38 Mackenzie’s Voyages

(across Grande Portage) in the course of six hours, being a
distance of eighteen miles over hills and mountains.”

The mosquitoes, which had followed them in clouds and
were seldom absent, were particularly annoying to the men
engaged in transferring their canoes and cargo past the
rapids. The whole outfit. was bodily carried a total distance
of about a mile and a half. In this way Casette, Mountain,
Pelican, and the Rapids of the Drowned and several minor
ones were passed. A venturesome Indian woman, how-
ever, in trying to run a chute alone in her canoe sensed
danger in time to abandon the craft, which went down the
falls and was dashed to pieces. Every traveller in the North
knows that experienced men may be caught and drowned.
Only three years before, a party proceeding to Slave Lake
in the fall of the year, under the direction of Cuthbert Grant,
lost two canoes and five of its men in the Rapids of the
Drowned, which occasioned the place to be called Portage
des Noyés. Proceeding six miles farther, camp was made
at 5.30 in the evening at Point de Roche. The hunters
brought in several geese, a beaver, and four ducks. All
were greatly fatigued after such a strenuous day’s work, as
well they might be. The mere labour of lifting and carrying
things is by no means so trying as the incessant strain
required to avert dangers and prevent catastrophes. ‘The high
nervous tension is more wearing than mere muscular effort.

Slave River below the rapids winds through a level
alluvial plain between banks of clay and sand. ‘The west
side shows dark rich soil, especially in the lower reaches. ©
At the sixtieth parallel the banks are a hundred feet high,
becoming, as the river descends, gradually lower. ‘The stream
averages half a mile in width, with a gradient of about six
inches to the mile

1 Mackenzie, Voyages.