ill lose their fine appearance. Let
us keep them as ornaments. These oxen now are fat and good. If we
fasten them up to these heavy ploughs, and make them drag them through
the ground, they will soon get poor and not fit for food. Let us make a
great feast." So they killed the oxen, and invited all of the
surrounding Indians to join them, and as long as a piece of meat was
left the pots were kept boiling.

Thus ended, just as many other efforts of the kind have ended, this
effort to civilise the Indians before Christianising them.

We found that almost in proportion to the genuineness of the Indian's
acceptance of the Gospel was his desire to improve his temporal
circumstances. Of course there were some places where the Indians could
not cultivate the land. We were four hundred miles north of the fertile
prairies of the great western part of the Dominion of Canada, where
perhaps a hundred millions of people will yet find happy times. From
these wondrously fertile regions my Nelson River Indians were at least
six hundred miles north. As hunters and fishermen these men, and those
at Oxford Mission, and indeed nearly all in those high latitudes, must
live. But where there was land to cultivate the Indians had their
gardens and little fields.

I carried out with me four potatoes. I did not get them in the ground
until the 6th of August. Yet in the short season left I succeeded in
raising a few little ones. These I carefully packed in cotton wool and
kept safe from the frost. The next year I got from them a pailful. The
yield the third year was six bushels, and the fourth year one hundred
and twenty-five bushels; and before I left the Indians were raising
thousands of bushels from those four potatoes. They had had some
before, but there had been some neglect, and they had run out.

One summer I carried out, in a little open boat from Red River, a good
Scotch iron beam plough. The next winter, when I came in to the
District Meeting, I bought a bag of wheat containing two bushels and a
half; and I got also thirty-two iron harrow teeth. I dragged these
things, with many others, including quite an assortment of garden seeds,
on my dog-trains, all the way to Norway House. I harnessed eight dogs
to my plough, and ploughed up my little fields; and, after making a
harrow, I harrowed in my wheat with the dogs. The first year I had
thirty bushels of beautiful wheat. This I cut with a sickle, and then
thrashed