urney was
continued to the south-west. The Rockies were crossed through Kootenay
Pass, and at last--after many a halt to find straying horses, and after
continuous annoyance from mosquitoes and venomous insects 'which in
size and appearance might have been mistaken for a cross between the
bulldog and the house-fly'--Fort Colville on the Columbia was reached
on August 18. Their long horseback ride was over. Favoured by
wonderfully fine weather, in the saddle eleven to twelve hours a day,
they had made their way through open prairie and rolling plain, tangled
thicket and burning forest and rushing river, and had covered the two
thousand miles from Fort Garry in six weeks and five days. From Fort
Colville they reached the waters of the Pacific at Fort Vancouver
(Washington) in another six days. The {112} continent had been crossed
in twelve weeks of actual travelling.

Sir George Simpson's journey stood as the record for many a year. For
a generation after his day the scattered travellers from Red River
westward were compelled to rely on saddle-horse and plains cart and
canoe. From Montreal and Toronto the railway could be utilized as far
as Collingwood, and thence the steamer to Port Arthur. Then for a time
the government opened up a summer route to the Red River, beginning it
in 1869 and maintaining it until 1876. The Dawson route, as it was
called, included forty-five miles of wagon-road from Port Arthur to
Lake Shebandowan, then over three hundred miles of water travel, with a
dozen portages, and again ninety-five miles of wagon-road from the Lake
of the Woods to Fort Garry.[1] In 1870 it took ninety-five days to
transport troops from Toronto to Fort Garry over this route. Such
makeshifts could not serve for long. South of the {113} border the
railway was rapidly pushing westward, and in the new nation of the
north, as well, its time had come.

Ever after the coming of the locomotive, it needed only imagination and
a map to see all British North America clamped by an iron band.
Engineers like Bonnycastle and Synge and Carmichael-Smyth wrote of the
possibility in the forties. Politicians found in the theme matter for
admirable after-dinner perorations--colonial governors like Harvey in
1847, colonial secretaries like Lytton and Carnarvon in the fifties,
and colonial premiers like Joseph Howe, who declared in Halifax in
1851: 'I believe that many in this room will live to hear the whistle
of the steam-engi