4 CAMP-FIRES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES 



est to a new panorama, — the late lamented " Wild 

 West." 



Throughout the once great but now greatly dimin- 

 ished Sioux Indian Reservation, canvas tepees, log cabins, 

 blanketed braves, broad-beamed squaws and paintless 

 wagons abound. The Fort Peck Reservation, as it is 

 called, begins near Calais and extends to Whateley, 

 about eighty miles. The time was when the Sioux were 

 picturesque, uncertain, and at times even thrilling. As 

 tame Indians, with no more buffalo-herds to tempt them 

 upon the war-path, the Sioux look commonplace. When 

 I think how the souls of their hunters must yearn for the 

 chase, and how even the excitement of horse-stealing is 

 denied them, I pity them. It is no wonder that even 

 with horses in abundance, parties of young Sioux of the 

 " warrior " class used to go down to the Crow Reserva- 

 tion, two hundred miles or more, steal horses and run 

 them up north of the Missouri, purely for the excitement 

 of the chase. 



South-east of Fort Assiniboin, about forty miles away, 

 is a mountain mass of considerable magnitude. It is 

 the Bear Paw Mountains, once good hunting-grounds 

 for big game, but now " hunted out." All along the line 

 of the Great Northern, from Minnesota to the mountains, 

 there is an astonishing absence of sage-brush. It is so 

 abundant along the Northern Pacific west of the Mis- 

 souri that I expected to see a good showing of it farther 

 north. But there is so little of it that it fails to count; 

 and there is no other plains brush to take its place. 

 South of the Sweet-Grass Hills, for instance, the prairie 



