Yet the sport these men were bent on was nothing less than a war of extermination against their fellow-countrymen. “They told us they were a party of 1,500 warriors, from 1,200 lodges, pitching their tents on towards Edmonton, leaving few behind capable of bearing arms. They were in pursuit of the Crees and Assiniboines, whom they threatened totally to annihilate, boasting that they themselves were as numerous as the grass on the plains.” The artist “must be a great medicine-man,” the warriors thought, as they saw him drawing their portraits. As they were expecting a battle with the Crees next day, they got up a war dance, and with much solemnity placed him in the best position “to work his incantations” for their success—that is, to draw his pictures while they danced. * * * * * Turn your eyes now to the north. At the very time when the adventurous artist and his fur-trading friends were floating through the long-established “North-west boat passage” across the continent, the search for a north-west ship passage was ending in tragedy. “We met here,” says the artist, arriving at the Pas on the 12th of June, 1848, “Sir John Richardson and Dr. Rae, _en route_ to Mackenzie River, with two canoes, in search of Sir John Franklin,” the great Arctic explorer. Three years before, on May 19, 1845, Franklin had left England in command of an expedition to discover what Columbus and so many other explorers had vainly sought, a sea-way to the east through the west. In his two ships, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_, of the British navy, there sailed 129 officers and men. They were seen in July by a passing vessel in Baffin’s Bay, and then they vanished. Not one man ever came back. One expedition after another was sent in search of them—by the British Government, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, by American friends, and by Lady Franklin herself when all others had given up the task as hopeless. In 1853, John Rae—a splendid specimen of the Hudson’s Bay factor, whom I knew in his later years—met a band of Eskimo who in the winter of 1850 had seen, first a large party of white men dragging southward a boat and sledges, and, some time after, dead bodies both on the mainland and on Montreal Island, near the mouth of Back’s Fish River. From the Eskimo, Rae recovered a silver plate engraved with Franklin’s name, and many forks and spoons with the initials of his officers.