egan to barter for carts, oxen, ponies, and dried
deer-meat or pemmican. An ox and cart cost from forty to fifty
dollars. Ponies sold at twenty-five dollars. Pemmican cost sixteen
cents a pound, and a pair of duffel Hudson's Bay blankets cost eight or
ten dollars. Instead of blankets, many of the travellers bought the
cheaper buffalo robes. These sold as low as a dollar each.

John Black, the Presbyterian 'apostle of the Red River,' preached
special sermons on Sunday for the miners. And on a beautiful June
afternoon the Overlanders headed towards the setting sun in a
procession of almost a hundred ox-carts; and the fort waved them
farewell. One wonders whether, as the last ox-cart creaked into the
distance, the fur-traders realized that the miner heralded the settler,
and that the settler would fence off the hunter's game preserve into
farms and cities. A rare glamour lay over the plains {58} that June,
not the less rare because hope beckoned the travellers. The unfenced
prairie billowed to the horizon a sea of green, diversified by the
sky-blue waters of slough and lake, and decked with the hues of
gorgeous flowers--the prairie rose, fragrant, tender, elusive, and
fragile as the English primrose; the blood-red tiger-lily; the brown
windflower with its corn-tassel; the heavy wax cups of the sedgy
water-lily, growing where wild duck flackered unafraid. Game was
superabundant. Prairie chickens nestled along the single-file trail.
Deer bounded from the poplar thickets and shy coyotes barked all night
in the offing. Night in June on the northern prairie is but the
shadowy twilight between two long days. The sun sets between nine and
ten, and rises between three and four, and the moonlight is clear
enough on cloudless nights for campers to see the time on their watches.

[Illustration: A Red River cart. From a photograph.]

The trail followed was the old path of the fur-trader from fort to fort
'the plains across' to the Rockies. From the Assiniboine the road ran
northerly to Forts Ellice and Carlton and Pitt and Edmonton.[1] Thomas
M'Micking {59} of Niagara acted as captain and eight others as
lieutenants. A scout preceded the marchers, and at sundown camp was
formed in a big triangle with the carts as a stockade, the animals
tethered or hobbled inside. Tents were pitched outside with six men
doing sentry duty all night. At two in the morning a halloo roused
camp. An hour was permitted for harnessing a