SUPERIOE. 203 



gradually recede beyond the limit of vision. In the far- 

 distant horizon sky and water meet, and the waves roll up 

 on shore with a volume and dash as turbulent in storms as 

 those of Erie or Superior. Its bays are numerous and vast. 

 Some of them are very deep, and extend inland for twenty 

 miles, teeming with trout, lake-trout, pike, and pickerel. 

 Into it flow large rivers, that have their sources in the 

 Heights of Land which constitute the watershed that divides! 

 the waters of the St. Lawrence chain from those of Hudson's 

 Bay and the Arctic zone. 



This is Neepigon Lake, seldom even indicated on maps, 

 and scarcely known except to the Indians and the officers 

 and servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, who have long 

 used this route as a highway to their more northern posts. 

 The heights of land alluded to are twenty miles beyond its 

 northern boundary. And there are other routes from Lake 

 Superior to ultimate regions. One through Pigeon Eiver, 

 Sturgeon Lake, and Rainy River into the Lake of the Woods 

 (which is only ninety miles from the Red River or Selkirk 

 Settlement), and thence to Hudson's Bay, has served to locate 

 the boundary between the United States and British posses- 

 sions. Another through Brule River leads to the rivers that 

 empty into the Pacific Ocean. This was the thoroughfare 

 that connected the Hudson's Bay Company's outposts of the 

 Rocky Mountains and Pacific with the grand entrep6t at 

 Montreal. The route now being surveyed for the Canadian 

 Pacific Railroad follows this long-established highway for the 

 greater part of the distance. The surveyors find no easier 

 grades. By-and-by this iron railroad will transport 'to Canada 

 ' the wealth that flows from the gold mines of Eraser River, 

 the coal fields of Vancouver, the inexhaustible fisheries of 

 British Columbia, and the fertile plains of the Saskatchewan, 

 the Red River, and the Assiniboine waters which, commu- 

 nicating by means of portages, lead all the way to the imme- 

 diate neighborhood of Lake Superior. 



