Sir William Francis Butler

“ The great ocean itself does not present more infinite variety than does this prairie-ocean of which we speak. In winter, a dazzling surface-of purest snow; in early summer, a vast expanse of grass and pale pink roses; in autumn too often a-wild sea of raging-fire. No ocean of water in the world can vie with its gorgeous sunsets;--no solitude can equal the loneliness of a night-shadowed prairie: one feels the stillness, and hears the silence, the wail of the prowling wolf makes the voice of solitude audible, the stars look down through infinite silence upon a silence almost as intense. ”

“ The hill up which the horses scrambled for a thousand feet was blue with wild anemones; spring was in the earth and in the air. Cerf-vola raced in front, with tail so twisted over his back that it threatened to dislocate his spine in a frantic attempt to get in front of his nose. The earth, bare of snow, gave forth a delicious fragrance, which one drank with infinite delight after the long, long scentless winter; and over the white river below, and the pine forest beyond, summer, dressed in blue sky and golden sunbeam, came moving gently up on the wing of the soft south wind. ”

“ From one of the westward jutting spurs of the Touchwood Hills the eye sees far away over an immense plain; the sun goes down, and as he sinks upon the earth the straight line of the horizon becomes visible for a moment across this blood red disc, but so distant, so far away, that it seems dream like in its immensity. There is not a sound in the air or on the earth; on every side lie spread the relics of the great fight waged by man against the brute creation: all is silent and deserted--the Indian and the buffalo gone, the settler not yet come. ”

“ When the news of this battle reached England, the entire nation cried out with one voice for Charles Napier at the helm of India, and of all the bitter draughts ever swallowed by any Honourable Company of Traders assuredly the bitterest was this forced acceptance as their Commander-in-Chief of the man whom now for six years they had been assailing in public and in private throughout the entire English empire. All honest England laughed loud at their discomfiture. Every real man welcomed with joy the triumph of the old hero over his treacherous and powerful foes. ”

“ No book has told the story, no picture has caught the colouring of sky and plain, no sound can echo back the music of that untainted breeze, sighing so mournfully through the yellow grass, but all the same the vision returns without one effort of remembrance: the vast plain snow-wrapt, the west ablaze with gold, and green, and saffron, and colours never classed or catalogued, while the horizon circle from north to east and south grows dim and indistinct, and, far off, the bison herd in long, scattered file trails slowly across the blue-white snow into the caverns of the sunset. ”

“ And they knew that though this small, spare, eagle-beaked and falcon-eyed leader worked them till they dropped beneath the fierce sun of Scinde, there was no heat of sun or fatigue of march or press of battle which he did not take his lion's share of. Even when now, in this autumn of 1843, an enemy more formidable to soldiers attacked them, when the deadliest fever stalked through the rough camps along the Indus, and the graveyards grew as the ranks thinned, no murmur rose from the rank and file, but silently the fate was accepted which sent hundreds of them to an inglorious death. ”

“ The hauling-dogs day is a long tissue of trial. While yet the night is in its small hours, and the aurora is beginning to think of hiding its trembling lustre in the earliest dawn, the hauling-dog has his slumber rudely broken by the summons of his driver. Poor beast! All night long he has lain curled up in the roundest of round balls hard by the camp; there, in the lea of tree-stumps or snow-drift, he has dreamt the dreams of peace and comfort. If the night has been one of storm, the fast-falling flakes have added to his sense of warmth by covering him completely beneath them. ”

“ The seasons come and go; grass grows and flowers die; the fire leaps with tiger bounds along the earth; the snow lies still and quiet over hill and lake; the rivers rise and fall, but the rigid features of the wilderness rest unchanged. Lonely, silent, and impassive; heedless of man, season, or time, the weight of the Infinite seems to brood over it. Once only in the hours of day and night a moment comes when this impassive veil is drawn from its features, and the eye of the wanderer catches a glimpse of the sunken soul of the wilderness; it is the moment which follows the sunset ”

“ From him Charles Napier learned a thousand lessons of truth and justice, of honour in arms, of simplicity in life, of steady purpose, of hatred for pomp and show and empty-headed pride, of pity for the poor, of sympathy with the oppressed, of fearless independence of character, which those who care to follow us through these pages will find growing in profusion along the pathway of his life, plants none of which ever withered from the moment they were planted in these youthful days, but many of which were only to blossom into full luxuriance in the autumn of existence. ”

“ In the centre ran a rush of water that nothing could stem. Poling, paddling, clinging with hands and nails to the rock; often beaten back and always edging up again, we crept slowly along under the overhanging cliff, which leaned out two hundred feet above us to hold upon its dizzy verge some clinging pine-tree. In the centre of the chasm, about half a mile from its mouth, a wild cataract of foam forbade our passage; but after a whole morning’s labour we succeeded in bringing the canoe safely to the foot of this rapid, and moored her in a quiet eddy behind a sheltering rock. ”

“ It is not a boat, it is a house; it can be carried long distances over land from lake to lake. It is frail beyond words, yet you can load it down to the water's edge; it carries the Indian by day, it shelters him by night; in it he will steer boldly out into a vast lake where land is unseen, or paddle through mud and swamp or reedy shallows; sitting in it, he gathers his harvest of wild rice and catches his fish or shoots his game; it will dash down a foaming rapid, brave a fiercely-rushing torrent, or lie like a sea-bird on the placid water. ”

“ Great lives have two lessons—one for the class to which the life belonged, the other to the nation which gave it birth. The latter is the lesson of paramount importance; for as the past is ever a mirror held up to the present in which to read the future, so the life of a dead hero may be said to mark for statesmen and rulers the rocks and shallows of their system of government. Never perhaps did a nation pay more swiftly and to the full the penalty of being blind to the real nature of the son which had been born to her than did England in her neglect of Napier. ”

“ The years that followed the casting away of the fearless Hudson saw strange vessels coasting the misty shores of that weird sea; at first, to seek through its bergs and ice floes, its dreary cloud-wrapt fiords and inlets, a passage to the land where ceaseless sunshine glinted on the spice-scented shores of fabulous Cathay; and later on, to trade with the savages who clad themselves in skins, which the fairest favourites of Whitehall or the Louvre (by a strange extreme wherein savagery joined hands with civilization) would be proud to wrap round their snowy shoulders. ”

“ There sounds ahead a roar of falling water, and we see, upon rounding some pine-clad island or ledge of rock, a tumbling mass of foam and spray studded with projecting rocks and flanked by dark wooded shores; above we can see nothing, but below the waters, maddened by their wild rush amidst the rocks, surge and leap in angry whirlpools. It is as wild a scene of crag and wood and water as the eye can gaze upon, but we look upon it not for its beauty, because there is no time for that, but because it is an enemy that must be conquered. ”

“ Some fifty miles west of St. John, the Peace River issues from the cañon through which it passes the outer range of the Rocky Mountains. No boat, canoe, or craft of any kind has ever run the gauntlet of this huge chasm; for five-and-thirty miles it lies deep sunken through the mountains; while from its depths there ever rises the hoarse roar of the angry waters as they dash furiously against their rocky prison. A trail of ten miles leads across this portage, and at the western end of this trail the river is reached close to where it makes its first plunge into the rock-hewn chasm. ”

“ Year by year the great torrent of flame moves on deeper and deeper into the dark ranks of the solemn-standing pines; year by year a wider region is laid open to the influences of sun and shower, and soon the traces of the conflict are hidden beneath the waving grass, and clinging vetches, and the clumps of tufted prairie roses. But another species of vegetation also springs up in the track of the fire; groves of aspens and poplars grow out of the burnt soil, giving to the country that park-like appearance already spoken of. ”

“ We may well ask the question where can they come from? for in truth the vast expanse of the great prairie seems too small to save them from their relentless foes.
The creek of the Eagle Hills winds through the prairie in long, lazy bends. The beaver has made his home under its banks; and in some of the serpentine bends the bastard maple lifts its gnarled trunk, and the willow copses grow thickly. It is a favourite ground for the hunter in summer; but now, in mid-November, no sign of man was visible, and we had the little thicket oasis all to ourselves. ”

“ From the estuary of the Mackenzie to the Lake of Mexico no point of the American continent reaches higher to the skies. That eternal crust of snow seeks in summer widely-severed oceans. The Mackenzie, the Columbia, and the Saskatchewan spring from the peaks whose teeth-like summits lie grouped from this spot into the compass of a single glance. The clouds that cast their moisture upon this long line of upheaven rocks seek again the ocean which gave them birth in its far-separated divisions of Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic. ”

“ Yet in this view from the Spathanaw there is nothing dimly seen; the eye travels to the farthest distance without one effort of vision, and, reaching there, rests untired by its long gaze. As the traveller looks at this wonderful view he stands by the grave of an Indian, and he sees around him for four hundred miles the Indian Paradise. It was from scenes such as this, when the spring had covered them with greensward, and the wild herds darkened them by their myriads, that the shadowy sense of a life beyond the tomb took shape and form in the Red man’s mind. ”

“ Close by to the south lay the country of the great Blackfeet nation--that wild, restless tribe whose name has been a terror to other tribes and to trader and trapper for many and many a year. Who and what are these wild dusky men who have held their own against all comers, sweeping like a whirlwind over the sand deserts of the central continent? They speak a tongue distinct from all other Indian tribes; they have ceremonies and feasts wholly different, too, from the feasts and ceremonies of other nations; they are at war with every nation that touches the wide circle of their boundaries ”

“ These islands which we call “home” are far away; afar off we idealize them, in the forest depths we dream bright visions of their firesides of welcome; in the snow-sheeted lake, and the icy stretch of river, and the motionless muskeg, how sweetly sound the notes of brook and bird; how brightly rise the glimpses of summer eves when the white mists float over the scented meadows, and the corn-craik sounds from his lair in the meadow-sweet! ”

“ They are the poor wild birds whose country has cast them off, and who repay her by offering their lives for her glory; the men who take the shilling, who drink, who drill, who march to music, who fill the graveyards of Asia; the men who stand sentry at the gates of world-famous fortresses, who are old when their elder brothers are still young, who are bronzed and burned by fierce suns, who sail over seas packed in great masses, who watch at night over lonely magazines, who shout, "Who comes there?" ”

“ Solid under its weight of ice, four feet in thickness, it would yet lie for days in motionless torpor. Snow might fly from sky and hill-top, prairie and forest might yield to the soft coming spring; but like a skilful general grim winter only drew off his forces from outlying points to make his last stand in the intrenchments of the frozen river.
From the summit of the steep hill, whose scarped front looks down upon the little huts of Dunvegan, the eye travels over many a mile of wilderness, but no hill top darkens the far horizon ”

“ There are many who have seen a prisoned lark sitting on its perch, looking listlessly through the bars, from some brick wall against which its cage was hung; but at times, when the spring comes round, and a bit of grassy earth is put into the narrow cage, and, in spite of smoke and mist, the blue sky looks a moment on the foul face of the city, the little prisoner dreams himself free, and, with eyes fixed on the blue sky and feet clasping the tiny turf of green sod, he pours forth into the dirty street those notes which nature taught him in the never-to-be-forgotten days of boundless freedom. ”

“ Shasta is a loftier mountain than any that frown above the Peace River Pass. Yosemite can boast its half-dozen waterfalls, trickling down their thousand feet of rock; but for wild beauty, for the singular spectacle of a great river flowing tranquilly through a stupendous mountain range,—these mountains presenting at every reach a hundred varied aspects,—not the dizzy glory of Shasta nor the rampart precipices of Yosemite can vie with that lonely gorge far away on the great Unchagah. ”

“ For the Winnipeg by the multiplicity of its perils and the ever-changing beauty of its character, defies the description of civilized men as it defies the puny efforts of civilized travel. It seems part of the savage-fitted alone for him and for his ways, useless to carry the burden of man's labour, but useful to shelter the wild things of wood and water which dwell in its waves and along its shores. And the red man who steers his little birch-bark canoe through the foaming rapids of the Winnipeg, how well he knows its various ways! ”

“ From the low terrace along the shore they rose in stupendous masses; their lower ridges clothed in forests of huge spruce, poplar, and birch; their middle heights covered in dense thickets of spruce alone; their summits cut into a thousand varied peaks, bare of all vegetation, but bearing aloft into the sunshine 8000 feet above us the glittering crowns of snow which, when evening stilled the breezes, shone reflected in the quiet waters, vast and motionless.
Wonderful things to look at are these white peaks, perched up so high above our world. They belong to us, yet they are not of us. ”

“ I know that with that low brutality which has ever made the Anglo-Saxon race deny its enemy the possession of one atom of generous sensibility, that dull enmity which prompted us to paint the Maid of Orleans a harlot, and to call Napoleon the Corsican robber--I know that that same instinct glories in degrading the savage, whose chief crime is that he prefers death to slavery; glories in painting him devoid of every trait of manhood, worthy only to share the fate of the wild beast of the wilderness--to be shot down mercilessly when seen. ”

“ You are tired by a thirty-mile march on snow shoes. You have lain down with stiffened limbs and blistered feet, and sleep comes to you by the mere force of your fatigue; but never goes the consciousness of the cold from your waking brain; and as you lie with crossed arms and up-gathered knees beneath your buffalo robe, you welcome as a benefactor any short-haired, shivering dog who may be forced from his lair in the snow to seek a few hours’ sleep upon the outside of your blankets. ”

“ Among the Indians the lake holds high place as the favourite haunt of the Manitou. The strange water-worn rocks, the islands of soft pipe-stone from which are cut the bowls for many a calumet, the curious masses of ore resting on the polished surface of rock, the islands struck yearly by lightning, the islands which abound in lizards although these reptiles are scarce elsewhere--all these make the Lake of the Woods a region abounding in Indian legend and superstition. There are isles upon which he will not dare to venture, because the evil spirit has chosen them ”

“ It has seemed to us when watching this strange, wild hunter, this keen, untutored scholar of nature, this human creature that sickens beneath our civilization, and dies midst our prosperity—it has seemed to us that he was of a race older and more remote than our own, a stock coeval with a shadowy age—a remnant, perchance, of an earlier creation which has vanished from the earth, preserved here in these wilds—a waif flung by the surge of time to these later ages of our own. ”

“ Blue mountain, far stretching river, foaming cascade, the white sails of ocean ships, the black trunks of many-sized guns, the pointed roofs, the white village nestling amidst its fields of green, the great isle in mid-channel, the many shades of colour from deep blue pine-wood to yellowing corn-field in what other spot on the earth's broad bosom lie grouped together in a single glance so many of these "things of beauty" which the eye loves to feast on and to place in memory as joys-for ever? ”

“ In summer, a land of sound, a land echoing with the voices of birds, the ripple of running water, the mournful music of the waving pine-branch; in winter, a land of silence, a land hushed to its inmost depths by the weight of ice, the thick-falling snow, the intense rigour of a merciless cold—its great rivers glimmering in the moonlight, wrapped in their shrouds of ice ”

“ To say that the Winnipeg River has an immense volume of water, that it descends 360 feet in a distance of 160 miles, that it is full of eddies and whirlpools, of every variation of waterfall from chutes to cataracts, that it expands into lonely pine edged lakes and far-reaching island-studded bays, that its bed is cumbered with immense wave-polished rocks, that its vast solitudes are silent and its cascades ceaselessly active--to say all this is but to tell in bare items of fact the narrative of its beauty. ”

“ Athabasca trades to-day the skins of nearly 2000 moose in a single year. Few animals are more unshapely than this giant deer. His neck slopes down from the shoulder, ending in a head as large as a horse—a head which ends in a nose curled like a camel’s—a nose delicious to the taste, but hideous to the eye. The ears are of enormous length. Yet, ugly as are the nose and ears of the moose, they are his chief means of protection against his enemy, and in that great ungainly head there lurks a brain of marvellous cunning. ”

“ The excitement of the last few hours steering by the stars in an unknown country, and its most successful denouement, had put fatigue and weariness in the background; and as we sat down to a well-cooked supper of buffalo steaks and potatoes, with the brightest eyed little lassie, half Cree, half Scotch, in the North-west to wait upon us, while a great fire of pine wood blazed and crackled on the open hearth, I couldn't help saying to my companions, "Well, this is better than your hill-top and the fireless bivouac in the rustling willows." ”

“ Then begins the cold; it has been bitterly cold all day, with darkness; the wind has lulled, and the frost has come out of the cold, grey sky with still, silent rigour. If you have a thermometer placed in the snow at your head the spirit will have shrunken back into the twenties and thirties below zero; and just when the dawn is stealing over the eastern pine tops it will not unfrequently be into the forties. ”

“ The pine-trees standing in inky blackness the rushing water, white with foam-above, the rifted thunder-clouds. Soon the lightning began to flash and the voice of the thunder to sound above the roar of the cataract. My Indians made me a rough shelter with cross-poles and a sail-cloth, and, huddling themselves together under the upturned canoe, we slept regardless of the storm.
I was ninety miles from Fort Garry, and as yet no tidings of the Expedition.
A man may journey very far through the lone spaces of the earth without meeting with another Winnipeg River. ”

“ At times the trail led up the steep face of the outer hill to the plateau above, and then a rich view would lie beneath—a view so vast with the glories of the snowy range, and so filled with nearer river and diamond-shaped island, that many a time I drew rein upon some lofty standpoint to look, as one looks upon things which we would fain carry away into the memory of an after-time. ”