Society.

SEASON 1884-85


Ours are the only mounds making up a distinct mound-region on Canadian
soil. This comes to us as a part of the large inheritance which we who
have migrated to Manitoba receive. No longer cribbed, cabined, and
confined, we have in this our "greater Canada" a far wider range of
study than in the fringe along the Canadian lakes. Think of a thousand
miles of prairie! The enthusiastic Scotsman was wont to despise our
level Ontario, because it had no Grampians, but the mountains of
Scotland all piled together would reach but to the foot hills of our
Rockies. The Ontario geologist can only study the rocks in garden
plots, while the Nor'wester revels in the age of reptiles in his
hundreds of miles of Cretaceous rocks, with the largest coal and iron
area on the continent. As with our topography so with history. The
career of the Hudson's Bay Company, which is in fact the history of
Rupert's Land, began 120 years before the history of Ontario, and
there were forts of the two rival Fur Companies on the Saskatchewan
and throughout the country, before the first U. E. Loyalist felled a
forest tree in Upper Canada. We are especially fortunate in being the
possessors also of a field for archaeological study in the portion of
the area occupied by the mound builders--the lost race, whose fate has
a strange fascination for all who enquire into the condition of
Ancient America.

The Indian guide points out these mounds to the student of history
with a feeling of awe; he says he knows nothing of them; his fathers
have told him that the builders of the mounds were of a different race