42nd to the 57th degree of North Latitude, offer a more extensive,
promising, and practicable field for Missionary labours than any other
in that quarter of the globe. The climate is, in general, temperate,
the soil reasonably productive, and the surface of the country level.
[Footnote: Some of the information given to the Committee at that early
date was not very accurate. The surface of British Columbia is anything
but level and the soil is not too productive.] The people are not
savage, ferocious, and wandering but settled in villages and in several
respects somewhat civilized, though still in the hunter state, with few
arts, no letters, no general knowledge, but a great desire to be taught
by white men, whose superiority they clearly discern. Numbers of them
are scattered over this great range of country, and it has hitherto
been very little known that so great a portion of the North American
continent is covered with a stationary, aboriginal people, still,
however, very much in a state of nature. The North West Company trades
through all the great space which lies between Montreal and the North
Pacific, a longitudinal distance of not less than 4,000 miles, and
keeps up a direct communication, by sea, between London and the mouth
of the river Columbia, on the North West coast of America. A member of
that Company, who is a highly respectable merchant in Canada, informs
your Committee that he has been frequently among the Indians in
question, and thinks the prospect of the introduction of Christianity
very promising, while many of the principal persons in Upper Canada are
anxious for the promotion of that object."

The Society's work, however, among the Red Indians, which was begun in
the following year, was concentrated on Red River, and thirty-six years
passed away before the attention of the Committee was again drawn to
the more remote field on the Pacific shore.