Jarvis, Horetzky, Keeper, and others have displayed remarkable daring and endurance. They have forced their way from the interior to the sea-coast, or from the coast to the Peace River, Pine or Yellow Head Passes, through country previously unknown, to Port Simpson, to Burke Channel, to the mouth of the Skeena, and to the Bute Inlet, so that a region but recently almost a blank on our maps, which John Arrowsmith, our last great authority, but very imperfectly sketched, is now known in great detail." Thus it has happened once more, as we have so often noted in the course of our narrative, that the traveler, foiled in his main purpose, has opened for himself and for the world new scenes by the way; and as we scan the pages of these Canadian reports, pictures rise before us of surpassing loveliness, while we dream of these vast territories as they will be when the glory of the gorge and the mountain pass is varied by the vision of plains covered with corn and dotted with smiling villages.
During the last ten years, another cause has also largely contributed to the opening up of the great West. A dispute between the United States and Canada, as to the exact interpretation of the Treaty of 1818, led to the sending out of a joint commission to settle the matter, and mark out the boundary line between the north-west corner of the Lake of the Woods to the summit of the Rocky Mountains. The Commissioners, most of them able men of science, embodied in their report much interesting geographical information of a supplementary character, the most noteworthy points established being the vast extent of the Great Plains, with their strange, bewildering succession of mirages, rendering surveying operations extremely difficult; and the existence of a chain of salt lakes, with no outlet to the ocean, extending for fifteen miles in an east and west direction, near the very heart of the central watershed of the continent. Nine hundred miles were traversed in this successful trip, and the whole of the boundary line, now finally determined, was marked by stone cairns or earthen mounds, at intervals of three miles on the great plains, and by iron pillars one mile distant from each other for 135 miles through the southern prairie of Manitoba. These solitary landmarks, whether on the rich, fertile lands between the Lake of the Woods and the Pembina Mountains, the prairie steppe extending from the Pembina Mountains to the great Coteau of the Missouri, or the wild semi-desert stretching away from it to the Rocky Mountains, will soon, if we may so express it, be set in frameworks of colonization, for great and mighty are the changes which have taken place within the last few
