in the wilderness, a coureur de bois or a voyageur, under some prickings of conscience, would come into the settlement that he might obtain shriving, at least for the past. If he made a clean breast of it, a guileless-hearted priest must have felt a heavier burden lying upon him than that which the penitent hoped to throw off.
A more favorable character is given by a good authority of some of the descendants of this race of men. The Earl of Dufferin, late Governor-General of Canada, on his return way from his interesting overland visit to British Columbia, in September, 1877, in addressing a meeting at Winnipeg, made the following laudatory reference to this class of men, of whose character and influence he had had opportunities of observation: —
" There is no doubt that a great deal of the good feeling subsisting
between the red men and ourselves is due to the influence and
interposition of that invaluable class of men, the half-breed settlers
and pioneers of Manitoba, who — combining as they do the hardihood,
the endurance, and love of enterprise generated by the strain
of Indian blood within their veins, with the civilization, the instruction,
and the intellectual power derived from their fathers — have
preached the gospel of peace and good-will and mutual respect, with
results beneficent alike to the Indian chieftain in his lodge and to
the British settler in his shanty. They have been the ambassadors
between the East and the West, the interpreters of civilization and
its exigencies to the dwellers on the prairie, as well as the exponents
to the white man of the consideration justly due to the
susceptibilities, the sensitive self-respect, the prejudices, the innate craving
for justice of the Indian race. In fact they have done for the colony
what otherwise would have been left unaccomplished; and
they have introduced between the white population and the red
man a traditional feeling of amity and friendship, which but for
them it might have been impossible to establish."[1]
These remarks of the Earl gave high gratification to his
auditors, many of whom were of the class to whom he re-
- ↑ Speeches and Addresses of the Earl of Dufferin. London, 1882. pp. 237-238.
