It was ten o’clock when we reached the closely-barred gate of this Hudson Bay post, the inhabitants of which had gone to bed.  Ten o’clock at night, and we had started at six o’clock in the morning.  I had been fifteen hours in the saddle, and no less than ninety miles had passed under my horse’s hoofs, but so accustomed had I grown to travel that I felt just as ready to set out again as though only twenty miles had been traversed.  The excitement of the last few hours steering by the stars in an unknown country, and its most successful denouement, had put fatigue and weariness in the background; and as we sat down to a well-cooked supper of buffalo steaks and potatoes, with the brightest eyed little lassie, half Cree, half Scotch, in the North-west to wait upon us, while a great fire of pine wood blazed and crackled on the open hearth, I couldn’t help saying to my companions, “Well, this is better than your hill-top and the fireless bivouac in the rustling willows.”

Fort Pitt was free from small-pox, but it had gone through a fearful ordeal:  more than one hundred Crees had perished close around its stockades.  The unburied dead lay for days by the road-side, till the wolves, growing bold with the impunity which death among the hunters ever gives to the hunted, approached and fought over the decay ing bodies.  From a spot many marches to the south the Indians had come to the fort in midsummer, leaving behind them a long track of dead and dying men over the waste of distance.  “Give us help,” they cried, “give us help, our medicine-men can do nothing against this plague; from the white man We got it, and it is only the white man who can take it away from us.”

But there was no help to be given, and day by day the wretched band grew less.  Then came another idea into the red man’s brain:  “If we can only give this disease to the white man and the trader in the fort,” thought they, “we will cease to suffer from it ourselves;” so they came into the houses dying and disfigured as they were, horrible beyond description to look at, and sat down in the entrances of the wooden houses, and stretched themselves on the floors and spat upon the door-handles.  It was no use, the fell disease held them in a grasp from which there was no escape, and just six weeks before my arrival the living remnant fled away in despair.

Fort Pitt stands on the left or north shore of the Saskatchewan River, which is here more than four hundred yards in width.  On the opposite shore immense bare, bleak hills raise their wind-swept heads seven hundred feet above the river level.  A few pine-trees show their tops some distance away to the north, but no other trace of wood is to be seen in that vast amphitheatre of dry grassy hill in which the fort is built.  It is a singularly wild-looking scene, not without a certain beauty of its own, but difficult of association with the idea of disease orepidemic, so pure and bracing is the air which sweeps over those great grassy uplands.