There is a family to each cart,--father, mother, and a troop of frowzy-headed, brown-faced children, who, though shoeless and hatless and half naked, are as happy as the larks singing in the meadows, or the plover skimming the air on quivering wings. They travel in companies,--fifteen or twenty carts in a caravan. When night comes on, the animals are turned out to graze; the families cook each their own scanty supply of food, smoke their pipes by the glimmering camp-fire, tell their stories of adventure among the buffaloes, roll themselves in a blanket, creep beneath their carts,--all the family in a pile if the night is cool,--sleep soundly, and are astir before daylight, and on the move by sunrise. The journey down and back is between eight and nine hundred miles; and as the average distance travelled is only about twenty miles a day, it takes from forty to fifty days to make the round trip. No wonder the people of that settlement are anxious to have a railroad reach the Red River. Leaving the Pembina road and striking westward to the river, we descend the bank to the bottom-land, which is usually about twenty-five feet below the general surface of the valley. We cross the river by a rope ferry kept by a half-breed, and strike out upon the Dakota plain. The trail that we are upon bears northwest, and is the main road to Fort Totten, near Lake Miniwakan, or the "Devil's Lake," and the forts on the Upper Missouri. Here, as upon the Minnesota side, the wild-flowers are blooming in luxuriance. Our horses remorselessly trample the roses, the convolvulus, and the lilies beneath their feet. The prairie chickens are whirring in every direction, and one of our bluff and burly teamsters, who is at home upon the prairies, who in the First Minnesota Regiment faced the Rebels in all the battles of the Peninsula, who was in the thickest of the fight at Gettysburg, who has hunted Indians over the Upper Missouri region, who is as keen-sighted as a hawk, takes the grouse right and left as they rise. His slouched hat bobs up and down everywhere. He seems to know just where the game is; now he is at your right hand, now upon the run a half-mile away upon the prairies. He stops, raises his gun,--there is a puff of smoke, another, and he has two more chickens in his bag. We are sure of having good suppers as long as he is about. We reach Dakota City,--another thriving town of one log-house,--peopled by Monsieur Marchaud, a French Canadian, his Chippewa wife and twelve children. While our tents are being pitched, we cross the river by another ferry to Georgetown,--a place consisting of two dwellings and a large storehouse owned by the Hudson Bay Company. This is the present steamboat landing, though sometimes the one steamer now on the river goes up to Fort Abercrombie. The river is narrow and winding south of this point, and not well adapted to navigation.