"The total distance to be traversed between Port Arthur and Fort Garry was over 600 miles ..."
The total distance to be traversed between Port Arthur and Fort Garry was over 600 miles, and the range of hills that we had to cross, and which divided the waters which drained into Hudson Bay from those that reached the sea by the St. Lawrence river, was about 800 feet in height. Everything depended upon how the force to be employed was organized and equipped before starting. After we had once embarked in our boats on Shebandowan Lake, we should be cut off absolutely from all outside help and should have to trust entirely to our own exertions and pluck. On the way to Fort Garry we could not receive reinforcements, and, worse still, could obtain no provisions, clothing, ammunition, axes or other tools. Everything we required had therefore to be taken with us in our boats, and their carrying capacity was necessarily very limited. All implements for use during the expedition had to be both strong and light. At the numerous rocky and difficult portages to be traversed, our boats would be exposed to extremely rough usage, for which they would have to be well built of good tough material. But if made extra heavy for this purpose, their great weight would add seriously to the men’s labour in dragging them over the steep and rugged heights to be encountered between Lakes Superior and Winnipeg. Almost all these boats were about thirty feet long, with a proportionate beam; all had keels, and were about half and half, carvel and clinker built. The crew of each consisted of eight or nine soldiers and two” or three Indians or other civilians who were selected as being, “voyageurs,” or good men on timber rafts, or at river work generally. Each boat carried sixty days’ provisions for all on board of it, in the shape of salt pork, beans, preserved potatoes, flour, biscuit, salt, tea and sugar. No spirits of any sort were provided for the men, and the officers were forbidden to take any wine for their own use. It was a strictly teetotal undertaking. The necessary entrenching tools, ammunition, tents, waterproof sheets, cooking pots, blankets, etc., etc., left but little empty space in the boats, which were loaded down as far as they could be with due regard to safety. The captain of each company was responsible for all these stores, and to him were given some well-selected boat-builders’ tools, a number of tin plates, and plenty of white lead for patching up holes or injuries done to the boats. All such minutiae had to be well thought out and every calculable contingency provided for.
***
The wind had died away, as it usually does there towards evening. The weather was delightful, the lake so lately stormy, was in its best and most placid beauty, reflecting on its mirror-like surface the beach and other trees on the high ground around it. For the moment all was still and quiet. The day’s work was over. Strange to say, no hum of insect or chirp of bird ever comes from these northern parts of the Canadian forests, and there were no swallows to skim over the lake below and lend life to its great expanse of water.
The whole scene, with its picturesque military accessories, was for many reasons very impressive. It brought to my mind the stories read in boyhood of how wild bands of fierce Norse freebooters set out from some secluded bay in quest of plunder and adventure.
One great peculiarity of our undertaking struck me forcibly at the time: that in an age, justly celebrated for its inventions and scientific progress, such a military expedition should start unaided in any fashion by either the steam engine or the electric telegraph. We were to depend exclusively upon sail and oar to reach our far-off destination, just as the Greeks and Romans had been forced to do in their foreign campaigns some twenty centuries before. Another curious fact was, that upon reaching our destination we should be as far from a telegraph station as Caesar was from Rome when he jumped ashore in Kent with his legions a little before the Christian era.
— Field Marshall Viscount Wolseley, The Story of A Soldier’s Life, Volume II (1903)
Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls by Frances Anne Hopkins, 1877
The American psyche is in some part shaped by the myth of the frontier, but Canada has the bush. The US Army fought frontier wars, but the Wolsely expedition is a different beast altogether. It's the epitome of bush warfare. The sheer audaciousness of projecting a self-sufficient force that far, that fast, by manpower alone to demonstrate the resolve of a fledgling federal government.
To gain a better appreciation for what moving through this sort of terrain at that time would have been like, here's a video of modern folks attempting to portage a yorkboat 1600m (metres!) through the northern bush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlWn3VVjIGc
Ok, I just ordered it, my first Disraeli.