Somewhere between the north and south branches of the Saskatchewan, Hendry's Assiniboines met Indians on horseback, the Blackfeet, or 'Archithinues,' as he calls them. The Blackfeet Indians tell us to-day that the Assiniboines and Crees used to meet the Blackfeet to exchange the trade of the Bay at Wetaskiwin, 'the Hills of Peace.' This exactly agrees with the itinerary, described by Hendry, after they crossed the south branch in September and struck up into the Eagle Hills. Winter was passed in hunting between the points where Calgary and Edmonton now stand. Hendry remarks on the outcropping of coal on the north branch. The same outcroppings can be seen to-day in the high banks below Edmonton.
It was on October 14 that Hendry was conveyed to the main Blackfeet camp.
The leader's tent was large enough to contain fifty persons. He received us seated on a buffalo skin, attended by twenty elderly men. He made signs for me to sit down on his right hand, which I did. Our leaders [the Assiniboines] set several great pipes going the rounds and we smoked according to their custom. Not one word was spoken. Smoking over, boiled buffalo flesh was served in baskets of bent wood. I was presented with ten buffalo tongues. My guide informed the leader I was sent by the grand leader who lives on the Great Waters to invite his young men down with their furs. They would receive in return powder, shot, guns and cloth. He made little answer; said it was far off, and his people could not paddle. We were then ordered to depart to our tents, which we pitched a quarter of a mile outside their lines. The chief told me his tribe never wanted food, as they followed the buffalo, but he was informed the natives who frequented the settlements often starved on their journey, which was exceedingly true.
Hendry gave his position for the winter as eight hundred and ten miles west of York, or between the sites of modern Edmonton and Battleford. Everywhere he presented gifts to the Indians to induce them to go down to the Bay. On the way back to York, the explorers canoed all the way down the Saskatchewan, and Hendry paused at Fort La Corne, half-way down to Lake Winnipeg. The banks were high, high as the Hudson river ramparts, and like those of the Hudson, heavily wooded. Trees and hills were intensest green, and everywhere through the high banks for a hundred miles below what is now Edmonton bulged great seams of coal. The river gradually widened until it was as broad as the Hudson at New York or the St Lawrence at Quebec. Hawks shrieked from the topmost boughs of black poplars ashore. Whole colonies of black eagles nodded and babbled and screamed from the long sand-bars. Wolf tracks dotted the soft mud of the shore, and sometimes what looked like a group of dogs came down to the bank, watched the boatmen land, and loped off. These were coyotes of the prairie. Again and again as the brigades drew in for nooning to the lee side of some willow-grown island, black-tailed deer leaped out of the brush almost over their heads, and at one bound were in the midst of a tangled thicket that opened a magic way for their flight. From Hendry's winter camp to Lake Winnipeg, a distance of almost a thousand miles, a good hunter could then, as now, keep himself in food summer and winter with but small labour.
Most people have a mental picture of the plains country as flat prairie, with sluggish, winding rivers. Such a picture would not be true of the Saskatchewan. From end to end of the river, for only one interval is the course straight enough and are the banks low enough to enable the traveller to see in a line for eight miles. The river is a continual succession of half-circles, hills to the right, with the stream curving into a shadowy lake, or swerving out again in a bend to the low left; or high-walled sandstone bluffs to the left sending the water wandering out to the low silt shore on the right. Not river of the Thousand Islands, like the St Lawrence, but river of Countless Islands, the Saskatchewan should be called.
More ideal hunting ground could not be found. The hills here are partly wooded and in the valleys nestle lakes literally black with wild-fowl—bittern that rise heavy-winged and furry with a boo-m-m; grey geese holding political caucus with raucous screeching of the honking ganders; black duck and mallard and teal; inland gulls white as snow and fearless of hunters; little match-legged phalaropes fishing gnats from the wet sand.
The wildest of the buffalo hunts used to take place along this section of the river, or between what are now known as Pitt and Battleford. It was a common trick of the eternally warring Blackfeet and Cree to lie in hiding among the woods here and stampede all horses, or for the Blackfeet to set canoes adrift down the river or scuttle the teepees of the frightened Cree squaws who waited at this point for their lords' return from the Bay.
Round that three-hundred mile bend in the river known as 'the Elbow' the water is wide and shallow, with such numbers of sand-bars and shallows and islands that one is lost trying to keep the main current. Shallow water sounds safe and easy for canoeing, but duststorms and wind make the Elbow the most trying stretch of water in the whole length of the river. Beyond this great bend, still called the Elbow, the Saskatchewan takes a swing north-east through the true wilderness primeval. The rough waters below the Elbow are the first of twenty-two rapids round the same number of sharp turns in the river. Some are a mere rippling of the current, more noisy than dangerous; others run swift and strong for sixteen miles. First are the Squaw Rapids, where the Indian women used to wait while the men went on down-stream with the furs. Next are the Cold Rapids, and boats are barely into calm water out of these when a roar gives warning of more to come, and a tall tree stripped of all branches but a tufted crest on top—known among Indians as a 'lob-stick,—marks two more rippling rapids. The Crooked Rapids send canoes twisting round point after point almost to the forks of the South Saskatchewan. Here, five miles below the modern fur post, at a bend in the river commanding a great sweep of approach, a gay courtier of France built Fort La Corne. Who called the bold sand-walls to the right Heart Hills? And how comes it that here are Cadotte Rapids, named after the famous voyageur family of Cadottes, whose ancestor gave his life and his name to one section of the Ottawa?
Forty miles below La Corne is Nepawin, the 'looking-out-place' of the Indians for the coming trader, where the French had another post. And still the river widens and widens. Though the country is flat, the level of the river is ten feet below a crumbling shore worn sheer as a wall, with not the width of a hand for camping-place below. On a spit of the north shore was the camping-place known as Devil's Point, where no voyageur would ever stay because the long point was inhabited by demons. The bank is steep here, flanked by a swamp of huge spruce trees criss-crossed by the log-jam of centuries. The reason for the ill omen of the place is plain enough—a long point running out with three sides exposed to a bellowing wind.