PROGRESS BY LAND, 1818-1910 161 



The whole district which Cormack traversed was wilderness 

 in 1822, was wilderness in 1875, and seemed likely to be 

 wilderness for ever and ever. Such a railway would have con- 

 sisted merely of two termini. The route was the route of least 

 resistance, but it was also the route of least attraction. Nor 

 has it even been utilized, like the Pilgrim's Way along the 

 English North Downs, as a bridle-path ; for it is supposed 

 that horses would not thrive on the scanty wiry grass or marsh- 

 plants, and could not cross the forest-belts or marshes. Nor 

 has it been followed by pedestrians. Cormack noted ser- 

 pentine rocks, with which minerals are often associated in 

 Canada, and gazed on myriads of Caribou, or tracks of 

 Caribou wending their way from their summer woodland 

 retreats towards the open moor in autumn, but geologists like 

 Jukes (1839-40), Murray, and Howley (1864 et seq.), miners 

 like Willis and Guzman, and sportsmen like Dashwood, Selous, 

 and Millais, who have entered those wilds since Cormack's 

 time, have invariably adhered to the better plan, which is the 

 Indian plan, of moving on the wet instead of on the dry, and 

 of following watercourses instead of watersheds. Cormack's 

 geographical discoveries did not open up new country or new 

 roads or even new routes to the white colonists. 



In the second place, Cormack was a philanthropist, and and with- 

 wished to do somethinsr for the Beothics. But he discovered ^"^ ^^f' 



o covering 



to his surprise that, except at King George IV Lake, he was Beothics, 



never within ten miles of their haunts. He heard for the ^']?^^Sfi ^^ 



discovered 



first time of a great war in the long long ago,^ in which their 

 Micmac riflemen shot down Beothic archers and their wives ■^'''^'^^'^''■^' 

 and children ; since which, the Beothics had shunned the 

 haunts of the Micmacs, and had confined themselves more 

 and more to their capital on Red Indian Lake in the middle 

 reaches of the Exploits. Thence they ranged as far as 

 King George IV Lake near the sources of the Exploits, and 



1 Jukes, Excursions in Newfoundland, 1839-40, vol. i, p. 172; 

 vol. ii, pp. 126-33. 



