The Great Lone Land: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of AmericaButler, William Francis, Sir
History
The Great Lone Land: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America
Butler, William Francis, Sir
Northwest, Canadian -- Description and travel
I only remained one day at Victoria, and the 25th of November found me
again en route for Edmonton. Our Cree had, however, disappeared. One
night when he was eating his supper with his scalping-knife--a knife, by
the way, with which he had taken, he informed us, three Black feet scalps
--I asked him why he had come away with us from Battle River. Because he
wanted to get rid of his wife, of whom he was tired, he replied. He had
come off without saying any thing to her. "And what will happen to the
wife?" I asked. "Oh, she will marry another brave when she finds me
gone," he answered, laughing at the idea. I did not enter into the
previous domestic events which had led to this separation, but I presume
they were of a nature similar to those which are not altogether unknown
in more civilized society, and I make no hesitation in offering to our
legislators the example of my friend the Cree as tending to simplify the
solution, or rather the dissolution, of that knotty point, the separation
of couples who, for reasons best known to themselves, have ceased to
love. Whether it was that the Cree found in Victoria a lady suitad to his
fancy, or whether he had heard of a war-party against the Sircies, I
cannot say, but he vanished during the night of our stay in the fort, and
we saw him no more.
As we journeyed on towards Edmonton the country maintained its rich and
beautiful appearance, and the weather continued fine and mild. Every
where nature had written in unmistakable characters the story of the
fertility of the soil over which we rode--every where the eye looked upon
panoramas filled with the beauty of lake and winding river, and grassy
slope and undulating woodland. The whole face of the country was indeed
one vast park. For two days we passed through this beautiful land,-and on
the evening of the 28th November drew near to Edmonton. My party had been
increased by the presence of two gentlemen from Victoria, a Wesleyan
minister and the Hudson Bay official in charge of the Company's post at
that place. Both of these gentlemen had resided long in the Upper
Saskatchewan, and were intimately acquainted with the tribes who inhabit
The vast territory from the Rocky Mountains to Carlton House. It was late
in the evening, just one month after I had started from the banks of the
Red River, that I approached the high palisades of Edmonton. As one who
looks back at evening from the summit of some lofty ridge over the long
track which he has followed since the morning, so now did my mind travel
back over the immense distance through which I had ridden in twenty-two
days of actual travel and in thirty-three of the entire journey-that
distance could not have been less than 1000 miles; and as each camp scene
rose again before me, with its surrounding of snow and storm-swept
prairie and lonely clump of aspens, it seemed as though something like
infinite space stretched between me and that far-away land which one word
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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