CHAPTER III.

THE RIVERS AND LAKES.

1. General Features and Extent.

CANADA has been called the country of waterways, as it surpasses all others in the area and navigable extent of its rivers and lakes.

Tourists, accustomed to the more restricted landscapes of Europe, do not readily grasp the idea of the majesty of the lakes, the grandeur of the rivers, or the awful power of the cataracts of Canada.

This extensive water-supply is an indication of the excess of the rain-fall over the evaporation, and also represents, to a certain extent, the gradual melting of the snows stored in the mountain ranges of the Rocky Mountains, and mirrors in the azure waters embosomed in the lakes, or gliding in the rivers towards the ocean, the immensity of the source from which it springs. An idea of the quantity of these waters may be realised from the fact that the river St. Lawrence and its tributary lakes, which constitute but one of the vast water-systems of Canada, are estimated to contain 12,000 cubic miles of water, or more than one-half the fresh water of the globe.

The configuration of the great fan-shaped plateau between the Pacific and Atlantic mountain ranges has been already noticed. It may now be remarked that almost all the great rivers of the continent take their rise on a limited area at the base of the Rocky Moun

tains, namely, the Mackenzie River, emptying into the Arctic Ocean; the Missouri, with its affluent the Mississippi, falling into the Gulf of Mexico; the Saskatchewan, running into Lake Winnipeg, and from thence finding its way to the Atlantic Ocean through Hudson Bay; and the Fraser and Columbia, entering the Pacific Ocean. Nor need we travel far north from this plateau to reach the head-waters of the mighty Yukon, which gains the Pacific Ocean at Bering Strait, or far east to tap the head waters of the St. Lawrence chain of lakes, which reach the Atlantic Ocean by the river of the same name.

It will also be noticed, on reference to a map of the continent, that the several great lakes form a semicircle around Hudson Bay stretching from the Arctic to the Atlantic Ocean, namely, Great Bear Lake, Slave Lake, Athabasca Lake, Wollaston, Deer, Winnipeg, Winnipegosis, Manitoba, Lake of the Woods, Superior, Nipigon, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario, and the great basin of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, thus marking the ancient shore of the ocean retiring before a rising continent.

This great water-system, in keeping with the immense plateau which it traverses, not only affords means of communication, and carries fertility with it, but at the same time tempers the summer's heat and winter's cold, and in its pure waters purifies the air, so that Canada may be said to be free from the agues and malarial fevers which prevail where extreme heat and stagnant waters abound.

Nor are these lakes and rivers barren of products and food for man, as their cool waters swarm with the choicest fish, and are as valuable, acre for acre, as the richest agricultural land.

The eloquent Earl of Dufferin, when Governor-General of Canada, visited Manitoba and the North-West Territories in 1877, and being entertained by the Mayor and

Town Council of Winnipeg, delivered an address in which he referred to the extent and beauties of the "fluvial" system of Canada. In his usual felicitous manner, and with striking power of description and magic of language, he said:

"From its geographical position, and its peculiar characteristics, Manitoba may be regarded as the keystone of that mighty arch of sister provinces which spans the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was here that Canada, emerging from her woods and forests, first gazed upon her rolling prairies and unexplored NorthWest, and learnt as by an unexpected revelation that her historical territories of the Canadas, her eastern seaboards of New Brunswick, Labrador, and Nova Scotia, her Laurentian lakes and valleys, corn-lands and pastures, though themselves more extensive than half a dozen European kingdoms, were but the vestibules and antechambers to that till then undreamt-of Dominion, whose illimitable dimensions alike confound the arithmetic of the surveyor and the verification of the explorer.

"It was hence that, counting her past achievements as but the preface and prelude to her future exertions and expanding destinies, she took a fresh departure, received the afflatus of a more imperial inspiration, and felt herself no longer a mere settler along the banks of a single river, but the owner of half a continent, and in the magnitude of her possession, in the wealth of her resources, in the sinews of her material might, the peer of any power on the earth.

"In a recent remarkably witty speech the Marquis of Salisbury alluded to the geographical misconceptions often engendered by the smallness of the maps upon which the figure of the world is depicted. To this cause is probably to be attributed the inadequate idea entertained by the best-educated persons of the extent of her

Majesty's North American possessions. Perhaps the best way of correcting such a universal misapprehension would be by a summary of the rivers which flow through them, for we know that as a poor man cannot afford to live in a big house, so a small country cannot support a big river. Now, to an Englishman or a Frenchman, the Severn or the Thames, the Seine or the Rhone, would appear considerable streams, but in the Ottawa, a mere affluent of the St. Lawrence,-an affluent, moreover, which reaches the parent stream 600 miles from its mouth,we have a river nearly 550 miles long, and three or four times as big as any of them.

"But even after having ascended the St. Lawrence itself to Lake Ontario, and pursued it across Lake Huron, the Niagara, the St. Clair, and Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, a distance of 1500 miles, where are we? In the estimation of the person who has made the journey, at the end of all things; but to us who know better, scarcely at the commencement of the great fluvial systems of the Dominion; for, from that spot-that is to say, from Thunder Bay-we are able at once to ship our astonished traveller on to the Kaministiquia, a river of some hundred miles long. Thence almost in a straight line we launch him on to Lake Shebandowan and Rainy Lake and River -whose proper name, by-the-by, is Réné,' after the man who discovered it a magnificent stream three hundred yards broad, and a couple of hundred miles long, down. whose tranquil bosom he floats into the Lake of the Woods, where he finds himself on a sheet of water, which, though diminutive as compared with the inland seas he has left behind him, will probably be found sufficiently extensive to render him fearfully sea-sick during his passage across it. For the last eighty miles of his voyage, however, he will be consoled by sailing through a succession of land-locked channels, the beauty of whose

scenery, while it resembles, certainly excels the far-famed Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence.

"From this lacustrian paradise of sylvan beauty we are able at once to transfer our friend to the Winnipeg, a river whose existence in the very heart and centre of the continent is in itself one of nature's most delightful miracles, so beautiful and varied are its rocky banks, its tufted islands, so broad, so deep, so fervid, is the volume of its waters, the extent of their lake-like expansions, and the tremendous power of their rapids.

"At last let us suppose we have landed our traveller at the town of Winnipeg, the half-way house of the continent, the capital of the Prairie Province, and I trust the future umbilicus' of the Dominion. Having had so much of water, having now reached the home of the buffalo, like the extenuated Falstaff, he naturally' babbles of green fields' and careers in imagination over the primeval grasses of the prairie. Not at all. Escorted by Mr. Mayor and the Town Council, we take him down to your quay, and ask him which he will ascend first, the Red River or the Assiniboine, two streams-the one 500 miles long, the other 480-which so happily mingle their waters within your city limits.

"After having given him a preliminary canter upon these respective rivers, we take him off to Lake Winnipeg, an inland sea 300 miles long and upwards of sixty broad, during the navigation of which for many a weary hour he will find himself out of sight of land, and probably a good deal more indisposed than ever he was on the Lake of the Woods, or even the Atlantic.

"At the north-west angle of Lake Winnipeg he hits upon the mouth of the Saskatchewan, the gateway and high road to the North-West, and the starting-point to another 1500 miles of navigable water flowing nearly due east and west between its alluvial banks.