Sir William Francis Butler

“ North of California, and south of British Columbia, there lies a vast region. Rich in forest, prairie, snow-clad peak, alluvial meadow, hill pasture, and rolling table-land. It has all that nature can give a nation; its climate is that of England; its peaks are as lofty as Mont Blanc; its meadows as rich as the vales of Somerset.
The Spaniard knew it by repute, and named it Oregon, after the river which we call the Columbia. Oregon was at that time the entire west of the Rocky Mountains, to the north of California. Oregon had long been a mystic land, a realm of fable. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Alone in a vast waste the Spathanaw Watchi lifts his head, thickets and lakes are at his base, a lonely grave at top, around four hundred miles of horizon; a view so vast that endless space seems for once to find embodiment, and at a single glance the eye is satiated with immensity. There is no mountain range to come up across the sky-line, no river to lay its glistening folds along the middle distance, no dark forest to give shade to foreground or to fringe perspective, no speck of life, no track of man, nothing but the wilderness. ”

“ Once again we set out: debouching from the forest we entered a large marsh. Soon a lake, with low-lying shores, spread before us. Another marsh, another frozen river, and at last, a vast lake opened out upon our gaze. Islands, rocky, and clothed with pine-trees, rose from the snowy surface. To the east, nothing136 but a vast expanse of ice-covered sea, with a blue, cold sky-line; to the north, a shore of rocks and hills, wind-swept, and part covered with dwarf firs, and on the rising shore, the clustered buildings of a large fort, with a red flag flying above them in the cold north blast. ”

“ It was the last of October, just one day after my arrival at the Forks, when we turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. They were said to be a long way off—200 miles nearer to the setting sun—out somewhere on that great motionless ocean, where no tree, no bush breaks the vast expanse of prairie; land to which the wild men of the West and those who lead wild lives there have turned for many an age in search of that food which nature once so generously scattered over the plains of Central North America. ”

“ Neither could the reader enter into the joy with which, after such a day of toil and hardships, the traveller sees in the gloom the haven he has sought so long; it may be only a rude cabin with windows cut from the snow-drift or the moose-skin, it may be only a camp-fire in a pine clump, but nevertheless the lost wanderer hails with a feeling of intense joy the gleam which tells him of a resting-place; and as he stretches his weary limbs on the hut floor or the pine-bush, he laughs and jests over the misfortunes, fatigues, and fears, which but a short hour before were heartsickening enough. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nearly two millions of square miles formed their undivided domain; on three sides a forest boundary encircled it, on the fourth a great mountain range loomed up against the western sky. Through this enormous area countless creeks and rivers meandered through the meadows, where the prairie grass grew thick and rank, and the cotton woods spread their serpentine belts. Out in the vast prairie the Missouri, the Platte, the Sweet Water, the Arkansas, the South Saskatchewan, the Bighorn, the Yellowstone, rolled their volumes towards the east, gathering a thousand affluents as they flowed. ”

“ Poor moose that walks! in this trade for skins you are but a small item!
Society muffles itself in your toil-won sables in distant cities, while you starve and die out in the wilderness.
The credit of your twenty skins, hung to the rafter of Hudson’s Hope, is not a large one; but surely there is a Hope somewhere else, where your account is kept in golden letters, even though nothing but the clouds had baptized you, no missionary had cast water on your head, and God only knows who taught you to be honest. ”

“ In the small fort at the Forks, luxuries unseen during many a day met the eye; choice vegetables, the produce of the garden; moose venison, and better than all, the tender steak of the wood buffalo, an animal now growing rare in the North.
There was salmon too, and pears and peaches; but these latter luxuries I need hardly say were not home produce; they came from the opposite extremes of Quebec and California. Here, then, in the midst of the wilderness was a veritable Eden. Here was a place to cry Halt, to build a hut, and pass the remainder of one’s life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It may seem strange to those who live in warm houses, who sleep in cosy rooms from which the draught is carefully excluded, and to whom the notion of seeking one’s rest on the ground, under a pine-tree in mid-winter, would appear eminently suicidal; it may seem strange, I say, how in a climate where cold is measured by degrees as much below the freezing point as the hottest shade heat of Carnatic or Scindian summer is known to be above it, that men should be able at the close of a hard day’s march to lie down to rest under the open heavens. ”

“ Nothing, poor blind reader, nothing, for the blind is leading the blind; and all this boundless range of river and plain, ridge and prairie, rocky precipice and snow-capped sierra, is as much above my poor power of words, as He who built this mighty nature is higher still than all.
Ah, my friend, my reader! Let us come down from this mountain-top to our own small level again. We will upset you in an ice-rapid; Kalder will fire at you; we will be wrecked; we will have no food ”

“ Two or three days later the three castaways were found frozen stiff on the inhospitable shore.
The next summer saw fewer miners at the Camp, and this summer saw fewer still; but if to-morrow another strike were to be made 500 miles to the north of this remote Camp, hundreds would rush to it, caring little whether their bones were left to mark the long forest trail. The miner has ever got his dream of an El Dorado fresh and sanguine. No disaster, no repeated failure will discourage him. His golden paradise is always “away up” in some half-inaccessible spot in a wilderness of mountains. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has ever been the habit of explorers in the north-west of America, to imagine that beyond the farthest extreme to which they penetrate, there lay a region of utter worthlessness. One hundred years ago, Niagara lay on the confines of the habitable earth; fifty years ago a man travelling in what are now the States of Wisconsin and Minnesota, would have been far beyond the faintest echo of civilization. ”

“ I was in the society of gentlemen whose lives had been passed in all portions of the great north, on the frozen shores of Hudson’s Bay, in the mountain fastnesses of the Chipewyan range, or midst the savage solitudes that lie where, in long, low-lying capes, and ice-piled promontories, the shore of America stretches out to meet the waves of the Northern Ocean. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”