40 Mackenzie’s Voyages

there was scarcely any appearance of verdure along the lake,
although on the rivers above trees were in full leaf.

Speaking of the country on both sides of Slave River
Mackenzie says: “‘The Indians informed me, that, at a
very small distance from either bank of the river, are very
extensive plains, frequented by large herds of buffaloes,
while the moose and reindeer! keep in the woods that
border on it. The beavers, which are in great numbers,
build their habitations in the small lakes and rivers, because
in the larger streams, the ice carries away everything with
it during the spring. The mud banks in the river are covered
with wild fowl, and we this morning killed two swans,
ten geese, and one beaver, without suffering the delay of
an hour, so that we might soon have filled the canoe with
them if that had been our object.”

Slave River enters the lake through many channels
flowing among low alluvial islands. The lower edge of the
delta has in fact a frontage of twenty miles. The prevailing
north-east winds cast up miles of driftwood which forms
barrier beaches on the south shore. The long lagoons made
in this manner eventually fill up and are reclaimed from the
lake and added to the delta which is gradually encroaching
northward across the lake. A great part of the northern
section of Slave River was once an arm of the lake, since
filled in by the above sequence of sedimentation, north-east
winds, barrier beaches of driftwood, lagoons, swamps and
alluvial lands.

The canoes proceeded eastward behind one of these long
barriers to the houses erected by Messrs. Grant and Le
Roux in 1786. They had wintered here that and the follow-
ing year, calling the place (old) Fort Resolution. Le Roux
had then crossed the lake to the North Arm where a house

1 For “reindeer” read ‘‘caribou”’ in the following pages.