und continent first felt the abiding foot of the stranger--from
Oglethorpe to Acadia, reveals, alas! no Utopia. It remained for a
later time,--the earlier half of the present century, amid some severity
of climate, and under conditions without precedent, and incapable of
repetition,--to evolve a community in the heart of the continent, shut
away from intercourse with civilized mankind--that slowly crystalized
into a form beyond the ideal of the dreamers--a community, in the past,
known but slightly to the outer world as the Red River Settlement, which
is but the bygone name for the one Utopia of Britain--the clear-cut
impress of an exceptional people living under conditions of excellence
unthought of by themselves until they had passed away.

THE UTOPIAN COLONY.

A people, whose name in the vast domain, was in days by gone, sought out
and coveted by all. Unknown races had rested here and gone away, leaving
only their careful graves behind them. The "Mandans"--the brave, the
fair, the beautiful, and the "Cheyennes," pressed by the "Nay-he-owuk,"
and the "Assin-a-pau-tuk," had quitted their earthen forts on the banks
of the streams and urged their way to the broader tide of the Missouri.
More fatal to the conquerors came afterward, the white man, "Nemesis" of
all Indian life, spying with the instinct of his race, a spot of
abounding fertility, where the great water-reaches stretched from the
mountains to the sea, and southward touched almost the beginning of the
great River of the Gulf.

Quick changing his errant camp for barter into a stronghold for the
trade, making the "Niste-y-ak" of the "Crees" his settled home, the
white man's grasp of the fair domain but grew with years. From the seas
of the far north came with the men, fair-haired, blue-eyed women and
children. The glamour of the spot, the teeming soil, the great and
lesser game, that swam past,--or wandered by their doors--soon drew to
this Mecca of the Plains and Waters--the roving, scattered children of
the trade--Bourgeois and voyageur alike heading their lithe and dusky
broods. Here touched and fused all habitudes of life, the blended races,
knit by ties conserving every divergence of pursuit, all forms of faith
and thought, free from assail or taint begotten of contact with aught
other than themselves. A people whose unchecked primal freedom was
afterward strengthened by the light hand of laws that conserved what
they most desired; whose personal relatio