They accept it as a part of
their daily routine. This fact alone is enough to guarantee the
industrial future of the red-man when the hunter life is no longer
possible.
Next day we embarked on the Little Buffalo River, beginning what
should have been and would have been a trip of memorable joys but
for the awful, awful, awful - see Chapter IX.
The Little Buffalo is the most beautiful river in the whole world
except, perhaps, its affluent, the Nyarling.
This statement sounds like the exaggeration of mere impulsive
utterance. Perhaps it is; but I am writing now after thinking the
matter over for two and a half years, during, which time I have
seen a thousand others, including the upper Thames, the Afton, the
Seine, the Arno, the Tiber, the Iser, the Spree, and the Rhine.
A hundred miles long is this uncharted stream; fifty feet its breadth
of limpid tide; eight feet deep, crystal clear, calm, slow, and
deep to the margin. A steamer could ply on its placid, unobstructed
flood, a child could navigate it anywhere. The heavenly beauty of
the shores, with virgin forest of fresh, green spruces towering a
hundred feet on every side, or varied in open places with long rows
and thick-set hedges of the gorgeous, wild, red, Athabaska rose,
made a stream that most canoemen, woodmen, and naturalists would
think without a fault or flaw, and with every river beauty in its
highest possible degree.
