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