“On leaving Battleford we had a ninety-mile journey through most awful country. It shook us all to pieces, what with driving through thick scrub and charging across great streams and ravines. Simply perished with cold and hunger, we reached the Government tents at our journey’s end. We all felt weary, worn, and sad. My little Doris was taken ill the day before we arrived, and my husband’s first care, on reaching Mr. Barr’s camp, was to seek out the doctor. She had a temperature of 104; but, thanks to poultices and medical care, she soon pulled round. Then Barnes was taken ill; and I suppose all this worry and anxiety proved the last straw as far as I was concerned, for I was the next to collapse, with a bad chill and bronchitis, together with an abscess on my face, all of which combined to make me feel very low and out of sorts.” So much for the first ordeal, to which this family and their fellow-colonists need not have been subjected in 1903. That long trek, accomplished by makeshift means of their own providing, put them on a sort of post-dated equality with settlers who arrived in pre-railway days. Indeed, save that the country was now free from Indian savages and belligerent fur-traders, Mr. and Mrs. Rendall and their two little children might have been living a hundred years ago, and traversing the North-West in one of Lord Selkirk’s parties of pioneers. But the journey was, after all, of minor moment. Dumped down in the wilderness, isolated from civilisation, with no road or river service to connect them with the populated world, those English families had now somehow to strike root as a self-supporting community. Two hundred miles from a railway! Truly it was a formidable handicap. But I will resume the personal story: “We arrived at our destination,” the husband recorded, “on May 10th, and remained in camp until May 15th. Prairie fires raged around on all sides, giving rise to serious anxiety. At one time, for the safety of the whole camp, it was necessary to summon out all the men, horses, and ploughs that were available.”