Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/372

352 must be sent forth on that stern errand, he had a right to name his man. He knew whom to select; and very rarely — I know not if in any case — did the order find the man to refuse or to quail. To creep through the gate in the darkness; to track his way by night through forest, swamp, and watercourse, with snow-shoes or moccasons torn by the tangling briars or soaked with the ooze of the woods and marshes, listening to the music of howling wolves and hooting owls, as sweet compared with the shriek and yell of the red man; to find a covert by day, and so — alone, famished, fireless, and pinched by the cold to his very marrow — to alternate by light and darkness, still undismayed, till his errand was sped or dismally baffled; — this was his work and its conditions. Amazement comes over us when we know how often this venture of heroism succeeded. We willingly leave unveiled in tragic gloom the cases in which message and messenger were often shrouded.

What herculean toil, what a strain upon all human resources of vigor and endurance, were exacted in the planting and supply of a wilderness stronghold! The pack-horse was comparatively a deferred help in this work. Human hands and backs and shoulders did the earliest, the hardest, and the worst of it. If the convoy needed something broader than the Indian trail (the forest pathway) for a train in Indian file, then a military road was to be opened, the fallen trees making a lurking-place for skulking Indians, while the stumps and rocks impeded the lumbering wagons, with their cannon and flour-bags and meat-barrels. Cattle, too, were to be moved over those pastureless highways. When the English, after the cession of Canada, went with their scant forces and the help of provincials and occasionally some friendly Indian allies to take possession of the farther forts on the lakes, the enterprise was thick with the perils of sea and shore. On the route from the seaboard, whence artillery,