ARMY OF CATERPILLARS. 



93 



Eainy Eiver, and evidently form channels by which the 

 swamps in the rear are drained. 



On the 6th June, 1846, Mr. Kane* saw the trees on 

 each side £>f Eainy Eiver, and part of the Lake of 

 the Woods, for full 150 miles of the route, literally 

 stripped of foliage by myriads of green caterpillars, 

 which had left nothing but the bare branches. In such 

 extraordinary numbers were these destructive insects that 

 Mr. Kane's party found it impossible to breakfast on 

 land unless they submitted to the unpleasant addition of 

 numbers of these caterpillars to their meal, dropping as 

 they did from the trees without intermission and covering 

 the ground. 



Sir John Eichardson relates that in 1847 multitudes of 

 caterpillars spread like locusts over the neighbourhood of 

 Eainy Eiver. They travelled in a straight line, crawling 

 over houses, across rivers, and into large fires kindled to 

 arrest them. Throughout the whole length of Eainy 

 Eiver, on the Lake of the Woods, and on the Eiver 

 Winnipeg, they stripped the leaves from the trees and ate 

 up the herbage. They destroyed the Folk avoine (wild 

 rice) on Eainy Lake, but left untouched some wheat that 

 was just coming into ear. This was the first time that 

 Fort Frances had experienced such a visitation. The 

 following year Sir John Eichardson found the still leafless 

 trees covered with the cocoons of the previous year, in 

 each of which there remained the hairy skin of a cater- 

 pillar. In 1858 we noticed the trees in the Bad Woods, 

 on the north bank of the Assinniboine, covered with an 

 incredible number of small green caterpillars, resembling 

 the palmer worm, so destructive in the United States in 

 some seasons. 



The Lake of the Woods is about seventy-five miles in 



* Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, by Paul 

 Kane. 



