repetition, — to evolve a community in the heart of the con- 

 tinent, shut away from intercourse with civilized mankind — 

 that slowly crystalized into a form beyond the ideal of the 

 dreamers — a community, in the past, known faintly to the 

 outer world as the Red River Settlement, which is but the 

 by-gone name for the one Utopia of Britain. 



It was : brief as the few decades of its existence, still 

 fate had caught away from time, the clear-cut impress of an 

 exceptional people living under conditions of excellence tin- 

 thought of by themselves until they had passed away. 



A people, whose name in the vast domain, was in the 

 days by gone, sought out and coveted by all. Unknown races 

 had rested here and gone away, leaving only their careful 

 graves behind them. The "Mandans" — the brave, the fair T 

 cne beautiful, and the "Cheyennes," pressed by the "Nay-he- 

 owuk," and the " Assin-a-pau-tuk," had quitted their earthen 

 forts on the banks of the streams and urged their way to the 

 broader tide of the Missouri. More fatal to the conquerors 

 came after, the pale-faced "Nemesis" of all Indian life, spying 

 with the instinct of his race, a spot of abounding fertility, 

 where the great water reaches stretched from the mountains 

 to the sea, and southward touched almost the beginning of the 

 great River of the Gulf. 



Quick changing his errant camp for barter into a strong- 

 hold for the trade, making the "Niste-y-ak" of the "Crees" 

 his settled heme, the white man's grasp of the fair domain 

 but grew with years. From the tumbling seas of the far 

 north came with the men, fair-haired, blue-eved women and 

 children. The glamor of the spot, the teeming soil, the great 

 and lesser game, that swam past, — or wandered by their doors 

 — soon drew to this Mecca of the Plains and Waters — 

 the roving, scattered children of the trade — Bourgeois and 

 rayageur alike heading their lithe and dusky broods. Here 

 touched and fused all habitudes of life, the blended races, 

 knit by ties conserving every divergence of pursuit, 

 all forms of faith and thought, free from assail or 

 taint begotten of contact with aught other than them- 



