rica.

Hitherto it maybe said that the Crees have looked upon the white man as
their friend, but latterly indications have not been wanting to
foreshadow a change in this respect--a change which I. have found many
causes to account for, and which, if the Saskatchewan remains in its
present condition, must, I fear, deepen into more positive enmity. The
buffalo, the red man's sole means of subsistence, is rapidly
disappearing; year by year the prairies, which once shook beneath the
tread of countless herds of bisons, are becoming denuded of animal life,
and year by year the affliction of starvation comes with an
ever-increasing intensity upon the land. There are men still living who
remember to have hunted buffalo on the shores of Lake Manitoba. It is
scarcely twelve years since Fort Ellice, on the Assineboine River, formed
one of the principal posts of supply for the Hudson Bay Company; and the
vast prairies which flank the southern and western spurs of the Touchwood
Hills, now utterly silent and deserted, are still white with the bones of
the migratory herds which, until lately, roamed over their surface.

Nor is this absence of animal life confined to the plains of the
Qu'Appelle and of the Upper Assineboine--all along the line of the North
Saskatchewan, from Carlton to Edmonton House, the same scarcity prevails;
and if further illustration of this decrease of buffalo be wanting, I
would state that, during the present winter, I have traversed the plains
from the Red River to the Rocky Mountains without seeing even one
solitary animal upon 1200 miles of prairie. The Indian is not slow to
attribute this lessening of his principal food to the presence of the
white and half-breed settlers, whose active competition for pemmican
(valuable as supplying the transport service of the Hudson Bay Company)
has led to this all but total extinction of the bison.

Nor does he fail to trace other grievances--some real, some imaginary-to
the same cause. Wherever the half-breed settler or hunter has established
himself he has resorted to the use of poison as a means of destroying the
wolves and foxes which were numerous on the prairies. This most
pernicious practice has had the effect of greatly embittering the Indians
against the settler, for not only have large numbers of animals been
uselessly destroyed, inasmuch as fully one-half the animals thus killed
are lost to the trapper, but also the poison is frequently communicated
to the