The Great Lone Land
From the wooded Pre-Cambrian Shield of northwestern Ontario and the Hudson's Bay hinterland, the Canadian prairies stretch westward over a thousand miles to the Rocky Mountain foothills. After traveling across the prairies in 1871, British army officer Lt. W.F. Butler dubbed this remote, vast territory "The Great Lone Land" - a wilderness sub-continent, where "one may wander 500 miles in a direct line without seeing a human being, or an animal larger than a wolf." On early nineteenth century maps  it was often shown as part of the "Great American Desert". Nomadic Indian tribes, following their traditional way of life hunting enormous herds of buffalo, inhabited this largely treeless tract of undulating grassland. In 1670 King Charles II of England granted most of the territory and a trade monopoly to "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay", or the Hudson's Bay Company, as it was soon known. The Company called its trading empire Rupert's Land, after King Charles' cousin Prince Rupert, but to Canadians at the time of  Confederation it was familiarly known as the North-West.
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