Doggedly and determinedly it kept its own course; and, utterly regardless of big-wig or diplomatic fogie, it formed an offensive and defensive alliance with the Sun and the Pole Star (two equally obstinate and big-wig disrespectful bodies), and struck out for itself an independent line.
Beyond the Mississippi there lay a vast region, a region where now millions (soon to be tens of millions) draw from prairie and river flat the long-sleeping richness of the soil. Then it was a great wilderness, over which the dusky bison and his wilder master roamed, in that fierce freedom which civilization ends for ever.
To the big-wigs at the Council Board this region was a myth—a land so far beyond the confines of diplomatic geography that its very existence was questioned. Not so to the shrewd solicitor, admiral, auctioneer, general conveyancer, and Jack-of-all-trades in one, who guided the foreign policy of the United States.
Unencumbered by the trappings of diplomatic tradition, he saw, vaguely perhaps, but still with prescient knowledge, the empire which it was possible to build in that western wild; and as every shifting scene in the outside world’s politics called up some new occasion for boundary rearrangement, or treaty rectification, he grasped eagerly at a fresh foothold, an additional scrap of territory, in that land which was to him an unborn empire, to us a half-begotten wilderness. Louisiana, purchased from Napoleon for a trifle, became in his hands a region larger than European Russia, and the vast water-shed of the Missouri passed into the Empire of the United States.
Cut off from the Mississippi, isolated from the Missouri, the unlucky boundary traversed an arid waste until it terminated at the Rocky Mountains.
Long before a citizen of the United States had crossed the Missouri, Canadian explorers had reached the Rocky Mountains and penetrated through their fastnesses to the Pacific; and British and Canadian fur traders had grown old in their forts across the Continent before Lewis and Clark, the pioneers of American exploration, had passed the Missouri. Discovered by a British sailor, explored by British subjects, it might well have been supposed that the great region along the Pacific slope, known to us as Oregon, belonged indisputably to England; but at some new treaty “rectification,” the old story was once more repeated, and the unlucky 49th parallel again selected to carry across the Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, the same record of British bungling and American astuteness which the Atlantic had witnessed sixty years earlier on the rugged estuary of the St. Croix.
For the present our business lies only with that portion of British territory east of the Rocky Mountains, and between them, the Bay of Hudson and the Arctic Ocean.
From the base of the great range of the Rocky Mountains, the Continent of British America slopes towards North and East, until, unbroken by one mountain summit, but in a profound and lasting desolation, it dips its shaggy arms and ice-bound capes into a sea as drear and desolate.
Two great rivers, following of necessity this depression, shed their waters into the Bay of Hudson. One is the Saskatchewan, of which we have already spoken; the other, that river known by various names—“English,” because the English traders first entered the country by it; “Beaver,” from the numbers of that animal trapped along it in olden time; “Churchill,” because a fort of that name stands at its estuary; and “Missinipi,” or “much water,” by the wild races who dwell upon it. The first river has a total length of 1700 miles; the last runs its course through worthless forest and primeval rock for 1200 miles.
