions on millions of dusky bisons.

What led them in their strange migrations no man could tell, but all at once a mighty impulse seemed to seize the myriad herds, and they moved over the broad realm which gave them birth as the waves of the ocean roll before the storm. Nothing stopped them on their march; great rivers stretched before them with steep, overhanging banks, and beds treacherous with quicksand and shifting bar; huge chasms and earth-rents, the work of subterraneous forces, crossed their line of march, but still the countless thousands swept on. Through day and night the earth trembled beneath their tramp, and the air was filled with the deep bellowing of their unnumbered throats.

Crowds of wolves and flocks of vultures dogged and hovered along their way, for many a huge beast, half sunken in quicksand, caught amidst whirling ice flow, or bruised and maimed at the foot of some steep precipice, marked their line of march, like the wrecks lying spread behind a routed army. Nearly two millions of square miles formed their undivided domain; on three sides a forest boundary encircled it, on the fourth a great mountain range loomed up against the western sky. Through this enormous area countless creeks and rivers meandered through the meadows, where the prairie grass grew thick and rank, and the cotton woods spread their serpentine belts. Out in the vast prairie the Missouri, the Platte, the Sweet Water, the Arkansas, the South Saskatchewan, the Bighorn, the Yellowstone, rolled their volumes towards the east, gathering a thousand affluents as they flowed.

Countless ages passed, tribes warred and wandered, but the life of the wilderness lay deep beneath the waves of time, and the roll of the passing centuries disturbed not its slumber.

At last the white man came, and soon from south and north the restless adventurers of Latin Europe pierced the encircling forests, and beheld the mighty meadows of the Central Continent. Spaniards on the south, Frenchmen on the north, no one in the centre; for the prudent Plymouth Puritan was more intent on flogging witches and gathering riches than on penetrating the tangled forest which lay westward of his settlement. No; his was not the work of adventure and discovery. Others might go before and brave the thousand perils of flood and forest; he would follow after, as the Jew pedlar follows the spendthrift, as the sutler dogs the footsteps of the soldier.

What though he be in possession of the wide dominion now, and the names of France and Spain be shrunken into a shapeless dream; that only proves what we knew before, that the men who lead the way to a great future are fated never to reap the golden harvest of their dreams.

And ever since that advent of the white man the scene has changed; the long slumber of the wilderness was broken, and hand in hand with the new life death moved amidst the wild denizens of the Prairies. Human life scattered over a vast area, animal life counted by tens of millions, take a long time to destroy; and it is only to-day—370 years after a Portuguese sailor killed and captured a band of harmless Indians, and 350 since a Spanish soldier first beheld a herd of buffaloes beyond the meadows of the Mississippi—that the long, hopeless struggle of the wild dwellers of the wilderness may be said to have reached its closing hour.

In thus classing together the buffalo and the red man as twin dwellers on the Great Prairie, I have but followed the Indian idea.

“What shall we do?” said a young Sioux warrior to an American officer on the Upper Missouri some fifteen years ago. “What shall we do? the buffalo is our only friend. When he goes all is over with the Dacotahs. I speak thus to you because like me you are a Brave.”

It was little wonder that he called the buffalo his only friend. Its skin gave him a house, its robe a blanket and a bed, its undressed hide a boat, its short, curved horn a powder-flask, its meat his daily food, its sinew a string for his bow, its leather a lariot for his horse, a saddle, bridle, rein, and bit. Its tail formed an ornament for his tent, its inner skin a book in which to sketch the brave deeds of his life, the “medicine robe” of his history. House, boat, food, bed, and covering, every want from infancy to age, and after life itself had passed, wrapt in his buffalo robe the red man waited for the dawn.

SUNSET SCENE WITH BUFFALO.

CHAPTER VIII.

Buffalo Hunts.—A Picture once seen, long remembered.—L’Homme capable.—A wonderful Lake.—The lost Indian.—An Apparition.—We return home.

It was mid-November before we reached the buffalo; the snow had deepened, the cold had become intense, and our horses under the influence of travel, cold, and exposure, had become miserably thin. To hunt the herds on horseback would have been an impossibility; the new-fallen snow hid the murderous badger holes that covered the prairie surface, and to gallop weak horses over such ground must have been certain disaster.

Buffalo hunts on horseback or on foot have frequently been the theme of travellers’ story. Ruxton and Palliser, and Mayne Reid and Catlin, have filled many a page with glowing descriptions of charge and counter-charge, stalk and stampede. Washington Irving has lighted with his genius the dull records of western wanderings, and to sketch now the pursuit of that huge beast (so soon to be an extinct giant) would be to repeat a thrice-told tale.

Who has not seen in pencil sketch or pen story the image of the huge, shaggy beast careering madly before an eagle-feathered red man, whose horse decked like its rider with the feathered trophy, launches himself swiftly over the prairie? The full-drawn bow, the deadly arrow, the stricken animal, the wild confusion of the flying herd, the wounded giant turning to bay;—all these have been described a thousand times; so also has the stalk, the stealthy approach under the wolf-skin covering, the careful shot and the stupid stare of the startled animals as they pause a moment to gather consciousness that this thing which they deemed a wolf in the grass is in reality their most deadly enemy, man. All these have found record from pen and pencil; but I much doubt me if it be possible to place before a reader’s mental vision anything like a true picture of the sense of solitude, of endless space, of awful desolation which at times comes to the traveller’s mind as he looks over some vast prairie and beholds a lonely herd of bisons trailing slowly across that snow-wrapt, endless expanse, into the shadows of the coming night.

Such a sight I have beheld more than once, and its memory returns at times with the sigh of the south wind, or the waving of a pine branch. It is from moments such as these that the wanderer draws the recompence of his toil, and reaps in after-time the harvest of his hardship. No book has told the story, no picture has caught the colouring of sky and plain, no sound can echo back the music of that untainted breeze, sighing so mournfully through the yellow grass, but all the same the vision returns without one effort of remembrance: the vast plain snow-wrapt, the west ablaze with gold, and green, and saffron, and colours never classed or catalogued, while the horizon circle from north to east and south grows dim and indistinct, and, far off, the bison herd in long, scattered file trails slowly across the blue-white snow into the caverns of the sunset.

We carried with us a leather tent of eight skins, small of its kind, but capable of sheltering the five individuals comprising our party. This tent, pitched in some hollow at sunset, formed the sole speck of life amidst the vast solitude. Ten poles resting on the ground, and locked together at the top, supported the leather covering. An open space at the apex of the tent was supposed to allow the smoke to escape, but the smoke usually seemed to consider itself under no restraint whatever in the dim interior of our lodge, and seldom or never took advantage of the means of freedom so liberally provided for it. Our stock of fuel was very limited, and barely sufficed to boil a kettle and fry a dish of pemmican at the opening or close of each day. When the evening meal was finished, we sat awhile grouped around the small fire in the centre. “L’homme capable” ran round our line of traps, returning with a couple of kit foxes, the fattest of which he skinned and roasted for his supper. Then we gathered the blankets close together, and lying down slept until the dawn came struggling through the open roof, and cold and hungry we sat again around the little fire. Thus we journeyed on.

Scattered over the wide prairie which lies between the South Saskatchewan and the Eagle Hills roamed many herds of buffalo. But their numbers were very far short of those immense herds which, until a few years ago, were wont to cover the treeless regions of the west. Yet they were numerous enough to make the onlooker marvel how they still held their own against the ever-increasing odds arrayed against them.

Around the wide circle of this prairie ocean lay scattered not less than 15,000 wild people, all preying with wasteful vigour upon these scattered herds; but the numbers killed for the consumption of these Indian or half-Indian men formed but a small item in the lists of slaughter. To the north and east the denizens of the remote parts of the great regions locked in savage distance, the land of fur, the land which stretches to the wintry shores of the Bay of Hudson, and the storm-swept capes of the Arctic Ocean, looked for their means of summer transport to these wandering herds in the, to them, far distant Saskatchewan. What food was it that the tired voyageur munched so stolidly at nightfall by the camp fire on some long portage of the Winnipeg, the Nelson, or the Beaver Rivers, or ate with so much relish ere the morning sun was glinting along the waves of far Lake Athabasca; and his boat, rich laden with precious fur, rocked on the secluded shore of some nameless bay? It was buffalo pemmican from the Saskatchewan. And what food was it that these dozen hungry dogs devoured with such haste by that lonely camp fire in the dark pine forest, when all nature lay in its mid-winter torpor frozen to the soul; when the pine-log flared upon some snow-sheeted lake, or ice-bound river in the great wilderness of the north? It was the same hard mixture of fat and dried buffalo-meat pounded down into a solid mass which the Indians called “pemmican.” Small wonder then that the great herds had dwindled down to their present numbers, and that now the once wide domain of the buffalo had shrunken into the limits of the great prairie.

Yet, even still, the numbers annually killed seem quite incredible; 12,000 are said to fall to the Blackfeet tribes alone; in a single hunt the French half-breeds, whose winter camp we had lately visited, had killed 600 cows. The forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company were filled with many thousand bags of pemmican, and to each bag two animals may be counted; while not less than 30,000 robes had already found their way to the Red River, and fully as many more in skins of parchment or in leather had been traded or consumed in the thousand wants of savage life; and all are ruthlessly killed—young and old, calves and cows, it matters little; the Indian and the half-breed know no such quality as forethought. Nor, looking at this annual havoc, and seeing still in spite of all the dusky herds yet roaming over the treeless waste, can we marvel that the Red man should ascribe to agencies other than mortal the seemingly endless numbers of his favourite animal?

South-west from the Eagle Hills, far out in the prairie, there lies a lake whose waters never rest; day and night a ceaseless murmur breaks the silence of the spot.

“See,” says the red man, “it is from under that lake that our buffalo comes. You say they are all gone; but look, they come again and again to us. We cannot kill them all—they are there under that lake. Do you hear the noise which never ceases? It is the buffalo fighting with each other far down under the ground, and striving to get out upon the prairie—where else can they come from?”

We may well ask the question where can they come from? for in truth the vast expanse of the great prairie seems too small to save them from their relentless foes.

The creek of the Eagle Hills winds through the prairie in long, lazy bends. The beaver has made his home under its banks; and in some of the serpentine bends the bastard maple lifts its gnarled trunk, and the willow copses grow thickly. It is a favourite ground for the hunter in summer; but now, in mid-November, no sign of man was visible, and we had the little thicket oasis all to ourselves.

It was in this spot, some two years ago, that the following event occurred. In a band of Crees travelling over the plains there happened to be a blind Indian. Following the band one day he lagged behind, and the party dipping over a ridge on the prairie became lost to sound. Becoming suddenly alarmed at having thus lost his friends, he began to run swiftly in hope of overtaking them; but now his judgment was at fault, and the direction of his run was the wrong one—he found himself alone on the immense plains. Tired at last by the speed to which feverish anxiety had urged him, he sat down to think over his chances. It was hopeless to attempt to regain his party; he was far out in the grassy ocean, and south, west, and east, lay hundreds of miles of undulating plain; to the north many days’ journey, but still near, in relative distance, lay the forts of the white man, and the trail which led from one to the other. He would steer for the north, and would endeavour to reach one of these forts. It was midsummer; he had no food, but the carcases of lately-killed buffalo were, he knew, numerous in that part of the prairie, and lakes or ponds were to be found at intervals.

He set out, and for three days he journeyed north. “How did he steer?” the reader will ask; “for have you not told us the man was blind?” Nevertheless, he steered with accuracy towards the north. From sunrise he kept the warm glow on his naked right shoulder; six hours later the heat fell full upon his back; towards evening the rays were on his left side; and when the sun had gone, and the damp dew began to fall, he lay down for the night: thus he held a tolerably correct course. At times the soft mud of a lake shore cloyed his feet; but that promised water, and after a drink he resumed his way; the lakelet was rounded and the course pursued. There was no food; for two days he travelled on patiently, until at last he stumbled over the bones of a buffalo. He felt around; it had been killed some time, and the wolves had left scant pickings on ribs or legs, but on the massive head the skin was yet untouched, and his knife enabled him to satisfy his hunger, and to carry away a few scraps of skin and flesh.

Thus recruited he pressed on. It was drawing towards evening on the fifth day of his weary journey when he found himself reduced to starvation, weak from protracted hunger and faint from thirst; the day had been a warm one, and no friendly lake had given him drink. His scanty food had been long exhausted, and there seemed but little hope that he could live to feel the warm sun again. Its rays were growing faint upon his left shoulder, when his feet suddenly sank into soft mud, and the reeds and flags of a swamp brushed against his legs: here was water, he lay down and drank a long, long draught. Then he bethought him, Was it not better to stay here while life lasted? here he had at least water, and of all the pangs that can afflict the lost wanderer that of thirst is the hardest to bear. He lay down midst the reeds, determined to wait for death.

Some few miles distant to the north-east lay the creek of the Eagle Hills. That evening a party of hunters from the distant fort of À la Corne, had appeared on the wide prairies which surrounded this creek; they were in search of buffalo, it wanted an hour of sunset. The man in charge looked at the sinking sun, and he bethought him of a camping-place. “Go to such and such a bend of the creek,” he said to his hunters, “unyoke the horses and make the camp. I will ride to yonder hill and take a look over the plains for buffalo; I will rejoin you at the camp.”

The party separated, and their leader pushed on to the hill-top for a better survey of the plains. When he reached the summit of the ridge he cast a look on every side; no buffalo were to be seen, but to his surprise, his men, instead of obeying his orders as to the route, appeared to be steering in a different direction from the one he had indicated, and were already far away to the south. When he again overtook them they were in the act of camping on the borders of a swampy lake, a long way from the place he had intended; they had mistaken the track, they said, and seeing water here had camped at sunset.

It was not a good place, and the officer felt annoyed at their stupidity. While they spoke together thus, a figure suddenly rose from the reeds at the further side of the lake, and called loudly for assistance. For a moment the hunters were amazed at this sudden apparition; they were somewhat startled too, for the Blackfeet bands were said to be on the war-trail. But presently they saw that there was only a solitary stranger, and that he was blind and helpless: it was the lost Cree. He had long before heard the hunters’ approach, but not less deadly was the fear of Blackfeet than the dread of death by starvation. Both meant death; but one meant scalping, therefore dishonour in addition. It was only when the welcome sounds of the Cree language fell on his ear that he could reveal his presence in the reed-fringed lake.

I have told this story at length just as I heard it from the man who had been in charge of the party of hunters, because it brings home to the mind of the outsider, not only the power of endurance which the Indian displays in the face of physical difficulties, but also the state of society produced by the never-ending wars among the Indian tribes. Of the mistake which caused the hunters to alter their course and pitch their camp in another direction than that intended by their leader I have nothing to say; chance is a strange leader people say. Tables are said to be turned by unseen powers seemingly like the stars in the song, “because they’ve nothing else to do;” but for my part I had rather believe that men’s footsteps are turned south instead of west under other Guidance than that of chance, when that change of direction, heedless though it be, saves some lost wanderer who has lain down to die.

It was the 3rd of December, when with thin and tired horses, we returned to the Forks of the Saskatchewan. We found our house wholly completed; on the stage in front safe from dogs and wolves the produce of the hunt was piled, the weary horses were turned loose on the ridge above, and with a few books on a shelf over a rude but comfortable bed, I prepared to pass the next two months of winter.

It was full time to reach home; the snow lay deep upon the ground; the cold, which had set in unusually early, had even in mid-November fallen to thirty degrees below zero, and some of our last buffalo stalks had been made under a temperature in which frozen fingers usually followed the handling, with unmittened hands, of rifle stock or gun trigger.

Those who in summer or autumn visit the great prairie of the Saskatchewan can form but a faint idea of its winter fierceness and utter desolation. They are prone to paint the scene as wanting only the settler’s hut, the yoke of oxen, the waggon, to become at once the paradise of the husbandman. They little know of what they speak. Should they really wish to form a true conception of life in these solitudes, let them go out towards the close of November into the treeless waste; then, midst fierce storm and biting cold, and snow-drift so dense that earth and heaven seem wrapped together in indistinguishable chaos, they will witness a sight as different from their summer ideal as a mid-Atlantic mid-winter storm varies from a tranquil moonlight on the Ægean Sea.

TENT IN THE GREAT PRAIRIE.

During the sixteen days in which we traversed the prairie on our return journey, we had not seen one soul, one human being moving over it; the picture of its desolation was complete.

CHAPTER IX.

Strange Visitors.—At-tistighat the Philosopher.—Indian Converts.—A Domestic Scene.—The Winter Packet.—Adam and his Dogs.

December passed away, the new year came, the cold became more intense. The snow deepened and the broad rivers lay hushed under their sparkling covering; wide roadways for our dog sleighs. At times there came a day of beautiful clearness, the sun shone brightly, the sky was of the deepest blue, and the earth sparkled in its spotless covering. At night the moon hung over the snow-wrapt river and silent pines with the brilliancy of a fairy scene; but many a day and night of storm and bitter tempest passed, and not unfrequently the thermometer placed against the hut wall marked full 70 degrees of frost.

Towards the end of the year four of our horses died, from the depth and hardness of the snow. The others would have soon followed if left to find their own sustenance, but a timely removal to the Fort à la Corne, twenty miles lower down the river, saved them.

When the year was drawing to its close two Indians pitched their lodge on the opposite side of the North River, and finding our stage pretty well stocked with food they began to starve immediately. In other words, it was easier to come to us for buffalo meat than to hunt deer for themselves: at all hours of the day they were with us, and frequently the whole family, two men, two squaws, and three children, would form a doleful procession to our hut for food. An Indian never knocks at a door; he lifts the latch, enters quietly, shakes hands with every one, and seats himself, without a word, upon the floor. You may be at breakfast, at dinner, or in bed, it doesn’t matter. If food be not offered to him, he will wait until the meal is finished, and then say that he has not eaten for so many hours, as the case may be. Our stock of food was not over sufficient, but it was impossible to refuse it to them even though they would not hunt for themselves; and when the three children were paraded—all pretty little things from four to seven years of age—the argument of course became irresistible.

It was useless to tell them that the winter was long, that no more buffalo could be obtained; they seemed to regard starvation as an ordinary event to be calculated upon, that as long as any food was to be obtained it was to be eaten at all times, and that when it was gone—well then the best thing was to do without it.

January drew to a close in very violent storms accompanied by great cold. Early one morning “At-tistighat,” or as we called him Bourgout No. 1, arrived with news that his brother had gone away two days before, that he had no blanket, no food; and that, as it had not been his intention to stay out, he concluded that he had perished. “At-tistighat” was a great scoundrel, but nevertheless, as the night had been one of terrible storm, we felt anxious for the safety of his brother, who was really a good Indian. “Go,” we said to him, “look for your brother; here is pemmican to feed you during your search.” He took the food, but coolly asserted that in all probability his brother had shot himself, and that consequently there was no use whatever in going to look for him; “or,” he said, “he is dead of cold, in which case it is useless to find him.”

While he spoke a footstep outside announced an arrival, the door opened, and the lost Bourgout No. 2 entered, bearing on his back a heavy load of venison.

At-tistighat’s line of argument was quite in keeping with the Indian character, and was laughable in its selfish logic. If the man was alive, he would find his own way home; if dead, there was nothing more to be done in the matter: but in any case pemmican was not to be despised.

But despite their habits of begging, and their frequently unseasonable visits, our Cree neighbours afforded us not a little food for amusement in the long winter evenings. Indian character is worth the study, if we will only take the trouble to divest ourselves of the notion that all men should be like ourselves. There is so much of simplicity and cunning, so much of close reasoning and child-like suspicion; so much natural quickness, sense of humour, credulousness, power of observation, faith and fun and selfishness, mixed up together in the Red man’s mental composition; that the person who will find nothing in Indian character worth studying will be likely to start from a base of nullity in his own brain system.

In nearly all the dealings of the white man with the red, except perhaps in those of the fur trade, as conducted by the great fur companies, the mistake of judging and treating Indians by European standards has been made. From the earliest ages of American discovery, down to the present moment, this error has been manifest; and it is this error which has rendered the whole missionary labour, the vast machinery set on foot by the charity and benevolence of the various religious bodies during so many centuries, a practical failure to-day.

When that Christian King Francis the First commissioned Cartier to convert the Indians, they were described in the royal edict as “men without knowledge of God, or use of reason;” and as the speediest mode of giving them one, and bringing them to the other, the Quebec chief savage was at once kidnapped, carried to France, baptized, and within six months was a dead man. We may wonder if his wild subjects had imbibed sufficient “reason” during the absence of the ship to realize during the following season the truth of what they were doubtless told, that it was better to be a dead Christian than a live savage; but no doubt, under the circumstances, they might be excused if they “didn’t quite see it.” Those who would imagine that the case of Menberton could not now occur in missionary enterprise are deceived.

Menberton, who is said to have been a devout Christian in the early days of Acadie, was duly instructed in the Lord’s Prayer; at a certain portion of the prayer he was wont to append a request that “fish and moose meat” might also be added to his daily bread. And previous to his death, which occurred many years after his conversion, he is said to have stoutly demanded that the savage rites of sepulture should be bestowed upon his body, in order that he might be well prepared to make vigorous war upon his enemies in the next world. This is of the past; yet it is not many years since a high dignitary of the Church was not a little horrified by a request made by some recently converted Dog-Rib Chiefs that the rite of Baptism should be bestowed upon three flaming red flannel shirts, of which they had for the first time in their lives become the joint possessors.

But all this is too long to enter upon here; enough that to me at least the Indian character is worth the trouble of close examination. If those, whose dealings religious and political with the red man are numerous, would only take a leaf from Goldsmith’s experience when he first essayed to become a teacher of English in France, (“for I found,” he writes, “that it was necessary I should previously learn French before I could teach them English,”) very much of the ill success which had attended labours projected by benevolence, and prosecuted with zeal and devotion, might perhaps be avoided.

Long before ever a white man touched the American shore a misty idea floated through the red man’s brain that from far-off lands a stranger would come as the messenger of peace and plenty, where both were so frequently unknown. In Florida, in Norembega, in Canada, the right hand of fellowship was the first proffered to the new comer; and when Cartier entered the palisaded village where now the stately capital of Canada spreads out along the base of the steep ridge, which he named Royal after that master whose “honour” had long been lost ere on Pavia’s field he yielded up all else, the dusky denizens of Hochelaga brought forth their sick and stricken comrades “as though a God had come among them.”

Three centuries and a half have passed since then; war, pestilence and famine have followed the white man’s track. Whole tribes have vanished even in name from the continent, yet still that strange tradition of a white stranger, kind and beneficent, has outlived the unnumbered cruelties of ages; and to-day the starving camp and the shivering bivouac hears again the hopeful yet hopeless story of “a good time coming.”

Besides our Indians we were favoured with but few visitors, silence reigned around our residence; a magpie or a whisky-jack sometimes hopped or chattered about our meat stage; in the morning the sharp-tailed grouse croaked in birch or spruce tree, and at dusk, when every other sound was hushed, the small grey owl hooted his lonely cry. Pleasant was it at night when returning after a long day on snow shoes, or a dog trip to the nearest fort, to reach the crest of the steep ridge that surrounded our valley, and see below the firelight gleaming through the little window of our hut, and the red sparks flying upward from the chimney like fire-flies amidst the dark pine-trees; nor was it less pleasant when as the night wore on the home letter was penned, or the book read, while the pine-log fire burnt brightly and the dogs slept stretched before it, and the light glared on rifle-barrel or axe-head and showed the skin-hung rafters of our lonely home.

As January drew towards a close, it became necessary to make preparations for a long journey. Hitherto I had limited my wanderings to the prairie region of the Saskatchewan, but these wanderings had only been a preliminary to further travel into the great northern wilds.

To pierce the forest region lying north of the Saskatchewan valley, to see the great lakes of the Athabasca and that vast extent of country which pours its waters into the Frozen Ocean, had long been my desire; and when four months earlier I had left the banks of the Red River and turned away from the last limit of civilization, it was with the hope that ere the winter snow had passed from plain and forest my wanderings would have led me at least 2000 miles into that vast wilderness of the north.

But many preparations had to be made against cold and distance. Dogs had to be fattened, leather clothing got ready, harness and sleds looked to, baggage reduced to the very smallest limit, and some one found willing to engage to drive the second dog sled, and to face the vicissitudes of the long northern road. The distance itself was enough to make a man hesitate ere for hire he embarked on such a journey. The first great stage was 750 miles, the second was as many more, and when 1500 miles had been traversed there still must remain half as much again before, on the river systems of the North Pacific, we could emerge into semi-civilized ways of travel.

Many were the routes which my brain sketched out during the months of autumn, but finally my choice rested between two rivers, the Mackenzie rolling its waters into the Frozen Ocean, the Peace River piercing the great defiles of the Rocky Mountains through the cañons and stupendous gorges of Northern British Columbia. A chance meeting decided my course.

One day at the end of October I had camped during a snow-storm for dinner in the Touchwood Hills. Suddenly through the drift a horseman came in sight. He proved to be an officer of the Hudson’s Bay Company from the distant post of Dunvegan on the Peace River: of all men he was the one I most wished to see. Ninety days earlier he had left his station; it was far away, but still with dogs over the ice of frozen rivers and lakes, through the snow of long leagues of forest and muskey and prairie, I might hope to reach that post on Upper Peace River in sixty days; twenty days more might carry me through the defiles of the Rocky Mountains to waters which flow south into the Pacific. “Good-bye, bon voyage,” and we went our different ways; he towards Red River, I for Athabasca and the Peace River.

And now, as I have said, the end of January had come, and it was time to start; all my preparations were completed, Cerf-vola and his companions were fat, strong, and hearty. Dog shoes, copper kettles, a buffalo robe, a thermometer, some three or four dozen rounds of ammunition, a little tobacco and pain-killer, a dial compass, a pedometer, snow shoes, about fifteen pounds of baggage, tea, sugar, a little flour, and lastly, the inevitable pemmican; all were put together, and I only waited the arrival of the winter packet from the south to set out.

Let me see if I can convey to the reader’s mind a notion of this winter packet.

Towards the middle of the month of December there is unusual bustle in the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Garry on the Red River; the winter packet is being made ready. Two oblong boxes are filled with letters and papers addressed to nine different districts of the northern continent. The limited term district is a singularly unappropriate one: a single instance will suffice. From the post of the Forks of the Athabasca and Clear Water Rivers to the Rocky Mountain Portage is fully 900 miles as a man can travel, yet all that distance lies within the limits of the single Athabasca district; and there are others larger still. From the Fort Resolution on the Slave River to the ramparts on the Upper Yukon, 1100 miles lay their lengths within the limits of the Mackenzie River district.

Just as the days are at their shortest, a dog sled bearing the winter packet starts from Fort Garry; a man walks behind it, another man some distance in advance of the dogs. It holds its way down the Red River to Lake Winnipeg; in about nine days’ travel it crosses that lake to the north shore at Norway House; from thence, lessened of its packet of letters for the Bay of Hudson and the distant Churchill, it journeys in twenty days’ travel up the Great Saskatchewan River to Carlton House. Here it undergoes a complete readjustment; the Saskatchewan and Lesser Slave Lake letters are detached from it, and about the 1st of February it starts on its long journey to the north.

During the succeeding months it holds steadily along its northern way, sending off at long, long intervals branch dog packets to right and left; finally, just as the sunshine of mid-May is beginning to carry a faint whisper of the coming spring to the valleys of the Upper Yukon, the dog train, last of many, drags the packet, now but a tiny bundle, into the enclosure of La Pierre’s House. It has travelled nearly 3000 miles; a score of different dog teams have hauled it, and it has camped for more than a hundred nights in the great northern forest.

The end of January had come, but contrary to the experience of several years had brought no packet from Fort Garry, and many were the surmises afloat as to the cause of this delay. The old Swampy Indian Adam who, for more than a score of years had driven the dog packet, had tumbled into a water-hole in the ice, and his dogs had literally exemplified one portion of the popular saying of following their leader through fire and water; and the packet, Adam, and the dogs, lay at the bottom of the Saskatchewan River. Such was one anticipated cause of this non-appearance.

To many persons the delay was very vexatious, but to me it was something more. Time was a precious article: it is true a northern winter is a long one, but so also was the route I was about to follow, and I hoped to reach the upper regions of the Rocky Mountains while winter yet held with icy grasp the waters of the Peace River Cañon.

The beginning of February came, and I could wait no longer for the missing packet. On the 3rd, at mid-day, I set out on my journey. The day was bright and beautiful, the dogs climbed defiantly the steep high point, and we paused a moment on the summit; beneath lay hut and pine wood and precipitous bank, all sparkling with snow and sunshine; and beyond, standing motionless and silent, rose the Great Sub-Arctic Forest.

CHAPTER X.

A tale of warfare.—Dog-sleds.—A missing link.—The North Sea.—“Winterers.”—Samuel Hearne.

During the three months which had elapsed since his arrival at the Forks, Cerf-vola had led an idle life; he had led his train occasionally to Fort à la Corne, or hauled a light sled along the ice of the frozen rivers, but these were only desultory trips, and his days had usually passed in peace and plenty.

Perhaps I am wrong in saying peace, for the introduction of several strange dogs had occasioned much warfare, and although he had invariably managed to come off victorious, victory was not obtained without some loss. I have before remarked that he possessed a very large bushy tail. In time of war this appendage was carried prominently over his back, something after the manner of the plumes upon casque of knight in olden times, or the more modern helmet of dragoon in the era of the Peninsular War.

One day, while he was engaged in a desperate struggle with a bumptious new-comer, a large ill-conditioned mongrel which had already been vanquished, seeing his victor fully occupied, deemed it an auspicious moment for revenge, and springing upon the bushy tail proceeded to attack it with might and main. The unusual noise brought me to the door in time to separate the combatants while yet the tail was intact, but so unlooked for had been the assault that it was found upon examination to be considerably injured. With the aid of a needle and thread it was repaired as best we could, Cerf-vola apparently understanding what the surgical operation meant, for although he indulged in plenty of uproar at every stitch no attempt at biting was made by him. He was now however sound in body and in tail, and he tugged away at his load in blissful ignorance that 1500 miles of labour lay before him.

I know not if my readers are acquainted with the manner in which dogs are used as draught animals in the great fur regions of the north. A dog sled is simply two thin oak or birch-wood boards lashed together with deer-skin thongs: turned up in front like a Norwegian snow shoe, it runs when light over hard snow or ice with great ease; its length is about nine feet, its breadth sixteen inches. Along its outer edges runs a leather lashing, through the loops of which a long leather line is passed, to hold in its place whatever may be placed upon it. From the front, close to the turned portion, the traces for draught are attached. The dogs, usually four in number, stand in tandem fashion, one before the other, the best dog generally being placed in front, as “foregoer,” the next best in rear as “steer-dog.” It is the business of the foregoer to keep the track, however faint it may be on lake or river. The steer-dog guides the sled, and prevents it from striking or catching in tree or root. An ordinary load for four dogs weighs from 2 to 400 lbs.; laden with 200 lbs. dogs will travel on anything like a good track, or on hard snow, about thirty or thirty-five miles in each day. In deep or soft snow the pace is of necessity slow, and twenty to twenty-five miles will form a fair day’s work.

If any one should ask what length of time dogs will thus travel day after day, I refer them to the following chapters, wherein the fortunes of Cerf-vola and his brethren, starting out to-day on a long journey, are duly set forth.

Some few miles west of the mission station called Prince Albert I parted from my friend Captain M——, who thus far had accompanied me. He was to return to Red River and Canada, viá Cumberland and the lakes; I to hold my way across the frozen continent to the Pacific. For many months each day would place a double day’s distance between us, but we still looked forward to another meeting, even though between us and that prospect there lay the breadth of all the savage continent.

A couple of days later I reached the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fort of Carlton, the great rendezvous of the winter packets between north and south. From north and west several of the leading agents of the fur company had assembled at Carlton to await the coming of the packet bearing news from the outer world. From Fort Simpson on the far Mackenzie, from Fort Chipewyan on the lonely lake Athabasca, from Edmonton on the Upper Saskatchewan, from Isle à la Crosse, dogs had drawn the masters of these remote establishments to the central station on the middle Saskatchewan. But they waited in vain for the arrival of the packet; with singular punctuality had their various trains arrived within a few days of each other from starting-points 2000 miles apart; yet after a few days’ detention these officers felt anxious to set out once more on their journey, and many a time the hill-side on which the packet must first appear was scanned by watchers, and all the boasted second sight and conjuring power of haggard squaw and medicine man was set at work to discover the whereabouts of the “missing link” between the realms of civilization and savagery. To me the delay, except for the exigencies of time and distance, was not irksome. I was in the society of gentlemen whose lives had been passed in all portions of the great north, on the frozen shores of Hudson’s Bay, in the mountain fastnesses of the Chipewyan range, or midst the savage solitudes that lie where, in long, low-lying capes, and ice-piled promontories, the shore of America stretches out to meet the waves of the Northern Ocean.

There was one present who in the past seven months had travelled by horse and canoe, boat and dog train, full 4000 miles; and another, destined to be my close companion during many weeks, whose matchless determination and power of endurance had carried him in a single winter from the Lower Mackenzie River to the banks of the Mississippi.

Here, while we await the winter packet, let me sketch with hasty and imperfect touch the lives of those who, as the “winterers” of the great Company of Adventurers trading into Hudson’s Bay, have made their homes in the wilderness.

Two hundred and sixty-two years ago, a French adventurer under the banner of Samuel de Champlain wintered with an Indian tribe on the shores of the Upper Ottawa. In the ensuing spring he returned to Montreal, recounted his adventures, and became the hero of an hour. Beyond the country of the Ottawas he described a vast region, and from the uttermost sources of the Ottawa a large river ran towards the north until it ended in the North Sea. He had been there he said, and on the shore lay the ribs of an English vessel wrecked, and the skeletons of English sailors who had been drowned or murdered. His story was a false one, and ere a year had passed he confessed his duplicity; he had not been near the North Sea, nor had he seen aught that he described.

Yet was there even more than a germ of truth in his tale of wreck and disaster, for just one year earlier in this same North Sea, a brave English sailor had been set adrift in an open boat, with half a dozen faithful seamen; and of all the dark mysteries of the merciless ocean, no mystery lies wrapt in deeper shadow than that which hangs over the fate of Hudson.

But the seventeenth century was not an age when wreck or ruin could daunt the spirit of discovery. Here in this lonely North Sea, the palm of adventure belonged not to France alone. Spain might overrun the rich regions of the tropics, Richelieu (prototype of the great German chancellor of to-day) might plant the fleur-de-lis along the mighty St. Lawrence, but the north—the frozen north—must be the land of English enterprise and English daring. The years that followed the casting away of the fearless Hudson saw strange vessels coasting the misty shores of that weird sea; at first, to seek through its bergs and ice floes, its dreary cloud-wrapt fiords and inlets, a passage to the land where ceaseless sunshine glinted on the spice-scented shores of fabulous Cathay; and later on, to trade with the savages who clad themselves in skins, which the fairest favourites of Whitehall or the Louvre (by a strange extreme wherein savagery joined hands with civilization) would be proud to wrap round their snowy shoulders.

Prosecuted at first by desultory and chance adventurers, this trade in furs soon took definite form and became a branch of commerce. On the lonely sea-shores wooden buildings rose along the estuaries of rivers flowing from an unknown land. These were honoured by the title of fort or factory, and then the ships sailed back to England ere the autumn ice had closed upon the waters; while behind in Rupert’s Fort, York Factory, Churchill, or Albany (names which tell the political history of their day), stayed the agents, or “winterers,” whose work it was to face for a long season of hardship, famine, and disease, a climate so rigorous that not unfrequently, when the returning vessel rose upon the distant sea line, scarce half the eyes that had seen her vanish were there to watch her return. And they had other foes to contend with. Over the height of land, away by the great lakes, and along the forest shores of the St. Lawrence, the adventurers of another nation had long been busy at the mingled work of conquest and traffic. The rival Sultans of France and England could, midst the more pressing cares of their respective harems, find time occasionally to scribble “Henri” or “Charles” at the foot of a parchment scroll which gave a continent to a company; it little mattered whether Spaniard, Frenchman, or Briton had first bestowed the gift, the rival claimants might fight for the possession as they pleased. The geography of this New World was uncertain, and where Florida ended or Canada began was not matter of much consequence. But the great cardinal, like the great chancellor, was not likely to err in the matter of boundaries. “If there should be any doubt about the parts, we can take the whole,” was probably as good a maxim then as now; and accordingly we find at one sweep the whole northern continent, from Florida to the Arctic Circle, handed over to a company of which the priest-soldier was the moving spirit.

Thus began the long strife between France and England in North America,—a strife which only ended under the walls of Quebec. The story of their bravery, their endurance, their constancy, their heroism, has been woven into deathless history by a master-hand.[1] To France belongs the glory of the Great West—not the less her glory because the sun has set for ever upon her empire. Nothing remains to her. Promontory or lonely isle, name of sea-washed cape, or silent lake, half mistily tells of her former dominion. In the deep recesses of some north-western lake or river-reach the echoes still waken to the notes of some old French chanson, as the half Indian voyageur, ignorant of all save the sound, dips his glistening paddle to the cadence of his song. But of all that Cartier and Champlain, De Monts, La Salle, Marquette, Frontenac, and Montcalm lived and died for—nothing more remains.

[1] Francis Parkman.

Poor France! In the New World and in the Old history owes thee much. Yet in both hast thou paid the full measure of thy people’s wrong.

But to return. The seventeenth century had not closed ere the sea of Hudson became the theatre of strife, the wooden palisades of the factories were battered or burnt down; and one fine day in August, 1697, a loud cannonade boomed over the sullen waters, and before the long summer twilight had closed, the “Hampshire,” with her fifty-two guns on high poop or lofty forecastle, lay deep beneath the icy sea, her consorts the Frenchman’s prize. Nor had she gone down before a foe more powerful, but to the single frigate of Le Moyne d’Iberville, a child of Old and New France, the boldest rover that e’er went forth upon the Northern Seas. Some fifteen years later France resigned her claim to these sterile shores. Blenheim, Ramilies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet had given to England the sole possession of the frozen north.

And now for nigh seventy years the English Company pursued unmolested its trade along the coast. A strong fort, not of wood and lath and stockade, but of hard English brick and native granite hewn by English hands, rose near the estuary of the Churchill River. To this fort the natives came annually along the English river bearing skins gathered far inland, along the shores of the Lake of the Hills, and the borders of the great river of the north.

With these natives wandered back an Englishman named Samuel Hearne; he reached the Lake Athabasca, and on all sides he heard of large rivers, some coming from south and west, others flowing to the remotest north. He wandered on from tribe to tribe, reacted a great lake, descended a great river to the north, and saw at last the Arctic Sea.

Slowly did the Fur Company establish itself in the interior. It was easier to let the natives bring down the rich furs to the coast than to seek them in these friendless regions. But at last a subtle rival appeared on the scene; the story of the North-West Fur Company has often been told, and in another place we have painted the effects of that conflict; here it is enough to say that when in 1822 the north-west became merged into the older corporation, posts or forts had been scattered throughout the entire continent, and that henceforth from Oregon to Ungava, from Mingan to the Mackenzie, the countless tribes knew but one lord and master, the Company of Adventurers from England trading into Hudson’s Bay.

What in the meantime was the work of those wintering agents whose homes were made in the wilderness? God knows their lives were hard. They came generally from the remote isles or highlands of Scotland, they left home young, and the mind tires when it thinks upon the remoteness of many of their fur stations. Dreary and monotonous beyond words was their home life, and hardship was its rule. To travel on foot 1000 miles in winter’s darkest time, to live upon the coarsest food, to see nought of bread or sugar for long months, to lie down at night under the freezing branches, to feel cold such as Englishmen in England cannot even comprehend, often to starve, always to dwell in exile from the great world. Such was the routine of their lives. The names of these northern posts tell the story of their toil. “Resolution,” “Providence,” “Good Hope,” “Enterprise,” “Reliance,” “Confidence;” such were the titles given to these little forts on the distant Mackenzie, or the desolate shores of the great Slave Lake. Who can tell what memories of early days in the far away Scottish isles, or Highland glen, must have come to these men as the tempest swept the stunted pine-forest, and wrack and drift hurled across the frozen lake—when the dawn and the dusk, separated by only a few hours’ daylight, closed into the long, dark night. Perchance the savage scene was lost in a dreamy vision of some lonely Scottish loch, some Druid mound in far away Lewis, some vista of a fireside, when storm howled and waves ran high upon the beach of Stornoway.

CHAPTER XI.

A dog of no character.—The Green Lake.—Lac Ile à la Crosse.—A cold day.—Fort Ile à la Crosse.—A long-lost brother.—Lost upon the Lake.—Unwelcome neighbours.—Mr. Roderick Macfarlane.—A beautiful morning.—Marble features.

On the night of the 11th of February, under a brilliant moonlight, we quitted Fort Carlton; crossing the Saskatchewan, we climbed the steep northern bank, and paused a moment to look back. The moon was at its full, not a cloud slept in the vast blue vault of heaven, a great planet burned in the western sky; the river lay beneath in spotless lustre; shore and prairie, ridge and lowland, sparkled in the sheen of snow and moonlight. Then I sprung upon my sled, and followed the others, for the music of their dog-bells was already getting faint.

The two following days saw us journeying on through a rich and fertile land. Clumps of poplar interspersed with pine, dotted the undulating surface of the country. Lakes were numerous, and the yellow grass along their margins still showed above the deep snow.

Six trains of dogs, twenty-three dogs in all, made a goodly show; the northern ones all beaded, belled, and ribboned, were mostly large powerful animals. Cree, French, and English names were curiously intermixed, and as varied were the tongues used to urge the trains to fresh exertions. Sometimes a dog would be abused, vilified, and cursed, in French alone; at others, he would be implored, in Cree, to put forth greater efforts. “Kuskey-tay-o-atim-moos,” or the little “black dog” would be appealed to, “for the love of Heaven to haul his traces.” He would be solemnly informed that he was a dog of no character; that he was the child of very disreputable parents; that, in fact, his mother had been no better than she should have been. Generally speaking, this information did not appear to have much effect upon Kuskey-tay-o-atim-moos, who was doubtless well satisfied if the abuse hurled at him and his progenitors exhausted the ire of his driver, and saved his back at the expense of his relations.

Four days of rapid travelling carried us far to the north. Early on the third day of travel the open country, with its lakelets and poplar ridges, was left behind, and the forest region entered upon for the first time.

Day had not yet dawned when we quitted a deserted hut which had given us shelter for the night; a succession of steep hills rose before us, and when the highest had been gained, the dawn had broken upon the dull grey landscape. Before us the great Sub-Arctic Forest stretched away to the north, a line of lakes, its rampart of defence against the wasting fires of the prairie region, lay beneath. This was the southern limit of that vast forest whose northern extreme must be sought where the waters of the Mackenzie mingle with the waves of the Arctic Sea.