the south an immense desert, on the east an immense marsh.
From the forest to the desert there lies a distance varying from 40 to
150 miles, and from the marsh to the mountain, 800 miles of land lie
spread in every varying phase of undulating fertility. This is the
Fertile Belt, the land of the Saskatchewan, the winter home of the
buffalo, the war country of the Crees and Blackfeet, the future home of
millions yet unborn. Few men have looked on this land-but the thoughts of
many in the New World tend towards it, and crave for description and fact
which in many instances can only be given to them at second-hand.

Like all things in this world, the Saskatchcwan has its poles of opinion;
there are those who paint it a paradise, and those who picture it a hell.
It is unfit for habitation, it is to be the garden-spot of America--it is
too cold, it is too dry--it is too beautiful; and, in reality, what is
it? I answer in a few words. It is rich; it is fertile; it is fair to the
eye. Man lives long in it, and the children of his body are cast in manly
mould. The cold of winter is intense, the strongest heat of summer is not
excessive. The autumn days are bright and-beautiful; the snow is seldom
deep, the frosts are early to come and late to go. All crops flourish,
though primitive and rude are the means by which they are tilled; timber
is in places plentiful, in other places scarce; grass grows high, thick,
and rich. Horses winter out, and are round-carcased, and fat in spring.
The lake-shores are deep in hay; lakelets every where. Rivers close in
mid-November and open in mid-April. The lakes teem with fish; and such
fish! fit for the table of a prince, but disdained at the feast of the
Indian. The river-heads lie all in a forest region; and it is midsummer
when their water has reached its highest level. Through the land the red
man stalks; war, his unceasing toil--horse-raiding, the pastime of his
life. How long has the Indian thus warred?-since he has been known to the
white man, and long before.

In 1776 the earliest English voyager in these regions speaks of war
between the Assineboines and their trouble some western neighbours, the
Snake and Blackfeet Indians. But war was older than the era of the
earliest white man, older probably than the Indian himself; for, from
what ever branch of the human race this stock is sprung, the lesson of
warfare was in all cases the same to him. To say he fights is, after all,
but to say he