“You’ve hit it, gentlemen,” I remarked, quietly looking up at them. “It’s dull work to skin a flint, and I did not wish to give you the trouble.”
“You did well to keep clear of those fellows,” observed a gentleman to me shortly afterwards. “If they could catch you on a dark night near the side of the vessel, they wouldn’t scruple to rob you and heave you overboard.”
In many places the banks of the Mississippi exhibit high bluffs of an earthy nature, sometimes broken into the most fantastic forms, representing castles, towers, church steeples, and ruins of every description.
On the morning of the sixth day we were off the mouth of the Ohio, which river can be ascended for nine hundred miles to Pittsburg, and it must be remembered that I had already come upwards of a thousand miles from New Orleans. The next day, after paddling against stream two hundred miles farther, I landed at St. Louis, in the State of Missouri. It is a handsome city, built on ground sloping up from the Mississippi, about twenty miles distant from the mouths of the two mighty streams of the Missouri and Illinois, while the Mississippi itself has there already pursued a course of nearly seventeen hundred miles. It is a very busy place, and vessels of every description crowd its quays. Proceeding up the Ohio, I landed at Louisville, the chief town in Kentucky. Everyone has heard what Kentucky riflemen can do with their weapons. Understanding that a match was going forward outside the town I went to see it. To my disappointment it was over, but I saw two men shooting away as fast as they could load, at two cocks in a sort of enclosure, with an open space towards us, through which they kept constantly coming into view. Nearly a dozen shots had been tired, and the birds ran about as lively as at first. “Well, sir, I think with uncle’s old fowling-piece I could knock over them barn-doors a precious sight faster than that,” observed Peter, eyeing the marksmen with a glance of contempt.
“Now I guess, stranger, if you was to look closer you wouldn’t be quite so ready to boast of what you could do,” observed a stout, good-natured looking man near us. “Understand, just what you say you could do, they don’t want to do. Their business is to knock the feathers out of them birds’ tails, and do them no mortal injury. There’s a chalked line on their tails, inside of which a shot mustn’t go, or the man who fires it loses the match. Each man, too, has his bird and it requires a sharp eye to know which is which.”
Such I found to be the case. One man had shot all but one short feather away, and he was afraid of killing his bird; the other had shot all but two very long thin ones away, and his bullets constantly flew between them.
The next day we stopped at Cincinnati, a very handsome, civilised-looking city, and one of the most important west of the Alleganies. Here we embarked on board a much smaller steamer than any which had before carried us, though we had still four hundred miles farther to go up the stream to Pittsburg, from whence it was my intention to proceed to Toronto, and so find my way into the Hudson’s Bay Territory, in the best way I could. The boat drew very little water, for we had rapids and shallows to pass over; not so little, however, as a builder on board boasted was the case with one he had constructed—“Six inches, sir! why you know well enough, I guess, that if you was to attempt to send a craft drawing six inches of water up some of our streams, she’d be grounding every day in the week, and ten times in the day,” I heard him exclaim, in a tone of contempt, to a fellow-passenger. “Talk of inches, sir—what do you say to one I built, sir—why, she’d go along right slick across the prairie, provided the dew was thick enough on the grass in the morning. Why, sir, nothing could stop that craft if she could but get a taste of water.” Whether or not his assertion was believed I do not know, but as he was a big strapping fellow, and carried a formidable-looking bowie-knife in his waistcoat pocket, with which he used to pick his teeth and carve his meat, or indeed, what was not so pleasant, any dish intended for the public before him, nobody chose to call his assertion in question.
The country in which I was now about to seek for adventures, is a region which must before long become of importance on account of the great highway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans passing over it. Through that region indeed will be found the true and only practicable North-west passage, but it will be across the rolling prairie instead of the rolling ocean, and over rocky mountains instead of mountainous billows. The land I speak of is Central British America, also known as “Rupert’s Land,” “the North West Territory,” and the “Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory.”
The earlier French settlers in Canada believed, and not without reason, that the high road to China would be found along the course of the mighty river on the banks of which they had located themselves. Their idea was ridiculed, and the name of La Chine was given to a village to the west of Montreal by those who believed that the explorers would never get farther in that direction, little supposing that ere long a rich province, full of wealthy cities, would have its eastern limits beyond the point in question; while only of late years the truth has dawned on a few far-sighted individuals that in that direction will be found the shortest and safest high road not only to China, but to provinces fast rising into importance, to British Columbia and Vancouver’s Island, to the wide-spreading shores of the Pacific, and to the numberless islands which stud its bosom; that it will afford a western outlet to the commercial enterprise of the British North American Confederation, which will raise it to a position of great wealth and power.
Let me try and map-down this great country. Following up the course of the St. Lawrence across Lake Ontario, and passing over a broad isthmus, where a deep canal is to be formed, we reach lake Huron. Still going west some two thousand miles distant from the month of the St. Lawrence, we arrive at the Saulte St. Marie, where the waters of the great Lake Superior fall into that of Huron. Here is a free port, and a free settlement has been formed; but we have yet Lake Superior to cross, when we shall reach Fort William, in Thunder Bay, where the most western British American settlement has lately been established. From Thunder Bay, a spot of great picturesque beauty, a good map will show us a succession of lakes, joined by rivers, and known as Dog Lake, Lac des Milles Lacs, Rainy Lake, and Lake of the Woods, the chain, extending till the extensive Lake Winnipeg is reached, having again numberless other lakes and rivers farther west. A journey of about eighty miles beyond the extreme west of the lovely Lake of the Woods carries us to a settlement of British people; not of people who have cast off their allegiance to the British crown, but true subjects, who desire to live under British laws and institutions, and to enjoy all the privileges which Britons justly value as their birthright; yet it is not too much to say that no community of the British race is more completely debarred from the advantages possessed by Englishmen at large than are the inhabitants of the settlement in question.