The records of these trips through a wilderness of forest and stream, with their exhilarating hardships, had a singular fascination for Isaac Brock. It was not long before he had won, with his conquering ways and robust manhood, the allegiance of the big-hearted fur-traders in Montreal. Their wild legends of the great fur country rang in his ears, and his receptive mind was soon stored with the exploits of Radisson and Groseillers, Joliette, Marquette, and other famous pathfinders, with whose exploits a century and a half before, aided by his fluency in French, he became wonderfully familiar.
He found the evolution of the Canadian highway a subject of absorbing interest. From his Caughnawaga guides he learned how the tracks made by lynx and beaver, rabbit and wolverine, wolf and red deer--invariably the safest and firmest ways--were in turn naturally followed by Indian voyageur and fur-trader, until the blazed trail became the bridle-road for the pack-horse of the pioneer. This, as the white settler drifted in, became the winter-road; then, as civilization stifled the call of the wild, there uprose from swamp and muskeg the crude corduroy, expanding by degrees into the half-graded highway, until the turnpike and toll-bar, with its despotic keeper, exacted its tribute from progress. This was the prelude to a still more amazing transformation, for the day soon came, though not in our hero's time, when the drumming of the partridge was silenced by the choo-choo of the locomotive as it shrieked through forest and beaver-meadow on its way to vaster tracks, further and further west, disclosing and leaving in its trail an empire of undreamed-of fertility. Then the redman, disturbed in his solitudes, was confronted with civilization, and had to accept the terms of conquest or seek another sanctuary in the greater wilderness beyond.
The navigation of the lakes and rivers at this time was limited to three types of vessel, the "snow," a three-master with a try-sail abaft the mainmast, the schooner, the batteau and the birch canoe, and, in closely land-locked waters, the horse ferry. The Durham boat, a batteau on a larger scale with false keel, had yet to be introduced. The bark canoe, which for certain purposes has never been improved upon--not even excepting the cedar-built canoe--varied in size from nine to thirty feet, or, in the language of the voyageur, from one and a half to five fathoms. These canoes had capacity for a crew of from one to thirty men, or a cargo of seventy "pieces" of ninety pounds each, equal to three tons, exclusive of provisions for nine paddlers. In these arks of safety, manned by Indians or _metis_ (half-breeds), the fur-trader would leave Lachine, on the St. Lawrence, ascend the Ottawa, descend the French, cross Lake Huron--the Lake Orleans of Nicollet and Hennepin--and find no rest from drench or riffle until he reached Mackinaw, or more distant Fort Dearborn (now Chicago), on the Skunk River, at the head of Lake Michigan, 1,450 miles by water from Quebec.