frosts are early to come and late to go.  All crops flourish, though primitive and rude are the means by which they are tilled; timber is in places plentiful, in other places scarce; grass grows high, thick, and rich.  Horses winter out, and are round-carcased, and fat in spring.  The lake-shores are deep in hay; lakelets every where.  Rivers close in mid-November and open in mid-April.  The lakes teem with fish; and such fish! fit for the table of a prince, but disdained at the feast of the Indian.  The river-heads lie all in a forest region; and it is midsummer when their water has reached its highest level.  Through the land the red man stalks; war, his unceasing toil—­horse-raiding, the pastime of his life.  How long has the Indian thus warred?-since he has been known to the white man, and long before.

In 1776 the earliest English voyager in these regions speaks of war between the Assineboines and their trouble some western neighbours, the Snake and Blackfeet Indians.  But war was older than the era of the earliest white man, older probably than the Indian himself; for, from what ever branch of the human race this stock is sprung, the lesson of warfare was in all cases the same to him.  To say he fights is, after all, but to say he is a man; for whether it be in Polynesia or in Paris, in the Saskatchewan or in Sweden, in Bundelond or in Bulgaria, fighting is just the one universal “touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.”

“My good brothers,” said a missionary friend of mine, some little while ago, to an assemblage of Crees, “My good brothers—­why do you carry on this unceasing war with the Blackfeet and Peaginoos, with Sircies and Bloods?  It is not good, it is not right; the great Manitou does not like his children to kill each other, but he wishes them to live in peace and brotherhood.”

To which the Cree chief made answer—­“My friend, what you say is good; but look, you are white man and Christian, we are red men and worship the Manitou; but what is the news we hear from the traders and the black-robes?  Is it not always the news of war?  The Kitchi Mokamans (i.e. the Americans) are on the war-path against their brethren of the South, the English are fighting some tribes far away over the big lake; the French, and all the other tribes are fighting too!  My brother, it is news of war, always news of war! and we—­we go on the war-path in small numbers.  We stop when we kill a few of our enemies and take a few scalps; but your nations go to war in countless thousands, and we hear of more of your braves killed in one battle than all our tribe numbers together.  So, my brother, do not say to us that it is wrong to go on the war-path, for what is right for the white man cannot be wrong in his red brother.  I have done!”