It is now noon on the prairie, and I am dying of the heat. Oh, for the forest shade! Oh, for the crystal stream! Alas! the water here is not good for the stranger, and I fear to touch it. At Toronto I managed pretty well on Apollinaris water; but out here nothing of the kind is to be had. What am I to do? The beef here is so tough that you can’t cut it with a knife, and must have belonged to the oldest importation from my native land; and I have to pay a price for which I can have a luxurious repast in London. O Spiers and Pond! O Gordon and Co.! O respected Ring and Brymer, under whose juicy joints and sparkling wines the ancient Corporation of London renews its youth! How my soul longs for your flesh-pots in this dry and thirsty land, where no water is! I have been out on the prairie under the burning sun. It is cracked, and parched, and bare, and the flowers refuse to bloom, and only the gigantic grasshopper or the pretty but repulsive snake meets my eye. That dim line, protracted to the horizon east and west, is the railroad. That far-off collection of sheds is the rising town of Moose Jaw. That blue line on the horizon, which makes me pant for the sea, is a mirage. Far off are some white tents glistening in the sun. They are the wigwams of the Indians.
Like the Wandering Jew, again I urge on my wild career, and here I am with noble savages—so hideous that words fail to tell their hideousness. No wonder the squaws are bashful. They have little to be proud of, though they have necklaces and rings and ornaments around their belts, and gay shawls, which have come from some far away factory. Some of them have put a streak of red paint where the black hair divides. Others are painted as much as any Dowager of Mayfair, and have ear ornaments that reach down to the middle. Not one is fairly passable.
Rousseau and the sentimentalists, who talk of the savage, greatly err in their estimate of that noble individual. He is lazy and filthy, gluttonous, and would be a wine-bibber had he the chance. I looked into his tent, and there he was sitting naked, whilst his squaw was cooking a bit of a horse with the hair on for his dinner. He is unpleasant as a neighbour for many reasons, and is indifferent how he gets a dollar, or how his squaw earns it either. All along the prairie he seems to have nothing to do but to rush to the nearest railway station, and sit there all day in the hope that some passing traveller may give him tobacco or cash, the only two things on earth he seems to care for. Apparently, the mothers are fond of their young. The men are clever at stealing horses, and the traveller must look after his horses by night, or he may find them, as friends of my own did, gone in the morning. But to return to the prairie, it is an awful place to travel in alone; it is so easy to lose one’s way. I heard wonderful stories in this respect. Fancy being lost on the prairie; nothing but the grass to eat; nothing but the sky to look at; nothing in the shape of human speech to listen to. Out here by myself, I felt more than once how appropriate the language of the poet beloved by our grandmothers: