ground; they encamped their men on the beach." The garrison was
withdrawn from Louisbourg and soon arrived at Halifax, with a
vast quantity of stores. A town was marked out; lots were drawn
for sites; and every one knew where he might build his house.
There were prodigious digging, chopping, hammering. "I shall be
able to get them all Houses before winter," wrote Cornwallis
cheerily. Firm military discipline, indeed, did wonders. Before
winter came, a town had been created, and with the town a
fortress which from that time has remained the chief naval and
military stronghold of Great Britain in North America. At
Louisbourg some two hundred miles farther east on the coast,
France could reestablish her military strength, but now
Louisbourg had a rival and each was resolved to yield nothing to
the other. The founding of Halifax was in truth the symbol of the
renewal of the struggle for a continent.



CHAPTER V. The Great West

In days before the railway had made possible a bulky commerce by
overland routes, rivers furnished the chief means of access to
inland regions. The fame of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile,
and the Danube shows the part which great rivers have played in
history. Of North America's four greatest river systems, the two
in the far north have become known in times so recent that their
place in history is not yet determined. One of them, the
Mackenzie, a mighty stream some two thousand miles long, flows
into the Arctic Ocean through what remains chiefly a wilderness.
The waters of the other, the Saskatchewan, discharge into Hudson