II. EXCAVATION OF GREAT MOUND, 

 RAINY RIVER, AUGUST 22, 1884 



Ours are the only mounds making up a distinct mound- 

 region on Canadian soil. This comes to us as a part of the 

 large inheritance which we who has migrated to Manitoba 

 receive. No longer cribbed, cabined, and confined, we have 

 in this our " Greater Canada " a far wider range of study than 

 in the fringe along the Canadian lakes. Think of a thousand 

 miles of prairie ! The enthusiastic Scotsman was wont to des- 

 pise our level Ontario, because it had no Grampians, but the 

 mountains of Scotland all piled together would reach but to 

 the foot hills of our Rockies. The Ontario geologist can only 

 study the rocks in garden plots, while the Nor'wester revels 

 in the age of reptiles in his hundreds of miles of Cretaceous 

 rocks, with the largest coal and iron area on the continent. 

 As with our topography so with history. The career of the 

 Hudson's Bay Company, which is in fact the history of 

 Rupert's Land, began 120 years before the history of Ontario, 

 and there were forts of the two rival Fur Companies on the 

 Saskatchewan and throughout the country, before the first 

 U. E. Loyalist felled a forest tree in Upper Canada. We are 

 especially fortunate in being the possessors also of a field for 

 archaeological study in the portion of the area occupied by the 

 mound builders — the lost race, whose fate has a strange fas- 

 cination for all who enquire into the condition of Ancient 

 America. 



The Indian guide points out these mounds to the student of 

 history with a feeling of awe ; he says he knows nothing of 

 them ; his fathers have told him that the builders of the mounds 

 were of a different race from them — that the mounds are 

 memorials of a vanished people — the " Ke-te-anish-i-na-be," 

 or " very ancient men." The oldest Hudson's Bay officer, and 

 the most intelligent of the native people born in' the country, 

 can only give some vague story of their connection with a race 

 who perished with small-pox, but who, or whence, or of what 

 degree of civilization they were, no clue is left. 



