The party was brimming with queer characters. These made things very interesting for themselves, and Barr, and everybody. Puritans and free-thinkers; university and remittance men; ignoramuses and intellectuals; socialists and men of vision; ex-soldiers and ex-stay-at-homes; men who believed every word in the Bible was inspired by God, and men who believed everything in _The Daily Mail_ was the same; Methodists, Anglicans, Calvinists, Catholics, Unitarians, Agnostics, and men belonging to twenty other sects; niggards and spendthrifts; men with brothers who were officers in the Yeomanry, and men with not a single drop of blue blood in their veins at all; men with money and very little sense; men with sense and very little money; men with both and men with not much of either; all began to dribble westwards along the Battleford trail, their eyes turned wistfully towards the only, for them, ideal life--HOMESTEADING. Four hundred wagons at the very least commenced the trip. A few speedy colonists, travelling light, reached their destination, hunted their land, scraped the top off a couple of acres, sowed them with wild oats--and wilder mustard--and were busy hacking some innocent trees down with which to build shacks, before some of the more helpless ones even thought of quitting Saskatoon. Quite early--a week or more perhaps--the trek began to sort out the invertebrates. These came straggling back to Saskatoon with mossy chins and bedraggled looks, reciting fearful yarns about how they had been forced to leave pieces of their backbones in sloughs; the sheen of their lovely equipment in bottomless muskegs; shreds of nerve hanging on the almost perpendicular walls of yawning ravines; and, inferentially, their rapidly dwindling courage in the rapacious ooze of sticky alkali flats. At that time, the West possessed (except nearer to Winnipeg) only the main line of the Canadian Pacific, the Calgary-Strathcona, and the Regina-Prince Albert branches, in the way of railways. The Canadian Northern transcontinental had been surveyed the previous summer, and the spot in the wilderness for which the colonists were bound was where this survey bisected the 110th meridian of longitude--almost exactly midway between the Battle and North Saskatchewan rivers. The North-West Territories had not yet given birth to the charming twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan; but the cradle was bought, any amount of clothes were ready, and numerous attendants, in the shape of future government officials, waited round to be first with their congratulations.