While pitching our tents, a flock of pigeons flew past, and down in the woods along the bank of the river we could hear their cooing. Those who had shot-guns went to the hunt; while some of us tried the river for fish, but returned luckless. The supper was good enough, however, without trout or pickerel. Who can ask for anything better than prairie chicken, plover, duck, pork, and pigeons?
Then, when hunger is appeased, we sit around the camp-fire and think of the future of this paradise. Near by is another camp-fire.
I see by its glimmering light a stalwart man with shaggy beard and a slouched hat. The emigrant's wife sits on the other side of the fire, and by its light I see that she wears a faded linsey-woolsey dress, that her hair is uncombed, and that she has not given much attention to her toilet. Two frowzy-headed children, a boy and a girl, are romping in the grass. The worldly effects of this family are in that canvas-covered ox-wagon, with a chicken-coop at the hinder part, and a tin kettle dangling beneath the axle. This emigrant has come from Iowa. He is moving into this valley "to take up a claim." That is, he is going to select a piece of choice land under the Homestead Act, build a cabin, and "make a break in the per-ra-ry," he says.
He will be followed by others. The tide is setting in rapidly, and by the time the railway company are ready to carry freight there will be population enough here to support the road.
We have an early start in the morning. Our route is along a highway, upon which there is more travel than upon many of the old turnpikes of New England for Winnipeg, and the Hudson Bay posts receive all their supplies over this road.
At our noonday halt we fall in with Father Genin, a French Catholic priest, who lives on the bank of the river in a log-hut. He comes out to see us, wearing a long black bombazine priestly gown, and low-crowned hat. He is in the prime of life, was educated at Paris, came to Quebec, and is assigned to the Northwest. He has sailed over Lake Winnipeg, and paddled his canoe on the Saskatchawan and Athabasca.
"My parish," he says, "reaches from St. Paul to the Rocky Mountains." He speaks in glowing terms of the country up "in the Northwest,"—as if we, who are now sixteen hundred miles from Boston, had not reached the Northwest!
Our talk with Father Genin, and his enthusiastic description of the Saskatchawan Valley, has set us to thinking of this region, to which the United States once held claim, and which might now have been a part of our domain if it had not been for the pusillanimity of President Polk.
Mackenzie was the first European who gave to the world an account of the country lying between us and the Arctic Sea. He was in this valley in 1789, and was charmed with it. He made his way down to Lake Winnipeg, thence up the Saskatchawan to Athabasca Lake. At the carrying-place between the Saskatchawan and Athabasca rivers, at Portage la Loche, he discovered springs of petroleum, which are thus described:—