Thus there were no climatic reasons why, both in summer and in winter, immense distances should not be quickly covered in Canada between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.  This is how a mere hundred of white pioneers opened up Canada to the knowledge of the civilized world far quicker than the same area could have been discovered in Africa or Asia.  Sometimes, for about a month, between the melting of the snow and ice and the steady flowing of the rivers in the late spring, or between the uncertain autumn of November and the confirmed winter of December, there might be an interval of a few weeks in which journeys had to be made on foot under conditions of great hardship, through mud, swamp, and over sharp stones or slippery rocks.

“The plains are covered with water from the melting of the snow so suddenly, and our men suffer much, as they are continually on the march, looking after Indians in every creek and little river.  The water is commonly knee deep, in some places up to the middle, and in the morning is usually covered with ice, which makes it tedious and even dangerous travelling.  Some of our men lose the use of their legs while still in the prime of life”, wrote one eighteenth-century pioneer, in the Canadian spring.

Severe as were the winter conditions of climate, the explorers were just as willing to travel through the winter as the summer, because in the winter they were spared the awful plague of mosquitoes and midges which still renders summer and early-autumn travel throughout the whole of Canada, from the United States borders on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north, a severe trial, and even an unbearable degree of physical suffering.

CHAPTER VII

The Amerindians and Eskimo:  the Aborigines of British North America

I have already attempted to describe in the first chapter the ancient peopling of America from north-eastern Asia, but it might be useful if I gave here some description of the Eskimo and Amerindian tribes of the Canadian Dominion at the time of its gradual discovery by Europeans, especially during the great explorations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

It is evident that the ESKIMO—­who are quite distinct from the Amerindians in physical type, language, customs, and industries—­have been for thousands of years the only inhabitants of Arctic America.  When the Norsemen came to the New World they seem to have met with Eskimo as far south as New England, but in more recent times the Eskimo have only been found inhabiting the extreme north and north-east:  in Greenland, on the Labrador coast, on Baffin’s Land, and along the Arctic coast of the North-American continent, between the Coppermine River and the westernmost extremity of Alaska, as well as on the opposite islands and promontories of Asia.