At last a streak of dawn broke over the high eastern shore, the light struggled for mastery with the surrounding darkness and finally prevailed, and descending to the river showed the broad current sweeping on to the north-east. Quitting without regret our cheerless bivouac, we climbed with stiff limbs the high overhanging bank, and gained the upper level. Far away the river still held its course to the north-east, deep sunken 300 feet below the prairie level: we were still distant from the Forks.
Retracing our steps through miles of fallen timber we reached the cart, but the morning had worn on to mid-day before our long-wished-for breakfast smoked in the kettle. Three hours later on, during an evening which had cleared sufficiently to allow the sun to glint through cloud rifts on pine forest and prairie, I reached the lofty ridge which overlooks the Forks of the Saskatchewan.
CHAPTER V.
The Forks of the Saskatchewan.—A perverse Parallel.—Diplomatic Bungling.—Its results.
Two hundred and fifty feet above water level, the narrow tongue of land rises over the junction of the two Saskatchewan rivers. Bare and level at top, its scarped front descends like a wall to the rivers; but land-slip and the wear of time have carried down to a lower level the loose sand and earth of the plateau, and thickly clustering along the northern face, pines, birch, and poplar shroud the steep descent. It is difficult to imagine a wilder scene than that which lay beneath this projecting point.
From north-west and from south-west two broad rivers roll their waters into one common channel, two rivers deep furrowed below the prairie level, curving in great bends through tree-fringed valleys. One river has travelled through eight hundred miles of rich rolling landscape; the other has run its course of nine hundred through waste and arid solitudes; both have had their sources in mountain summits where the avalanche thundered forth to solitude the tidings of their birth. And here at this point, like two lives, which, coming from a distance, are drawn together by some mysterious sympathy, and blended into one are henceforth to know only the final separation, these rivers roll their currents into one majestic stream, which, sinking into a deep gorge, sweeps eastward through unbroken pine forest. As yet no steamboat furrows the deep water; no whistle breaks the sleeping echoes of these grim scarped shores; the winding stream rests in voiceless solitude, and the summer sun goes down beyond silent river reaches, gleaming upon a virgin land.
Standing at this junction of the two Saskatchewan rivers, the traveller sees to the north and east the dark ranks of the great sub-Arctic forest, while to the south and west begin the endless prairies of the middle continent. It is not a bad position from whence to glance at the vast region known to us as British North America.
When the fatal error at Saratoga had made room for diplomatists of Old and New England, and removed the arbitrament of rebellion from the campaign to the council, those who drew on the part of Great Britain the boundary-lines of her transatlantic empire, bungled even more conspicuously in the treaty-chamber than her generals had failed in the field. Geographical knowledge appears ever to have been deemed superfluous to those whose business it was to shape the destinies of our colonial dominions, and if something more tangible than report be true, it is not many months since the British members at a celebrated conference stared blankly at each other when the free navigation of a river of more than two thousand miles in length was mooted at the Council Board. But then, what statesman has leisure to master such trifles as the existence of the great river Yukon, amid the more important brain toil of framing rabbit laws, defining compound householders, and solving other equally momentous questions of our Imperial and Parochial politics? However to our subject. When in 1783 the great quarrel between Britain and her Colonies was finally adjusted, the northern boundary of the United States was to follow the 49th parallel of latitude from the north-west angle of the Lake of the Woods to the river Mississippi, and thence down that river, &c., &c.
Nothing could possibly have been more simple, a child might comprehend it; but unfortunately it fell out in course of time that the 49th parallel was one of very considerable latitude indeed not at all a parallel of diplomatic respectability, or one that could be depended on, for neither at one end or the other could it be induced to approach the north-west angle of the Lake of the Woods or the river Mississippi. Do all that sextant, or quadrant, or zenith telescope could, the 49th parallel would not come to terms.