The contrast presented in emerging from the mountain ranges on to the level country is very remarkable. For hundreds of miles we pass through an almost uninhabited, treeless country, a long, long reach of prairie as boundless as the sea, and where no more of human life is seen than on the ocean. There are no hills, scarcely any undulations; the sun rises apparently out of the ground in the early gray of the morning, and sets in the endless level of the prairie at night. Small stations, twenty or thirty miles apart, have been built by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, consisting of a dwelling-house and a water-tank for the necessary supply of its engines, but the line is thus characterized through a thousand miles, where there is no way travel, and no local business, outside of its own necessities. The inference is plain that it crosses this distance at extraordinary expense, which must be supported by the terminal business on the Pacific and Atlantic ends of the road. The Cree and Blackfeet tribes are said to have no religion and few superstitions, being a restless, dangerous race, ranking very low in point of intelligence, even as savages. The efforts of the missionaries, we were told, have entirely failed to civilize or even permanently to improve the condition of the two tribes we have named. The women are hideously ugly, smeared with vermilion, and weighed down with cheap brass rings and bracelets of the same metal. The one article of sale offered to the traveler by these tribes is the polished horns of the buffalo, picked up upon the vast prairies of this region where they have been bleaching for many years. These are colored black by some process, and when highly polished are mounted in pairs, as they are placed by nature on the animal’s head.