WINNIPEG LAKE AND RIVER.
W. F. BUTLER.
[Colonel W. F. Butler, in “The Great Lone Land,” gives us some very interesting information about the life and scenery of the great American Northwest, from which we select the following description of a picturesque lake and river. His journey was made during the Riel rebellion, and the traveller was on his way to the Lake of the Woods, where he expected to meet an expedition sent for the suppression of the rebellion. The Red River Indians gave him a hearty send-off.]
The chief gave a signal, and a hundred trading guns were held aloft, and a hundred shots rang out on the morning air. Again and again the salutes were repeated, the whole tribe moving down to the water’s edge to see me off. Putting out to the middle of the river, I discharged my fourteen-shooter into the air in rapid succession; a prolonged war-whoop answered my salute, and, paddling their very best, for the eyes of the finest canoers were upon them, my men drove the little craft flying over the water until the Indian village and its still firing braves were hidden behind a river bend. Through many marsh-lined channels, and amidst a vast sea of reeds and rushes, the Red River of the North seeks the water of Lake Winnipeg. A mixture of land and water, of mud, and of the varied vegetation which grows thereon, this delta of the Red River is, like other spots of a similar description, inexplicably lonely.
The wind sighs over it, bending the tall weeds with mournful rustle, and the wild bird passes and repasses with plaintive cry over the rushes which form his summer home.
Emerging from the sedges of the Red River, we shot out into the waters of an immense lake,—a lake which stretched away into unseen spaces, and over whose waters the fervid July sun was playing strange freaks of mirage and inverted shore-land.
This was Lake Winnipeg,—a great lake, even on a continent where lakes are inland seas. But vast as it is now, it is only a tithe of what it must have been in the earlier ages of the earth.
The capes and headlands of what once was a vast inland sea now stand far away from the shores of Winnipeg. Hundreds of miles from its present limits these great landmarks still look down on the ocean, but it is an ocean of grass. The waters of Winnipeg have retired from their feet, and they are now mountain-ridges, rising over seas of verdure. At the bottom of this by-gone lake lay the whole valley of the Red River, the present Lakes Winnepegoos and Manitoba, and the prairie islands of the Lower Assiniboine,—one hundred thousand square miles of water. The water has long since been drained off by the lowering of the rocky channels leading to Hudson Bay, and the bed of the extinct lake now forms the richest prairie-land in the world.
But although Winnipeg has shrunken to a tenth of its original size, its rivers still remain worthy of the great basin into which they once flowed. The Saskatchewan is longer than the Danube, the Winnipeg has twice the volume of the Rhine. Four hundred thousand square miles of continent shed their waters into Lake Winnipeg; a lake as changeful as the ocean, but, fortunately for us, in its very calmest mood to-day. Not a wave, not a ripple on its surface, not a breath of breeze to aid the untiring paddles. The little canoe, weighed down by men and provisions, had scarcely three inches of its gunwale over the water, and yet the steersman held his course far out into the glassy waste, leaving behind the marshy headlands which marked the river’s mouth.