the story of the
fertility of the soil over which we rode--every where the eye looked upon
panoramas filled with the beauty of lake and winding river, and grassy
slope and undulating woodland. The whole face of the country was indeed
one vast park. For two days we passed through this beautiful land,-and on
the evening of the 28th November drew near to Edmonton. My party had been
increased by the presence of two gentlemen from Victoria, a Wesleyan
minister and the Hudson Bay official in charge of the Company's post at
that place. Both of these gentlemen had resided long in the Upper
Saskatchewan, and were intimately acquainted with the tribes who inhabit
The vast territory from the Rocky Mountains to Carlton House. It was late
in the evening, just one month after I had started from the banks of the
Red River, that I approached the high palisades of Edmonton. As one who
looks back at evening from the summit of some lofty ridge over the long
track which he has followed since the morning, so now did my mind travel
back over the immense distance through which I had ridden in twenty-two
days of actual travel and in thirty-three of the entire journey-that
distance could not have been less than 1000 miles; and as each camp scene
rose again before me, with its surrounding of snow and storm-swept
prairie and lonely clump of aspens, it seemed as though something like
infinite space stretched between me and that far-away land which one word
alone can picture, that one word in which so many others centre--Home.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Edmonton--The Ruffian Tahakooch--French Missionaries--Westward still--A
beautiful Land--The Blackfeet-Horses--A "Bellox" Soldier--A Blackfoot
Speech--The Indian Land--First Sight of the Rocky Mountains--The Mountain
House--The Mountain Assineboines--An Indian Trade--M. la
Combe--Fire-water--A Night Assault.

EDMONTON, the head-quarters of the Hudson Bay Company's Saskatchewan
trade, and the residence of a chief factor of the corporation, is a large
five-sided fort with the usual flanking bastions and high stockades. It
has within these stockades many commodious and well-built wooden houses,
and differs in the cleanliness and order of its arrangements from the
general run of trading forts in the Indian country. It stands on a high
level bank 100 feet above the Saskatchewan River, which rolls below in a
broad majestic stream, 300 yards in width. Farming operations,
boat-building, and flour-milling are