Excerpt from The Canadian Pacific Railway The trail was exasperating. When it passed over stretches of land lying high in the glades it was hard and dry in summer, but in the places where it dipped down it was quite likely that in following it you might plunge into holes filled with mud where you would sink up to the waist, or if you were riding your horse would go in as far as the girth. Sometimes the trail followed the edge of a steep precipice with the river foaming along hundreds of feet below. Then extreme care had to be taken in crawling along such a dangerous part. What are called muskegs, however, were the worst difficulty of all. This is the Indian word for a morass, something like the peat-bogs which are found in Scotland, Ireland, and on the Yorkshire moors. These muskegs are filled with rotting leaves, tree trunks, grass, and other vegetable stuff, which has accumulated year after year, and has become thoroughly soddened with water. The surface seems to be uite hard and safe, so the unsuspecting traveller plods steadily forward. But before he has gone many yards he is caught in some horrible sticky mud from which he can hardly draw his feet it is as if he had walked into a giant glue-pot by accident. Many a man has lost his life in this way, for the bogs are not small - indeed, sometimes they stretch for miles and appear to be bottomless. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.