The Authors have been anxious to give a faithful account of their travels and adventures amongst the prairies, forests, and mountains of the Far West, and have studiously endeavoured to preserve the greatest accuracy in describing countries previously little known. But one of the principal objects they have had in view has been to draw attention to the vast importance of establishing a highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the British possessions; not only as establishing a connection between the different English colonies in North America, but also as affording a means of more rapid and direct communication with China and Japan. Another advantage which would follow--no less important than the preceding--would be the opening out and colonisation of the magnificent regions of the Red River and Saskatchewan, where 65,000 square miles of a country of unsurpassed fertility, and abounding in mineral wealth, lies isolated from the world, neglected, almost unknown, although destined, at no distant period perhaps, to become one of the most valuable possessions of the British Crown. The idea of a route across the northern part of the Continent is not a new one. The project was entertained by the early French settlers in Canada, and led to the discovery of the Rocky Mountains. It has since been revived and ably advocated by Professor Hind and others, hitherto without success. The favourite scheme of geographers in this country for the last three centuries has been the discovery of a North-West Passage by sea, as the shortest route to the rich countries of the East. The discovery has been made, but in a commercial point of view it has proved valueless. We have attempted to show that the original idea of the French Canadians was the right one, and that the true North-West Passage is by land, along the fertile belt of the Saskatchewan, leading through British Columbia to the splendid harbour of Esquimalt, and the great coal-fields of Vancouver Island, which offer every advantage for the protection and supply of a merchant fleet trading thence to India, China, and Japan.