Unquestionably these French half-breeds are wild birds—hunters, drinkers, rovers, rascals if you will—yet generous and hospitable withal; destined to disappear before the white man’s footprint, and ere that time has come owing many of their vices to the pioneer American, whose worst qualities the wild man, or semi-wild man, has been ever too sure to imitate.
After a delay of three days in this hunter’s camp, which by some strange anomaly was denominated “la mission,” its sole claim to that title being the residence of a French priest in the community, we started on our journey further west.
The winter had now regularly set in; the broad South Saskatchewan was rolling thick masses of ice down its half-closed channel, the snow-covering had deepened on the landscape, the wind blew keenly over the prairie. Many of our horses had been too poor to take upon this journey, and the half-breed whom I had brought from Red River, dreading the exposure of the plains, had taken advantage of the hunter’s camp to desert our service; so another man had been engaged, and, with three fresh horses and an urchin attendant in the shape of a little half-breed, designated by our new man as “l’homme capable,” and for whose services he demanded only the moderate sum of five shillings per diem, we held our course along the South Saskatchewan towards the Great Prairie.
Xavier Bâtoche was a fair sample of his class. The blood of four nationalities mingled in his veins. His grandfather had been a French Canadian, his grandmother a Crow squaw; English and Cree had contributed to his descent on his mother’s side. The ceremony of taking a wife in the early days of the north-west fur trade was not an elaborate performance, or one much encumbered by social or religious preliminaries. If it did not literally fulfil the condition of force implied by the word “taking,” it usually developed into a question of barter; a horse, a flint gun, some white cloth and beads, could purchase the hand and heart of the fairest squaw in Prairie land. If she did not love after one of these valuable “presents” had been made to her father, the lodge-poles were always handy to enforce that obedience necessary to domestic happiness—admirable idea, the roof-tree contributed to the peace of the hearth-stone, and jealousy fled before a “lodge-poling.” To return to Bâtoche; Crow and Cree, French and English, had contrived to produce a genial, good-humoured, handsome fellow; the previous year had been one of plenty, buffalo had once more appeared in vast herds on the prairies of the Saskatchewan; wolf-skins, robes, and pemmican had fetched high prices, and Bâtoche was rich and prosperous.
Two days’ journeying brought us to the edge of the great prairie; silent, vast, and desolate it spread away into unseen space; the snow but scantily covered the yellow grass, and the November wind sighed mournfully through the wrecks of summer vegetation as it sped along its thousand leagues of unmeasured meadow. At the last copse of poplar and willow we halted for a day, to bake bread and cut wood sufficient for a week’s food and fuel, and then we launched our ocean ships—horses and sleds—out into the great meadow.
CHAPTER VII.
An Ocean of Grass.—The Red Man.—Whence comes he?—The Buffalo.—Puritans and Pioneers.—The Red Man’s Friend.
The general term “prairie” comprises many varieties of open landscape. There are the level, alluvial prairies of Illinois, long since settled and colonized; there are the low, fertile prairies of the Red River, where the rich black mould, fallow under five months of snow, puts forth the rank luxuriance of a hot-bed during the half tropic heat of summer; there are the sandy prairies of the Assineboine and Qu’Appelle, intermixed with clusters of aspen and of willow, and broken by lakes and saline ponds: but above each and all—exceeding all other prairies and open spaces—wild, treeless, and ocean-like in everything save motion, there stands forth in dreary grandeur the Great Prairie.
What the Irish Sea, the Channel, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean are to the Atlantic, so are these various outlying regions of plain to the vast rigid ocean of the central continent. It is true that on the Red River, or the Qu’Appelle, or along the line I have lately passed, one may frequently “get out of sight of land;” there are spaces where no tree or bush breaks the long monotony of the sky-line; but all these expanses are as nothing compared to the true prairie.