to tracing the causes
which led to the rebellion of the settlers--principally
half-breeds--under Louis Riel, against the Canadian
Government in 1870. He describes the romantic part he took
in the bloodless campaign of the expeditionary force under
Colonel (now Lord) Wolseley, from Lake Superior to
Winnipeg, for its suppression. In the other half of the
book he describes his journey on a special mission for the
Canadian Government to the Hudson Bay forts and Indian
camps in the valleys of the North and South Saskatchewan
Rivers. Sir William, as a writer, has the rich vocabulary
of the cultivated Celt; he presents many striking word
pictures of the natural scenery of the regions he
traversed. He was almost the first to proclaim the
possibilities of the settlement of the Saskatchewan
prairies, now receiving such an influx of population from
all over the world.

It was a period of universal peace over the world. Some of the great
powers were even bent on disarming. To be more precise, the time was the
close of the year 1869. But in the very farthest West, somewhere between
the Rocky Mountains, Hudson Bay, and Lake Superior, along the river
called the Red River of the North, a people, of whom nobody could tell
who and what they were, had risen in insurrection.

Had the country bordering on the Red River been an unpeopled wilderness,
the plan of transferring the land of the Northwest from the Hudson Bay
Company to the crown, and from the crown to the Dominion of Canada,
might have been an eminently wise one. But, unfortunately, it was a
country which had been originally settled by the Earl of Selkirk in 1812
with Scots from the Highland counties and the Orkney Islands, and
subsequently by French _voyageurs_ from Lower Canada.

There were 15,000 persons living in peaceful possession of the soil thus
transferred, and these persons very naturally objected to have
themselves and their possessions signed away without one word of consent
or note of approbation. Hence began the rebellion led by Louis Riel,
who, with his followers, seized Fort Garry, with all its stores of arms,
guns, provisions, dominated the adjacent village of Winnipeg, and
established what was called a Provisional Government. The rebels went
steadily from violence to pillage, from pillage to robbery, much
supplemented by drunkenness and dictatorial debauchery; and, finally, on
March 4, 1870, with many accessories of cruelty, s