40 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



unattractiveness. The ordinary type, which our travellers obtained, 

 was simply a compound of buffalo meat and grease. Its manufacture 

 is thus described by Milton and Cheadle: "The meat having been 

 dried in the sun or over a fire in thin flakes, is placed in a dressed 

 buffalo skin and pounded with a flail until it is reduced to small 

 fragments and powder. The fat of the animal is at the same time 

 melted down. The pounded meat is then put into bags of buffalo 

 hide, and the boiling grease poured on to it. The mass is well stirred 

 and mixed together, and on cooling becomes as solid as linseed cake." 

 The experience of our emigrants agrees with that of these authors, 

 that though at first decidedly unpalatable, tasting remarkably like a 

 mixture of chips and tallow, yet after a time they became quite partial 

 to it. For this staff of life on the prairies the party paid six cents a 

 pound. 



All preparations having been completed the travellers set out 

 stragglingly for White Horse Plains, some twenty-five miles from 

 Fort Garry, the appointed rendez-vous. With the usual optimism 

 of amateurs they had fixed upon the high basis of one ox and cart 

 carrying a load of eight hundred pounds for every two men ; experience 

 soon showed that six hundred pounds would have been sufficient. 

 On well-travelled level roads the load was not at all excessive; but it 

 was demonstratively too heavy over rough and hilly roads and 

 especially towards the close of a long day's drive. 



Though both Mr. R. B. McMicking's diary and that of his 

 brother are silent upon the point, yet from other sources and particu- 

 larly from Hargrave's Red River it appears clear that at Fort Garry 

 that strange person, made famous by Milton and Cheadle, "Mr. O'B." 

 (Mr. Felix O'Byrne) attached himself, like a bur, to the emigrants, 

 though not to the Queenston section. It seems that no tale of Mani- 

 toba or the West, in the early sixties, can be told without a reference 

 to this peculiar person. Our practical emigrants soon discovered 

 that he was an utterly useless and helpless appendage, and at Fort 

 Carlton on the North Saskatchewan they left the reverend, but not 

 revered, gentleman to shift for himself. Hargrave states that he 

 officiated as chaplain of the section to which he had attached himself. 

 However that may be, those who have read Milton and Cheadle's 

 story and, laughing over his impracticable conduct, may have thought 

 that these authors had invented the character, will readily believe 

 that energetic young men such as composed this party would not sit 

 quietly under the spiritual ministrations of so spiritless a creature. 



Gradually the numerous sections that constituted the expedition 

 gathered at Long Lake, where the real formation for the overland 



