Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 edition. Excerpt: ... A WINTER CAMP. JOURNEYING along the line of open country extending between the North Saskatchewan River and the great forest region stretching out toward the Polar Sea, in company with a party of half-breed plain-hunters, we reached, one dreary evening in November, one of those curious communities which are to be found in winter only along the borders of the great plains of the Fur Land. Nothing like them exists on the plains of the United States territories, because the peculiar nomadic population necessary to their being is lacking. On the south side of the forty-ninth parallel there are comparatively few half-breeds; on the north side there are half-breeds whose great-grandfathers were half-breeds. Situated in the sparse timber bordering a small tributary of the Saskatchewan, the community consisted of French half-breed hunters engaged in the usual winter quest of buffalo. It was a picturesque though not over cleanly place, and will probably look better in a photograph than it did in reality. Some thirty or forty huts crowded irregularly together, and built of logs, branches of pine-trees, raw-hides, and tanned and smoked skins, together with the inevitable tepee, or Indian lodge; horses, dogs, women and children, all intermingled in a confusion worthy of an Irish fair; half-breed hunters, ribboned, leggined, tasseled and capoted, lazy, idle, and, if liquor was to be had, sure to be drunk; remnants and wrecks of buffaloes lying everywhere around; here a white and glistening skull, there a disjointed vertebra but half denuded of its flesh; robes stretched upon a framework of poles and drying in the sun; meat piled upon stages to be out of the way of dogs; wolf-skins, fox-skins, and other smaller furs, tacked against the walls of the...
