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In the very centre of the great continent of North America, far removed from the abodes of civilised men, and about twenty miles to the south of Lake Winnipeg, exists a colony composed of Indians, Scotsmen, and French-Canadians, which is known by the name of Red River Settlement.
"Why, you see," said Billy, "we were returning from school at Winnipeg; it's holiday now, you know. Father sent the two ponies to 'the front' for us to ride home. Some Indians brought them over for us. It's a hundred and sixty miles. We started yesterday morning, and slept last night at Black Jack Pete's place. We must be a full hundred miles from home now." Billy stopped speaking.
Three hundred of the Selkirk Colonists and their children immediately gathered around Mr. Black, and though interrupted for a year by the great flood which we have described, erected in the following year, the stone Church of Kildonan, on the highway some five miles from Winnipeg.
"I shall probably leave Silverdale before morning, and have now to hand you a statement of my agreement with Courthorne and the result of my farming here, drawn up by a Winnipeg accountant. Here is also a document in which I have taken the liberty of making you and Dane my assigns.
When we left Winnipeg, too, he tried to tell me what a plain little shack we'd have to put up with for a year or two, and how it wouldn't be much better than camping out, and how he knew I was clear grit and would help him win that first year's battle. There was nothing depressing to me in the thought of life in a prairie-shack.
The same wild-looking men, pushing on into the interior from Lake Superior, made their way into Lake Winnipeg, up the great Saskatchewan River, and across to the valley of the Red River; building their forts for war and trade by distant lake-shore and confluence of river current, and drawing off the valued trade in furs to France; until all of a sudden there came the great blow struck by Wolfe under the walls of Quebec, and every little far-away post and distant fort throughout the vast interior continent felt the echoes of the guns of Abraham.
It was late in August before they reached the great portage of Lake Superior, which led across the height of land separating the waters of that lake from those flowing to Lake Winnipeg. The way was long and difficult. Pierre. La Verendrye was forced to winter with the rest of the party at the river Kaministiguia, not far from the great portage.
"Well," he said reassuringly, "no one can tell exactly how a game of this kind will go. All you can do is to hold tight and keep your eyes open." They changed the subject, and nothing more was said about the mine during the rest of the journey. In due time Stirling went ashore at a way port, and Weston met the man from Chicago in Winnipeg a day or two later.
I didn't pay much attention, for I was reflecting on a change I meant to make in one of my battalion commands, when a fresh voice broke in. It belonged to a Canadian captain from Winnipeg, a very silent fellow who smoked shag tobacco. 'There's a lot of ghosts in this darned country, he said. Then he started to tell about what happened to him when his division was last back in rest billets.
Through many marsh-lined channels, and amidst a vast sea of reeds and rushes, the Red River of the North seeks the waters 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.
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