About This Book
Thirty or more years ago, one who stood at the foot of Main Street, Winnipeg, in front of the stone gate leading to the inner court of Fort Garry, and looked up across the river flats, would have seen a procession as picturesque as ever graced the streets of old Quebec-the dog brigades of the Hudson's Bay Company coming in from the winter's hunt. Against the rolling snowdrifts appeared a line, at first grotesquely dwarfed under the mock suns of the eastern sky veiled in a soft frost fog. Then a husky-dog in bells and harness bounced up over the drifts, followed by another and yet another-eight or ten dogs to each long, low toboggan that slid along loaded and heaped with peltry. Beside each sleigh emerged out of the haze the form of the driver-a swarthy fellow, on snow-shoes, with hair bound back by a red scarf, and corduroy trousers belted in by another red scarf, and fur gauntlets to his elbows-flourishing his whip and yelling, in a high, snarling falsetto, 'marche marche '-the rallying-cry of the French wood-runner since first he set out from Quebec in the sixteen-hundreds to thread his way westward through the wilds of the continent.
