The late Paul Kane, author of _Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America_, informed me that when travelling beyond the Rocky Mountains he found no difficulty in transmitting his correspondence home, even when among the rudest Flathead savages. His packet, entrusted to one of the tribe, was accompanied with a small gift of tobacco, and the request to have it forwarded to Fort Garry, or other Hudson Bay fort. The messenger—Cowlitz, Chinook, Nasquallie, or other Indian,—carried it to the frontier of his own hunting-grounds, and then sold it for so much tobacco to some Indian of another tribe; by him it was passed on, by like process of barter, till it crossed the Rocky Mountains into the territory of the Blackfeet, the Crees, and so onward to its destination, in full confidence that the officers of the Hudson Bay Fort would sustain the credit of the White Medicine-man (for so the painter was regarded), and redeem the packet at its full value in tobacco or other equivalent. The personal interests of the little bands of European fur-traders thus settled in the heart of a wilderness, and surrounded by savage hunters, no less strongly prompted them to exclude the maddening fire-water from the vast regions under their control. Guns and ammunition, kettles, axes, knives, beads, and other trinkets, with the no less prized tobacco, were abundantly provided for barter. Even nails and the iron hoops of their barrels were traded with the Indians, and displaced the primitive tomahawk and arrow head of flint or stone. Thus, curiously, the Stone period of a people still in the most primitive stage of barbarism has been superseded by the use of metals obtained solely by barter, and without any advance either in the knowledge of metallurgy, or in the mastery of the arts which lie at the foundation of all civilisation. Long before the advent of Europeans, the Chippeways along the shores of Lake Superior had been familiar with the native copper which abounds there in the condition of pure metal. But they knew it only as a kind of malleable stone; nor have they even now learned the application of fire in their simple metallurgic processes. The root of their names for iron and copper is the same abstract term, _wahbik_, used only in compound words, and apparently in the sense of rock or stone. _Pewahbik_ is iron; _ozahwahbik_, copper, literally the yellow stone. It formed no part of the Hudson Bay traders’ aim to advance him beyond the stage of a savage hunter. It was incompatible with the interests of the fur-trader to teach him any higher use of the rich prairie land than that of a wilderness inhabited by fur-bearing animals, or a grazing ground for the herds of buffalo which furnished their annual supply of pemmican; or to familiarise him with more of the borrowed arts of civilisation than helped to facilitate the accumulation of peltries in the factory stores. Hence the intrusive Europeans and the