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 CHAPTER II

T must be next to impossible for one in this day to realize what a tangled wilderness this West was a century and a half ago. "The thing which puzzles us," writes W. H. H. Murray, "is not the past but the future; not the door which has been shut, but the strange door which has never been opened For who, though knocking with reddened knuckles against it may start even an echo?" True words indeed; yet were the task put to us, it is to be seriously doubted if we of untrained imagination could not draw a truer picture of this land as it will appear a century hence than we could conjure up of the land as it appeared a century ago. Suppose the latter picture could be true to the dense growth of bush and tree, the wallowings of the plunging buffalo, the ways of the wild animals tunneled through the tangled