0,000 square miles; the Mackenzie
River basin with nearly 700,000 square miles. The Winnipeg basin covers
a great area of prairie lands, whose luxuriant grasses and wild flowers
were indented for centuries only by the tracks of herds of innumerable
buffaloes on their way to the tortuous and sluggish streams which flow
through that wide region. This plain slopes gently towards the arctic
seas into which its waters flow, and is also remarkable for rising
gradually from its eastern limits in three distinct elevations or
steppes as far as the foot hills of the Rocky Mountains. Forests of
trees, small for the most part, are found only when the prairies are
left and we reach the more picturesque undulating country through which
the North Saskatchewan flows. An extraordinary feature of this great
region is the continuous chain of lakes and rivers which stretch from
the basin of the St. Lawrence as far as the distant northern sea into
which the Mackenzie, the second largest river in North America, carries
its enormous volume of waters. As we stand on the rugged heights of
land which divides the Winnipeg from the Laurentian basin we are within
easy reach of rivers which flow, some to arctic seas, some to the
Atlantic, and some to the Gulf of Mexico. If we ascend the Saskatchewan
River, from Lake Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, we shall find
ourselves within a measurable distance not only of the sources of the
Mackenzie, one of whose tributaries reaches the head waters of the
Yukon, a river of golden promise like the Pactolus of the eastern
lands--but also within reach of the head waters of the rapid Columbia,
and the still more impetuous Fraser, both of which pour into the Pacific
Ocean, as well as of the Missouri, which here accumulates strength for
its alliance with the Mississippi, that great artery of a more southern
land. It was to this remarkable geographical feature that Oliver Wendell
Holmes referred in the following well-known verses:

"Yon stream whose sources run
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabaska rolling toward the Sun
Through the cleft mountain ledge."

"The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon."

[ILLUSTRATION: MAP OF BRITISH AMERICA TO ILLUSTRATE THE CHARTER OF THE
HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY]

A great company claimed for two centuries exclusive trading privileges
over a large portion of the