ly they were exhausting furnaces in the hot season, where horses fell headlong in their tracks and men fainted from fatigue. We wonder sometimes that pioneer armies frequently accomplished only ten or twelve miles a day, sometimes less. But these marches were mostly made in the months of October and November—the dryest months of the year in the Central West—and the stifling heat of the becalmed forest easily explains both slowness and wearing fatigue. It was the heat that all leaders of pioneer armies feared; for heat meant thirst and at this season of the year the ground was very dry. Many a crazed trooper has thrown himself into the first marsh or swamp encountered and has drunk his fill of water as deadly as any bullet.
All this applies with special force to portages, as all know who have essayed mountain climbing in the stifling heat of a windless day. All that marching troops have endured, the brave missionaries and those who came after them suffered on the carrying place with the additional hardship, often, of climbing upward in the heat rather than marching on level ground. When
