(312 TUE GLACIAL LAKE AGASSIZ. 



above the general sui'face, with a diameter of 30 to 100 feet or more at 

 their base. Nearly all of them Avere made by the people for the burial 

 of theu- dead, and the relics found with their bones prove that they sur- 

 passed the present Indians of tliis region in having skill to make rude 

 pottery; but the superiority was very slight, and there are no evidences 

 of the development of handicrafts to a degree at all comparable with the 

 aboriginal arts of Mexico and Peru. There was some commercial inter- 

 change from great distances, but it was probably limited to a few articles 

 which were highly valued for beauty or regarded as mysterious and sacred. 

 Thus in the mounds on the bluffs of the Soui'is River and Antler creeks, in 

 southwestern Manitoba, Prof George Bryce found ornaments made of sea 

 shells, others of copper from Lake Superior, and pipes from the sacred red 

 pipestone quarry at Pipestone, Minn., which Longfellow has described in 

 "The Song of Hiawatha." 



Further notes of the mounds of the area of Lake Agassiz and the 

 adjoining country on the west are given in Appendix B. 



The first immigration of white men to colonize the fertile basin of the 

 Red River of the Nortli, bringing the civilized arts and agriculture of 

 Europe, Avas in the years 1812 to 1816, when, under Lord Selkirk's far- 

 sighted and patriotic supervision, the early pioneers of the Selkirk settle- 

 ments, coming by the way of Hudson Bay and York Factory, reached 

 Manitoba and established their homes along the river from the vicinity of 

 Winnij^eg to Pembina. In its beginning this colony experienced many 

 hardships, but, in the words of one of these immigrants, whose uan-ative 

 was written down in his old age, in 1881, "by and by our troubles ended, 

 war and famine and flood and poverty all passed away, and now we think 

 there is no such place to be found as the valley of the Red River."^ 



Fifty to sixty years after the founding of the Selkirk colony the mar- 

 gin of the advancing v/ave of immigration in the United States reached 

 the Red River Valley. In a few places on the Red, Wild Rice (of North 

 Dakota), and Sheyenne rivers small bands of immigrant farmers had begun 

 the settlement of this rich agiicultural area a few years before the building 



' Manitoba : Its Infancy, Growth, and Present Condition, by Prof. George Bryce, London, 1882, 

 p. 166. 



