marked out in the great northern unsettled
district under the names of Franklin, Mackenzie, Yukon, and Ungava.

[Illustration: Fort Garry and a Red River steamboat in 1870.]

In the course of a few years a handsome, well-built city arose on the
site of old Fort Garry, and with the construction of the Canadian
Pacific Railway--a national highway built with a rapidity remarkable
even in these days of extraordinary commercial enterprise--and the
connection of the Atlantic sea-board with the Pacific shores, villages
and towns have extended at distant intervals across the continent, from
Port Arthur to Vancouver, the latter place an instance of western
phenomenal growth. Stone and brick buildings of fine architectural
proportions, streets paved and lit by electricity, huge elevators, busy
mills, are the characteristics of {393} some towns where only yesterday
brooded silence, and the great flowery stretches of prairie were only
crushed by the feet of wandering Indians and voyageurs.

Fourteen years after the formation of the province of Manitoba, whilst
the Canadian Pacific Railway was in the course of construction, the
peace of the territories was again disturbed by risings of half-breeds
in the South Saskatchewan district, chiefly at Duck Lake, St. Laurent,
and Batoche. Many of these men had migrated from Manitoba to a country
where they could follow their occupation of hunting and fishing, and
till little patches of ground in that shiftless manner characteristic
of the _Metis_. The total number of half-breeds in the Saskatchewan
country were probably four thousand, of whom the majority lived in the
settlements just named. These people had certain land grievances, the
exact nature of which it is not easy even now to ascertain; but there
is no doubt that they laboured under the delusion that, because there
was much red-tapeism and some indifference at Ottawa in dealing with
their respective claims, there was a desire or intention to treat them
with injustice. Conscious that they might be crowded out by the
greater energy and enterprise of white settlers--that they could no
longer depend on their means of livelihood in the past, when the
buffalo and other game were plentiful, these restless, impulsive,
illiterate people were easily led to believe that their only chance of
redressing their real or fancied wrongs was such a rising as had taken
place on the Red River in {394} 1869. It is believed that English
settlers i