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with it the power of seeing; but this sentence is not to be taken to mean that the man with even the best sight scorns outside help and rests upon unaided vision. Thus before visiting a new place it is well for the intending traveller to realise it to himself as far as possible.

The pictures of his anticipation may not turn out to be true, but he should in some measure know what to look for, and not carry a perfectly blank sheet for the reception of such impressions as may await him in the land whither he goes. Thus before starting for Canada I read divers books about it, and made it a frequent subject of conversation. I was not surprised at my own ignorance, for I cannot rightly understand a map till I have visited the country which it displays, but the general lack of information about the matter was notable. True, we all knew something about the old provinces, but our knowledge of the North-West was found to be very limited. I took therefore a miscellaneous course of "Mudie," and beg to place before my readers some forecasts or anticipations which I set down on English paper before I set foot on board to cross the Atlantic.

I venture to think that they encourage a belief in seeking manifold rapid information about a country from books. We are likely to read two or three works concerning the place we propose to visit, but a dozen are not too many. They need not be "studied." Indeed they had mostly better be skimmed. It is the repeated presentation of a place through a number of eyes and minds which gives a fairly well proportioned view of its appearance and condition. Of course every traveller knows that there are aspects of a land which no descriptions ever convey, and which indeed can no more be described than a perfume or a tint. Failing, however, necessarily

in conveying these, let me head my notes with a forecast of Canada which I took some pains in preparing, and which personal traversing of the country enables me to perceive is just. It may possibly serve to introduce such a small record of the impressions as I have actually received.

I say

The realisation of enormous fertile plains un encumbered by the forest is really a new thing to former readers about Canada. In old days a settler was often called-by us in England at least a "backwoodsman," and his place was spoken of as a "clearing." He began his battle with the axe. Now, the first tool used by the farmer in the great North-West is the plough, but the immense size of the area which may be thus conquered is being realised only by degrees. Our eyes, and those of many Canadians too, are being gradually opened to its real use. "real" use, for a notable feature in the whole estimate and outlook of Canadian resources is the early apprehension of this area; it has long been appreciated and used, but for another purpose than that to which it seems presently in great part about to be devoted. It was seen to be fruitful, not in corn, but in fur. Wealthy London companies, having obtained concessions in the very early days of emigration, employed the huge territories of the North-West simply for the getting of skins. This use of them began a little more than two hundred years ago when King Charles II granted corporate privileges of which neither he nor the recipients perceived the full value. But one result was the penetration of the huge region by enterprising trappers or gatherers of skins. Myriads upon myriads of square miles were studded with small and sparse "forts." Away up to the Northern Lakes, under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, along the banks of the far-flowing Saskatchewan, here and there, though it might be at intervals of some two

hundred miles, a rude shelter or "fort" was built. These "forts" dotted the whole region controlled by the North-West Fur and Hudson's Bay Companies-finally combined. Lonely little. garrisons, sometimes of only two or three Europeans-often Scotsmen-dwelt in them, receiving, and periodically sending away the skins brought in by the Indians. The forts, though very far apart, were really numerous and connected. Their connection was made, however, by the thinnest thread, a mere trail, which sometimes none but the Indian eye and foot could detect. Still the solitary guard-houses were thus finely linked, and at distant intervals, when travelling by sledge was least difficult, heard some late echoes of the larger world of men. These came in winter up the frozen rivers, which made great flat white high roads, winding through the plains. A single Redskin, with his dog-sledge, thus carried letters to the lonely guards who watched over the growing stores of fur which "brave" and "squaw" bartered for axe, blankets, firewater, and beads. There was a Swampy "Indian named Adam, who for more than twenty years yearly went a postman's beat of 3,000 miles with his dog-train. Five dark winter months annually passed away before he had finished his solitary round and left his last packet at the last weary and expectant fort. This old Redskin "Adam" was, however, but one in many generations who continuously threaded the enormous North-West territories of British America, searching for, gathering, and dispatching "skins."

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Speaking broadly, and yet with carefully ascertained accuracy, this use of the great North-West went on for about two hundred years-from the times of Charles II to those of Napoleon III. I really do not exaggerate or overdraw the picture. It was only the other day that we were reading of the Red River Rebellion and the expedition of Colonel, now Lord, Wolseley to suppress it. This marked the close of the old order of things, and arose in consequence of the transfer of its authority by the Hudson's Bay Company to the Dominion in 1869. An isolated colony, composed of various nationalities, with many halfbreed French and Indians, resented this. Though they uttered threats, which were supposed capable of seriously disturbing the newly arranged compact, or making possible settlement more difficult to future inhabitants of the new-born Dominion, they yielded the moment Colonel Wolseley had finished his famous march and appeared on the scene with his soldiers. I mention this, however, not so much to revive memories of a distinguished military feat as to remark that the ultimate point of Colonel Wolseley's aim was only the front gate of the corn-bearing territories now being opened to the settler. Till that time the Hudson's Bay Company had reigned supreme over the "Great Lone Land." Its southern part is now traversed by trains equipped with sleepingcars; but only the other day (in Butler's wellknown book) it appeared to be repulsively impracticable; so at least most readers of popular travel must have thought. Year after year, till the years rose into centuries, the Indian moose,

marten, beaver, and buffalo had the whole region to themselves. It belonged to the London Company, whose directors drank pailfuls of port wine at City dinners while such men as the Redskin Adam drove his hungry dog-train up its frozen rivers, delivering the latest London letters and papers some eight months after date. All this while England, represented by the powerful fur companies, owned the huge land which is already being reckoned as the main wheat-growing section of North America. It has been noted that this continent may be roughly divided into three zones, producing respectively cotton, maize, and wheat. Explorers and experts are now saying that the last will be found to lie chiefly in British territory. The deep-soiled plains north of the Saskatchewan, in Athabasca, as well as the fertile belt of Manitoba, are believed to be best fitted for this precious produce. No doubt there are agreeable and productive regions in the older parts of the Dominion, such as New Brunswick, which are sometimes carelessly passed by in the eagerness of the settler to push on towards the great North-West. Many men would take far more kindly to the older parts of the Dominion (since they already possess the features of established civilisation) and yet at the same time make new and successful ventures in life as "settlers." But there has been a sort of charm about the discovery, as it might be called, of the huge region from the Red River to the Rocky Mountains. All at once it was seen to be potentially productive of abundant human food. But for two hundred years no one seriously thought of this. King Charles gaily made his concessions. As I have already said, small, long-enduring, lonesome parties were dropped and fenced in little forts here and there throughout the royally conceded regions. Shrewd London merchants sent out beads and knives for the skins which they gathered from the simple Indians. The Indians adorned themselves; and died of rum and small-pox. But few thought of their land, snow-buried in winter and sun-heated through the long summer days, as a future granary of Europe, till about the time of the battle of Sedan. Now an eager crowd, bearing ploughs and reaping machines, is pouring into it out of Europe and the old provinces of Canada.

In writing thus, I do not forget the first settlement of Scots in Manitoba, when Lord Selkirk, some sixty years ago, carried out a band of Highlanders and set them down to farm south of Lake Winnipeg. But this acted prophecy was a long time in approaching fulfilment. It may be reckoned along with the one traditional swallow which does not make a summer. True, the late immigrants into Manitoba have been surprised at finding the now old nest of this early bird, but virtually the rush into the North-West did not begin till after 1869, at which date the Hudson's Bay Company ceded its sovereign rights to the Dominion, and the Dominion began to realise the true use of its bargain. Soon it saw that wheat was better than fur, and that rivers which would bear steamboats were worth being navigated by something better than birch canoes. The poor

Indians, at first much reduced in numbers by drink and disease, the fruits of civilisation, have been and are being swept up into "reserves" and taught the catechism. According to trustworthy accounts they are submissive enough. They receive meat and flour from Government, at the rate of a pound of each per head daily. They are also paid "treaty money" once a year, and are encouraged in industry which they dislike. It is said that their numbers rather increase now, as, in most cases, they are kept from alcohol. Though in some respects treated like a child, your "brave" hardly ever condescends to walk if he can muster a horse; and his toy is a repeating rifle. As owner and master of the land in which his descendant is penned and survives, the day of the Indian has gone. Towns are growing around the little old weather-worn forts, and railways are following the faint trapper's trails. Trains now scream and rattle where the sledge slipped along in silence, and newspapers are published in places -I would instance Calgary at the foot of the Rocky Mountains which were laboriously reached once in the winter by the Redskin postman with his little dog-drawn box of letters. And yet it was only the other day, since the French and German War, that Butler, in his "Great Lone Land," speaking, not of the more distant parts of the North-West, but of Lake Winnipeg (from which the electric-lit, tram-traversed, degree-conferring "metropolis" of Manitoba takes its name), exclaims, "It may be that with these eyes of mine I shall never see thee again, for thou liest far out of the track of life, and man mars not thy beauty with ways of civilised travel." The advance since this was written is prodigious. The outbreak of progress which has marked this long known but despised land changes the whole character and prospect of Canada and Canadian emigration. The deed almost exceeds the thought. It is more than the unexpected opening of a door revealing new rooms in an old house, for the regions revealed are not only enormous, but incalculably pregnant with richness in the shape of malleable mineral, as well as corn-producing soil.

The two volumes of Butler, however, on the "Great Lone Land" and the "Wild North Land," though in some respects they bring the late past and present of Canada into striking contrast, do not perhaps set forth the position of the country so strikingly as another popular book, "Milton and Cheadle's North-West Passage." These adventurers travelled before any railroad at all had been made between the Atlantic and Pacific. Thus they help us better to realise the old state of intercommunication, and they also record the impressions produced by the Hudson's Bay Company's almost absolute rule, some of the last years of which they saw. It had come to an end before Butler wrote on the Great Lone Land

in 1870. But it was in strong force when Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle toiled across the great North-West regions to the Pacific.

Here is what they say of the first part of the new region, Manitoba, which was entered in 1812 by Highland settlers under Lord Selkirk, but

which stood still till the transfer of rule from the company to that of the Dominion :

"The soil is so fertile that wheat is raised year after year on the same land, and yields fifty or sixty bushels to the acre without any manure being required. The pasturage is of the finest quality and unlimited in extent. But shut out in this distant corner of the earth from any communication with the rest of the world, except an uncertain one with the young State of Minnesota by steamer during the summer, and with England by the company's ship which brings stores to York Factory, in Hudson's Bay, once a year (the italics are mine), the farmers find no market for their produce."

This was written less than twenty years ago. The writer has a prophetic eye, and pleads for the ultimate threading of the desolate North-West by a railroad which shall string together the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through British territory. Like Butler and other later travellers, he is astounded at the superb neglect of the unbroken plains of soil which he crosses in crawling across the continent towards the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. He says :—

"It is the interest and policy of the company to discourage emigration, and keep the country as one vast preserve for fur-bearing animals. It is also their interest to

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prevent any trading except through themselves. But the day of monopolies has gone by. time the anomaly should cease, and a proper Colonial Government be established, whose efforts would be directed to the opening out of a country so admirably adapted for settlement. From the Red River-i.e., the Winnipeg region to the Rocky Mountains, along the banks of the Assiniboine and the fertile belt of the Saskatchewan, at least sixty millions of acres of the richest soil lie ready for the farmer when he shall be allowed to enter in and possess it. This glorious country, capable of sustaining an enormous population, lies utterly useless, except for the support of a few Indians, and the enrichment of the shareholders of the last Great Monopoly."*

It might be difficult to learn and record in detail how they were enriched in former days, and by what cheap exchange they sometimes got store of costly marten fur (i.e., sable) and other precious skins; but a few hints dropped by the writer of the "North-West Passage" may indicate the nature of some traffic between the original dwellers in the land and the old devouring company. Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle "in a weak moment" promised to make one "KekekOoarsis," or "The Child of the Hawk," an old Indian, "a present of a small quantity of rum." "Thereupon," the writer continues, "the old gentleman became all excitement," and asked for the "fire-water" at once. This name is given by Indians to alcoholic drink by reason of their rude analysis of that which is offered to them. The writer of the "North-West Passage" says:

"It must be strong enough to be inflammable, for an Indian always tests it by pouring a few drops into the fire. If it possesses the one property from which he has given it the name of fire-water, he is satisfied, whatever its flavour or other qualities may be."

The result was that more Indians soon came into Lord Milton's and Dr. Cheadle's camp :

:

It was this very region that I traversed in the same sleeping-carriage with Dr. Cheadle himself, in three days and nights, this last September.-H. J.

"They produced a number of marten and other skins, and all our explanations failed to make them understand that we had not come as traders. To end the matter we sent them off with what remained in the little keg. In about two hours all returned more or less intoxicated. First one fellow thrust a marten skin into our hands, another two or three fish, while a third, attempting to strip off his shirt for sale, fell senseless into the arms of his squaw."

Boys, breathless, with news of the fire-water, had been sent off by the Indians in all directions, that the poor possessors of the costly furs might come in to trade. That was their view of the position, and one does not want much power of imagination to picture the emptying of many a native store of skins over a large area by means of a few casks of rum. The impregnation of this ancient race with Christianity must indeed be hard, since the grace of the Gospel is often accompanied by the vice of the greedy trader. Indians are at the same time proud and impulsive, naturally taciturn, and yet incapable of touching civilisation without immediate and shameless clamour for the open indulgence of its worst vices. Missionaries, mostly, it would seem, French Roman Catholic priests, have long laboured among them, and they pass into moods of religious acquiescence, but self-command or self-sacrifice, which is the essence of practical Christianity, is far from them when they can smell rum. A whole tribe, chiefs, braves, and squaws alike, then seem to be moved by a common yearning, not for festivity, but for sheer drunkenness. They would seem to be wonderfully dignified and immovable under some conditions, but the chance of intoxication charms them. I say intoxication, for your Redskin does not drink for good company, nor because the liquor is toothsome, but simply to get drunk. Lord Milton's experience shows how the hope of this must have helped to store the forts in the great North-West with fur. But these days of such questionable trade are numbered or past. The present directors of the Hudson's Bay Company are another generation of men. They are moved with a better spirit, appreciating the produce of something beside skins in the region which they long controlled, but are now associated with on other commercial conditions.

The toil and tribulation of Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle in crossing the North American continent through British territory were almost inconceivable. A few years ago, it was in the time of the American war, they spent twelve months in labour and hunger, cold and heat, while creeping across a continent, one route through which the members of the British Association can see from the plate-glass windows of their sleeping-cars as they run_rapidly in some ten days from Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains and back, with opportunities by the way of stopping at specially interesting places, and making an excursion into British Columbia.

We may

sometimes sentimentally complain or suspect that the stomach of Englishmen for travel has abated since the days of the old explorers, but up to the very verge of luxurious locomotion men like Milton, Cheadle, and Butler have seemed to enjoy

the most slow and miserable movement it is possible for man to survive. They did good scientific work; and when at last the two former arrived lean and empty within reach of food they must be praised for honesty in admitting that they cared less for the civilised news of a year than for chops and potatoes. I turn over the printed instructions to the members of the British Association who visit Canada this autumn and see that provision is made for regular meals at so much a head right away to the Rocky Mountains. There will probably be a restaurant in the train. Fire and Water are a fine couple, but their child Steam subdues the world after a fashion which even yet we can hardly measure. The threading of British North America is one of its most notable feats, inasmuch as it reveals the sudden opening of a people's eyes to the use of an enormous region long left in the hands of a company which cared more for keeping up a population of wild beasts than of men.

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Here we had no tame flock of tourists bleating at the heels of a "personal conductor," but a set of fellow-travellers who had intelligent eyes in their heads and knew what to look for. Of course it is possible to find innocence and an exaggerated readiness to accept fresh impressions even among scientific men. For instance, I heard of two philosophers who needed a vehicle one wet and chilly night, and on being asked whether they would not have a couple of buffaloes (the kind inquirer meant rugs), replied, quite simply, that they would prefer horses.

Such charming receptivity, however, was rare. Several, e.g., of the final party with which I visited the Rocky Mountains were veterans in experience of the roughest travel. They had been starved, frostbitten, or withered to their backbones by Arctic winter winds; they had been upset in canoes and deserted by faithful Indians; they had eaten their leggings and tried to melt snow for tea; they had wearily worked their way, month after month, across the plains and through the forests which we traversed with a rush in railway sleeping-cars. They knew all about the grasses on the surface of the plains, and the stores of coal which lay beneath them. They were learned in butterflies and grasshoppers, or, belonging to the "Social Science section," were ready to tackle the most peremptory colonial on the burning questions of protection and free trade. They had analysed the soils up to the North Pole, and knew all about the conditions necessary for the growth of corn. And with all this, and a great deal more, they were full of humour, kindliness, and bright conversation.

Thus I was well advised by the best influences

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