158 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

that the canoe is nearing completion when they return to
the river this morning. At ten in the forenoon one of them
comes to tell me that Thomas has so badly cut his foot with
the axe that all work has become impossible to him. This is
bad news, as we are already on rather short commons.

At 2 p.m., all the workmen come back with unwelcome
intelligence. In their hurry, the canoe they had finished
has split from end to end under the too great pressure of a
cross-bar they were forcing in with a view to widening it.
Two days work for nothing! A hole in our larder with no
corresponding advantage! Moved by our ill-luck, Nakhon
generously parts in our behalf with his little canoe.‘

As if to get a foretaste of what is awaiting us, we have
not gone far on Cambie Lake when we are assailed by a
terrible tempest® which puts us on the brink of perdition.
In a very short time, our tiny craft is full of water and our
things wet.

At the end of the lake, we enter one of three branches
of a fine river which falls into the same and which I call
the Dawson, after a friend of mine in England. We are
now pioneering, as no white man has ever preceded us in
these parts. Killed one duck, and at night camp on
a little lake formed by an expansion of the stream. This
will henceforth be Sinclair Lake.*

September 18: Getting out of Sinclair Lake we are stupe-
fied to remark that the river, yesterday so wide and so deep,
is now shallow and full of weeds, through which shoals of
fish frisk about and disport themselves at our approach in
a most lively way. Soon all progress becomes impossible.
What can the matter be? Upon examination, we realize

4 The inland aborigines have two kinds of canoes: one for lake
travelling, as large as they can make it out of a poplar tree, and one,
much smaller, for hunting purposes. Nakhon’s belongs to the last
category.

5 Which was felt all over the country. A big canoe, which Father
Morice had used on French Lake and was being taken back to Fraser
Lake, capsized and its tenants went tothe bottom, though they ultimately
saved themselves. On Stuart Lake the Hudson’s Bay Company’s
schooner was tossed about by the furious waves as she was taking back
Mr. Loring and family, and her two anchors got broken so that they had
to let her drift aground on the sand of the beach.

® After the man at the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post
at Fraser Lake.

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