460 HTBRIDITY AND ABSORPTION 



at the University, returned to the Red River settlement and started 

 a newspaper, in which the interests of the colony were advocated, as 

 distinct from those of the great fur company which then exercised 

 supreme control. Compelled to leave the settlement for a time, he 

 returned to Toronto, and accepted an engagement on the staff of one 

 of the daily papers. On my enquiring in how far his services proved 

 to be satisfactory, I was interested to learn that the patient, passive 

 endurance, inherited from his Indian ancestiy, enabled him to surpass 

 most of his competitors in the protracted night work which devolves 

 on the members of the editorial staff of a daily paper. 



Thus a favourable concurrence of circumstances has tended to 

 give ample opportunities for testing the experiment of intermingling 

 the blood of Europe and America, and raising up a civilized race 

 peculiar to its soil. This hybrid race will remain as an important 

 element in the population of the new Provinces of the North- 

 west. The experience of older settlements proves that it has within 

 itself no- inherent elements of decay. It will long serve to give a 

 peculiar character to the community; and even after it has been 

 absorbed by the predominant emigrant race, it will assert some 

 influence, and reveal its traces from time to time, as later genera- 

 tions revert to the ancestral Indian type. 



But apart from the civilized Half-breed, admitted to an equality 

 with the White settlers, and partaking of all the advantages which 

 European culture and habits of industry could transfer to the wilder- 

 ness, there remains the tribe of Half-breed hunters, mingling not 

 only the blood but the habits and mental characteristics of the 

 tv/o races from whom they trace their oi-igin. These Half-breed 

 buffalo-hunters — the offspring born to native women as the inevitable . 

 results of such a social condition as long pertained to the occupants 

 of the forts and trading-posts of that remote region — are wholly 

 distinct from the civilized settlers, and yet more nearly related to 

 them than to the wild Indian tribes. They belonged to the old settle- 

 ment, possess land, and cultivate farms; though their agricultural' 

 labours are very much subordinated to the claims of the chase, and 

 they have hitherto scarcely aimed at more than supplying their own 

 wants. They are divided into two bands, and number in all between 

 six and seven thousand. The two divisions have their separate 

 tribal organizations and distinct hunting grounds. In 1849, the 

 White-Horse-plain Half-breeds, on the Strayenne River, Dacotah 



