The Buffalo Runners : a Tale of the Red River
Plains. By R. M. Ballantyne. (Nisbet and Co.)—Mr. Ballantyne lays the scene of his story in a region which is now one of the great wheat-countries of the world,—that which has Winnipeg for its centre. At the time of which he writes, nearly three-quarters of a century ago, it was a desolate region, traversed by countless herds of buffaloes. Winnipeg itself, now a thriving town with some 30,000 inhabi- tants, was then represented by Fort Garry. Its social condition was of the wildest. Indians not yet relegated to their Reserves, trappers and hunters (half-breeds and white), and farmers who sought to pursue a settled industry under extraordinary diffi- culties, made up a population as strangely mixed as has often been seen in the world. The general disorder was accentuated by the strife that was still fiercely waged between the rival Com- panies, the Hudson's Bay and the North-West. All this furnishes exactly the material of which Mr. Ballantyne knows how to make excellent use. Sport, adventure, the tragic and the comic, war and love, and not a few other ingredients, make up the farrago of Mr. Ballantyne's book. From tho beginning (which is, we are glad to say, a plunge in medias res) to the end, it moves briskly on. Perhaps one might say that the scene is changed too rapidly and too frequently, and that the book might have been improved by a somewhat more artistic construction. But it is of excellent quality, worthy of an author who is not often surpassed in this line of literature. Is not "a six or eight months' winter" some- what of an exaggeration ?
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