obile_; from earliest days the sensational mover of civilized man,
and not unlikely to remain so until our old planet capsizes again,
and the poles become the equator with troglodites for inhabitants.
No barriers seem insurmountable to this rampant spirit; and,
urged by it, the gold-seekers, chiefly aliens from the United
States, plunged into the wilderness of Athabasca without
hesitation, and without as much as "by your leave" to the
native. Some of these marauders, as was to be expected,
exhibited on the way a congenital contempt for the Indian's
rights. At various places his horses were killed, his dogs shot,
his bear-traps broken up. An outcry arose in consequence, which
inevitably would have led to reprisals and bloodshed had not the
Government stepped in and forestalled further trouble by a prompt
recognition of the native's title. Hitherto he had been content
with his lot in these remote wildernesses, and well might he be!
One of the vast river systems of the Continent, perhaps the
greatest of them all, considering the area drained, teeming
with fish, and alive with fur and antler, was his home--a
region which furnished him in abundance with the means of life,
not to speak of such surplus of luxuries as was brought to his
doors by his old and paternal friend, "John Company." His wants
were simple, his life healthy, though full of toil, his appetite
great--an appetite which throve upon what it fed, and gave rise
to fabulous feats of eating, recalling the exploits of the
beloved and big-bellied Ben of nursery lore.

But the spirit of change was brooding even here. The moose, the
beaver and the bear had for years been decreasing, and other
fur-bearing animals were slowly but surely lessening with them.
The natives, aware of this, were now alive, as well, to concurrent
changes foreign to their experience. Recent events had awakened
them to a sense of the value the white man was beginning to
place upon their country as a great storehouse of mineral and
other wealth, enlivened otherwise by the sensible decrease of
their once unfailing resources. These events were, of course,
the Government borings for petroleum, the formation of parties
to prospect, with a view to developing, the minerals of Great Slave
Lake, but, above all, the inroad of gold-seekers by way of Edmonton.
The latter was viewed with great mistrust by the Indians, the
outrages referred to showing, like straws in the wind, the
inevitable drift of things