THE VoyacE To THE ArcTIC SI

themselves in the wide and shallow entrance
of the great river for which they had been
searching. Driven on by a stiff breeze, before
night they had left Great Slave Lake far
behind them, and they made their camp some-
where beyond the present site of Fort Provi-
dence.

For some days Mackenzie’s hopes must
have been high that he was indeed on the way
to the Pacific, for the broad river on which he
was the first white man to venture flows
almost due west for three hundred miles after
leaving Great Slave Lake, with a steady and
even current ideal for rapid progress by canoe.
At first wide and filled with islands, it soon
contracts to an average breadth of about one
mile all the way to its mouth. Progress now
was easy and rapid. After skirting the Horn
Mountains on the north shore, they passed on
July 1 the mouth of what Mackenzie calls the
River of the Mountain, the greatest tributary
of the Mackenzie, now known as the Liard.
Two more bags of pemmican were cached on
an island in the river. On July 2 the Rocky
Mountains, of which they had caught a dis-