It is a land of great natural wealth and wonderful variety of beauty, for within it the last elevated “prairie steppe” gives way to mountains with peaks that soar into the blue high above the snowline. The Rockies, indeed, form the irregular boundary line of the south-west, which divides Alberta from British Columbia; and there is many a noble mountain within the province, though one is often misled, by the inadequacies of the ordinary maps, into thinking of it almost wholly as a prairie land. In the south the country is of the rolling prairie type, though its altitude is high; but further north it has the park-like character of woodlands, interspersed with open prairie, and further north still, though the park-like country still prevails in certain districts, the land in general is a forest-covered wilderness, broken by lakes and muskegs. The latter make summer journeys extremely difficult, and it is easier for the Indians and traders and missionaries, who at present are the sole inhabitants, to travel when winter has sealed up the lakes and morasses with ice, thus making possible short-cuts between places which in summer can be reached only by devious journeys up one stream and down another, with laborious portages between. Edmonton is still a centre of the fur-trade, and even now, in winter time, picturesque dog-trains arrive from the north in the provincial capital, whilst in the heart of Alberta traders, surveyors, mail-carriers and missionaries are leading the kind of life described in the “Wild West” books of our childhood. Still, on winter’s nights, in the white Albertan wilderness, many a man, for one motive or another, is sleeping out under the stars, defiant of the frost and loneliness; and still, in the long days of the northern summer, canoes ply on the rivers, which are the only roads in portions of Alberta. Of the numerous lakes of the province, Athabasca, which Alberta shares with Saskatchewan, has a surface of 2,850 square miles, but Lesser Slave Lake, the largest entirely within the province, is only four hundred and eighty square miles in extent. The rivers of Alberta are more important than the lakes. The four principal are the North and the South Saskatchewan; the Athabasca and the Peace river, which all rise in the Rocky Mountains, flow in an easterly or north-easterly direction, and have numerous tributaries, amongst which are some which might themselves take rank as important rivers. Both lakes and rivers, by the way, abound in fish, white fish being a staple food of the Indians and of the few white men in the north, as well as of the dogs used as draught animals.