Our fertile prairie was still an unpeopled wilderness, long after a multitude of tribes had spread over the rest of the continent.
What sort of country was this vast empty space, “the granary of the British Empire” to-day?
It is not hard to imagine, for white men are still alive among us who remember it pretty much as it was when the “Indians” first came, a thousand years ago. A great grassy plain dotted with pale anemones in spring, pink roses and white strawberry blossoms in summer; mighty herds of buffalo grazing over it, and wallowing in little pools; parts of it flat, but most of it rolling, up and down, like a sea of earth suddenly stilled after a storm. Poplar bluffs rise here and there, but for hundreds of miles not a tree is to be seen. Two great rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan, have carved deep valleys across from west to east; their water, and that of many smaller rivers, pours into the Manitoban lakes, and out again to lose itself in Hudson Bay. Those lakes, great as they seem, are but the remnants of one vast lake which covered nearly all Manitoba long after the ice-cap had retreated.
Beyond the prairie northward stretches the forest, poplar and willow and birch, tamarack, pine and spruce. North-east the forest dwindles and fades away into the “barren lands,” which are not really barren, for countless caribou and musk ox pasture there. North-west, great rivers pour through the forest and away to the Arctic Sea; north-east, more rivers drain out to the Bay.
The plains rise gently for a thousand miles from east to west; so gently that we do not notice the change, till we see the foothills swelling up and the sharp-edged mountains towering high beyond in a heavenly rampart of white and grey. Beyond the prairie, mountains on mountains, range after range, with roaring torrents in deep ravines; wider valleys, and placid lakes reflecting stately trees; the country smoothing down to the north, in a thick cloak of poplar and pine, and sinking in the south-west to a level plain, dark under thronging regiments of giant firs and cedars, along the coast of the western sea.
No voice of man is heard upon the untilled plains; but the land is not silent. The coyote screams and howls. High overhead the wild-goose honks. The air is musical with songs of little birds and gay with their colors. No hand of man is raised to kill; but hunters are busy killing. In the woods, the rabbit squeals as the weasel catches him by the throat. On the prairie, the hovering hawk drops swiftly to seize a gopher. On the lake, the skimming gull darts down and snatches out a fish. In the mountains, the eagle swoops and carries off a marmot; the prowling bear claws at a rotting stump and gobbles down grubs by the mouthful.