spruce for boat-building, and several full-sized Hudson Bay boats are built annually at the fort.  Coal of very fair quality is also plentiful along the river banks, and the forge glows with the ruddy light of a real coal fire—­a friendly sight when one has not seen it during many months.  The Mountain House stands within the limits of the Rocky Mountain Assineboines, a branch of-the once famous Assineboines of the Plains whose wars in times not very remote made them the terror of the prairies which lie between the middle Missouri and the Saskatchewan.  The Assineboines derive their name, which signifies “stone-heaters,” from a custom in vogue among them before the advent of the traders into their country.  Their manner of boiling meat was as follows:  a round hole was scooped in the earth, and into the hole was sunk a piece of raw hide; this was filled with water, and the buffalo meat placed in it, then a fire was lighted close by and a number of round stones made red hot; in this state they were dropped into, or held in, the water, which was thus raised to boiling temperature and the meat cooked.  When the white man came he sold his kettle to the stone-heaters, and henceforth the practice disappeared, while the name it had given rise to remained—­a name which long after the final extinction of the tribe will still exist in the River Assineboine and its surroundings.  Nothing testifies more conclusively to the varied changes and vicissitude’s Indian tribes than the presence of this branch of the Assineboine nation in the pine forests of the Rocky Mountains.  It is not yet a hundred years since the “Ossinepoilles” were found by one of the earliest traders inhabiting the country between the head of the Pasquayah or Saskatchewan and the country of the Sioux, a stretch of territory fully 900 miles in length.

Twenty years later they still were numerous along the whole line of the North Saskatchewan, and their lodges were at intervals seen along a river line of 800 miles in length, but even then a great change had come upon them.  In 1780 the first epidemic of small-pox swept over the Western plains, and almost annihilated the powerful Assineboines.  The whole central portion of the tribe was destroyed, but the outskirting portions drew together and again made themselves a terror to trapper and trader.  In 1821 they were noted for their desperate forays, and for many years later a fierce conflict raged between them and the Blackfeet; under the leadership of a chief still famous in Indian story—­Tehatka, or the “Left-handed;” they for a long time more than held their own against these redoubtable warriors.  Tehatka was a medicine-man of the first order, and by the exercise of his superior cunning and dream power he was implicitly relied on by his followers; at length fortune deserted him, and he fell in a bloody battle with the Gros Ventres near the Knife River, a branch of the Missouri, in 1837.  About the same date small-pox again swept the tribe,