are golden in summer with fields of wheat and corn, and little towns are springing up where twenty years ago the Sioux lodge-poles were the only signs of habitation; but one cannot look on this transformation without feeling, with Longfellow, the terrible surge of the white man, “whose breath, like the blast of the east wind, drifts evermore to the west the scanty smoke of the wigwams.”  What savages, too, are they, the successors of the old race—­savages! not less barbarous because they do not scalp, or war-dance, or go out to meet the Ojibbeway in the woods or the Assineboine in the plains.

We had passed a beautiful sheet of water called Lake Osakis, and reached another lake not less lovely, the name of which I did not know.

“What is the name of this place?” I asked the driver who had stopped to water his horses.

“I don’t know,” he answered, lifting a bucket of water to his thirsty steeds; “some God-dam Italian name, I guess.”  This high rolling land which divides the waters flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from those of Hudson Bay lies at an elevation of 1600 feet above the sea level.  It is rich in every thing that can make a country prosperous; and that portion of the “down-trodden millions,” who “starve in the garrets of Europe,” and have made their homes along that height of land, have no reason to regret their choice.

On the evening of the second day we stopped for the night at the old stockaded post of Pomme-de-Terre, not far from the Ottertail River.  The place was foul beyond the power of words to paint it, but a “shake down” amidst the hay in a cow-house was far preferable to the society of man close by.

At eleven o’clock on the following morning we reached and crossed the Ottertail River, the main branch of the Red River, and I beheld with joy the stream upon whose banks, still many hundred miles distant, stood Fort Garry.  Later in the day, having passed the great level expanse known as The Breckenridge Flats, the stage drew up at Fort Abercrombie, and I saw for the first time the yellow, muddy waters of the Red River of the North.  Mr. Nolan, express agent, stage agent, and hotel keeper in the town of McAulyville, put me up for that night, and although the room which I occupied was shared by no less than five other individuals, he nevertheless most kindly provided me with a bed to myself.  I can’t say that I enjoyed the diggings very much.  A person lately returned from Fort Garry detailed his experiences of that place and his interview with the President at some length.  A large band of the Sioux Indians was ready to support the Dictator against all comers, and a vigilant watch was maintained upon the Pembina frontier for the purpose of excluding strangers who might attempt to enter from the United States; and altogether M. Riel was as securely established in Fort Garry as if there had not existed a red-coat in the universe.  As for the Expedition, its failure was looked upon as a foregone conclusion; nothing had