intercourse with the outer world, and many a noble life was lived and lost in the vain struggle for existence. Meantime, as we have seen, the United States were being intersected by railways, and their ocean boundaries were connected by iron bands. California—youngest state of the Union, and a few short years before but an unknown desert—had become the golden link between the East and the West. Yet the owners of a territory as vast, and perhaps as full of great possibilities as the mighty republic itself, still remained in ignorance of the true character of their possessions. Maps there were, but maps made up of sketches filled in on hearsay Indian evidence, and calculated only to mislead the unhappy explorer who should attempt to guide his course by their vague delineations. A change soon came, however, and one as rapid as the course of events which led up to it had been slow. This change may be said to have been inaugurated in 1857, when Captain Palliser started on an expedition, which occupied three years, and resulted in the thorough and just assessment of the economic value of the districts, extending from the United States boundary in N. lat. 49° to the chief rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean.
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SASKATCHEWAN STEAMER.
The admission of British Columbia to the newly-formed Dominion of Canada in 1871, the last act of the great political drama alluded to above, was clogged with the condition that a railway should be constructed within ten years "from the Pacific to a point of junction with the existing railway systems in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec." The English, if chary of undertaking new responsibilities, are prompt in acting on them, and the authorities of Canada, now fully alive to the fact that they had to do in a few
