Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/514

494 Territory, is the height of land, the dividing ridge, which parts the waters flowing into the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

The inhabitants of the region at the time were of as motley and miscellaneous a make-up as any extensive region of the earth would have afforded, — Canadians, half-breeds, Indians, and naked, painted, and feathered savages strutting and fuming, voyageurs, farmers, hunters fishermen, furnished with missionaries of rival creeds, and not without means of education. Groups of human dwellings presented the strongest contrast as between well-furnished and well-stocked houses and farm-barns and the filthiest, dreariest cabins and wigwams. Any of the Indians who were inclined to adopt the usages of civilization had the progressive stages of it set before them and facilitated, all the way up from and all the way down to barbarism. Many of the settlers, however, were faithful to their Indian wives, sought to raise them and their habits and mode of life, and sent their half-blood offspring to Canada and Europe for education.

The object of the British traders was to open a road from Lake Superior through the Rocky Mountains to British Columbia, for direct commerce with China, which was the market for the costliest furs. From the Saskatchewan Valley all the way to the mountains only the agents of the Bay Company wandered. The region covered an area of 65,000 square miles, or forty million acres, much of it rich soil. It is this region, now the Province of Manitoba, which under the prompting and enterprise of land companies, vigorously pressed, is fast becoming populous with settlers, and giving promise of vast prosperity. A just and reasonable energy, not necessarily involving any jealousy, is engaged in this enterprise to offer inducements to colonists under Great Britain to stay on their own territory instead of making preference of that of the United States. Not by any means, however, is this preference overcome in