to Fort Garry, and that a week would elapse before she
would start from her moorings below Georgetown, a. station of the Hudson
Bay Company situated 250 miles from St. Cloud. This was indeed the best
of good news to me; I saw in it the long-looked-for chance of bridging
this great stretch of 400 miles and reaching at last the Red River
Settlement. I saw in it still more the prospect of joining at no very
distant time the expeditionary force itself, after I had run the gauntlet
of M. Riel and his associates, and although many obstacles yet remained
to be overcome, and distances vast and wild had to be covered before that
hope could be realized, still the prospect of immediate movement overcame
every perspective difficulty; and glad indeed I was when from the top of
a well-horsed stage I saw the wooden houses of St. Cloud disappear
beneath the prairie behind me, and I bade good-bye for many a day to the
valley of the Mississippi,

CHAPTER SEVEN.

North Minnesota--A beautiful Land--Rival Savages-Abercrombie--News from
the North-Plans--A Lonely Shanty--The Red River--Prairies--Sunset--
Mosquitoes--Going North--A Mosquito Night--A Thunder-storm--A Prussian--
Dakota--I ride for it--The Steamer "International"--Pembina.

The stage-coach takes three days to run from St. Cloud to Fort
Abercrombie, about 180 miles. The road was tolerably good, and many
portions of the country were very beautiful to look at. On the second day
one reaches the height of land between the Mississippi and Red Rivers, a
region abounding in clear crystal lakes of every size and shape, the old
home of the great Sioux nation, the true Minnesota of their dreams.
Minnesota ("sky-coloured water"), how aptly did it describe that home
which was no longer theirs! They have left it for ever; the Norwegian and
the Swede now call it theirs, and nothing remains of the red man save
these sounding names of lake and river which long years ago he gave them.
Along the margins of these lakes many comfortable dwellings nestle
amongst oak openings and glades, and hill and valley are golden in
summer with fields of wheat and corn, and little towns are springing up
where twenty years ago the Sioux lodge-poles were the only signs of
habitation; but one cannot look on this transformation without feeling,
with Longfellow, the terrible surge of the white man, "whose breath, like
the blast of the east wind, drifts evermore to the west the scanty smoke
of the wigwams." Wh