THE OVERLANDERS > By

loped ahead and abreast on sinewy ponies,
riding bareback or on home-made saddles.
Only a few stores stood along what is now
Main Street, which ran northward towards
the Selkirk Settlement. With the Indians,
who were camped everywhere in the woods
along the Assiniboine, the Overlanders began
to barter for carts, oxen, ponies, and dried
deer-meat or pemmican. An ox and cart cost
from forty to fifty dollars. Ponies sold at
twenty-five dollars. Pemmican cost sixteen
cents a pound, and a pair of duffel Hudson’s
Bay blankets cost eight or ten dollars. In-
stead of blankets, many of the travellers
bought the cheaper buffalo robes. These sold
as low as a dollar each.

John Biack, the Presbyterian ‘ apostle of
the Red River,’ preached special sermons on
Sunday for the miners. And on a beautiful
June afternoon the Overlanders headed to-
wards the setting sun in a procession of almost
a hundred ox-carts ; and the fort waved them
farewell, One wonders whether, as the last
ox-cart creaked into the distance, the fur-
traders realized that the miner heralded the
settler, and that the settler would fence off
the hunter’s game preserve into farms and
cities. A rare glamour lay over the plains