Four hundred Assiniboines had come in canoes with their furs to the fort. Leather wigwams spread back from the Hayes River like a town of mushrooms. Canoes lay in hundreds bottom-up on the beach, and where the reddish blue of the campfire curled up from the sands filling the evening air with the pungent smell of burning bark, Assiniboine voyageurs could be seen melting resin and tar to gum the splits in the birch canoes. Hunters had exchanged their furs for guns and ammunition. Squaws had bartered their store of pemmican (buffalo) meat for gay gewgaws—red flannels and prints, colored beads, hand mirrors of tin—given at the wicket gate of the fort.
Young Hendry joined the encampment, became acquainted with different leaders of the brigades, and finally secured an Assiniboine called Little Bear as a guide to the country of the Great Unknown River, where the French sent traders—the Saskatchewan. It was the end of June before the Indians were ready to break camp for the homeward voyage. By looking at the map, it will be seen that Nelson and Hayes rivers flow northeast from the same prairie region to a point at the bay called Port Nelson, or Fort York. One could ascend to the country of the Assiniboines by either Hayes River or Nelson. York Fort was on Hayes River. The Indians at that time usually ascended the Hayes River halfway, then crossed westward to the Nelson by a chain of rivers and lakes and portages, and advanced to the prairie by a branch of the Nelson River known as Katchawan to Playgreen Lake. Playgreen Lake is really a northern arm of Lake Winnipeg. Instead of coming on down to Lake Winnipeg, the Assiniboines struck westward overland from Playgreen Lake to the Saskatchewan at Pasquia, variously known as Basquia and Pachegoia and the Pas. By cutting across westward from Playgreen Lake to the main Saskatchewan, three detours were avoided: (1) the long detour round the north shore of Lake Winnipeg; (2) the southern bend of Saskatchewan, where it enters the lake; (3) the portage of Grand Rapids in the Saskatchewan between Lake Winnipeg and Cedar Lake. It is necessary to give these somewhat tedious details as this route was to become the highway of commerce for a hundred years.
Up these waters paddled the gay Indian voyageurs, the foam rippling on the wake of their bark canoes not half so light as the sparkling foam of laugh and song and story from the paddlers. Over these long lonely portages, silent but for the wind through the trees, or the hoot of the owl, or flapping of a loon, or a far weird call of the meadow lark—a mote in an ocean of sky—the first colonists were to trudge, men and women and children, who came to the West seeking that freedom and room for the shoulder-swing of uncramped manhood, which home lands had denied. Plymouth Rock, they call the landing place of the Pilgrim Fathers. Every portage up Hayes River was a Plymouth Rock to these first colonists of the West.
On June 26, then, 1754, Hendry set out with the Assiniboines for the voyage up Hayes River. At Amista-Asinee or Great Stone Rock they camped for the first night, twenty-four miles from York—good progress considering it was against stream at the full flood of summer rains. Fire Steel River, Wood Partridge River, Pine Reach—marked the camps for sixty miles from York. Four Falls compelled portage beyond Pine Reach, and shoal water for another twenty-five miles set the men tracking, the crews jumping out to wade and draw the lightened canoes up stream.
July 1, Hendry was one hundred and thirteen miles from York. Terrific rains, hot and thundery, deluged the whole flotilla, and Hendry learned for the first time what clouds of huge inland mosquitoes can do. Mosquito Point, he called the camp. Here, the Hayes broke into three or four branches. Hendry’s brigade of Assiniboines began to work up one of the northwestward branches toward the Nelson. The land seemed to be barren rock. At camping places was neither fish nor fowl. The voyageurs took a reef in their belts and pressed on. Three beaver afforded some food on Steel River but “we are greatly fatigued,” records Hendry, “with carrying and hauling our canoes, and we are not well fed; but the natives are continually smoking, which I find allays hunger.” Pikes and ducks replenished the provision bags on Duck Lake beyond Steel River. Twenty canoes of Inland Indians were met at Shad Falls beyond Cree Lake, on their way to York. With these Hendry sent a letter to Governor Isham. It was July 20 before Hendry realized that the labyrinth of willow swamps had led into Nelson River. It must have been high up Nelson River, in some of its western sources east of Playgreen Lake, for one day later, on Sunday the 21st, he records: “We paddled two miles up the Nelson and then came to Keiskatchewan River, on which the French have two houses which we expect to see to-morrow.” He was now exactly five hundred miles from York. “The mosquitoes are intolerable, giving us peace neither day nor night. We paddled fourteen miles up the Keiskatchewan west, when we came to a French house. On our arrival, two Frenchmen came to the waterside and in a very genteel manner invited me into their house, which I readily accepted. One asked if I had any letter from my master and why I was going inland. I answered I had no letter and was out to view the country; that I meant to return this way in spring. He told me his master and men were gone down to Montreal with the furs, and that they must detain me until his return. However, they were very kind, and at night I went to my tent and told Little Bear my leader. He only smiled and said: “They dare not detain you.” Hendry was at the Pas on the Saskatchewan. If he had come up the Saskatchewan from Lake Winnipeg, he would have found that the French had another fort at the mouth of the river—Bourbon.
From now on, he describes the region which he crossed as Mosquito Plains. White men alone in the wilderness become friends quickly. In spite of rivalry, the English trader presented the French with tobacco; the French in turn gave him pemmican of moose meat. On Wednesday, July 24, he left the fort. Sixteen miles up the Saskatchewan, Hendry passed Peotago River, heavily timbered with birch trees. Up this region the canoes of the four hundred Assiniboines ascended southward, toward the western corner of the modern province of Manitoba. As the river became shoal, canoes were abandoned seventy miles south of the Saskatchewan. Packs strapped on backs, the Indians starving for food, a dreary march began across country southwest over the Mosquito Plains. “Neither bird nor beast is to be seen. We have nothing to eat,” records Hendry after a twenty-six miles tramp. At last, seventy miles from where they had left the canoes, one hundred and forty from the Saskatchewan, they came on a huge patch of ripe raspberries and wild cherries, and luckily in the brushwood killed two moose. This relieved the famine. Wandering Assiniboines chanced to be encamped here. Hendry held solemn conference with the leaders, whiffed pipes to the four corners of the universe—by which the deities of North, South, East and West were called to witness the sincerity of the sentiments—and invited these tribes down to York; but they only answered, “we are already supplied by the French at Pasquia.”
One hundred miles south of Pas—or just where the Canadian Northern Railroad strikes west from Manitoba across Saskatchewan—a delightful change came over the face of the country. Instead of brackish swamp water or salt sloughs, were clear-water lakes. Red deer—called by the Assiniboines waskesaw—were in myriads. “I am now,” writes Hendry as he entered what is now the Province of Saskatchewan, “entering a most pleasant and plentiful country of hills and dales with little woods.”
Many Indians were met, but all were strong partisans of the French. An average of ten miles a day was made by the marchers, hunting red deer as they tramped. On August 8, somewhere near what is now Red Deer River, along the line of the Canada Northern, pause was made for a festival of rejoicing on safe return from the long voyage and relief from famine. For a day and a night, all hands feasted and smoked and danced and drank and conjured in gladness; the smoking of the pipe corresponding to our modern grace before meals, the dancing a way of evincing thanks in rhythmic motion instead of music, the drinking and conjuring not so far different from our ancestors’ way of giving thanks. The lakes were becoming alkali swamps, and camp had to be made where there was fresh water. Sometimes the day’s march did not average four miles. Again, there would be a forced march of fifteen. For the first time, an English fur trader saw Indians on horseback. Where did they get the horses? As we now know, the horses came from the Spaniards, but we must not wonder that when Hendry reported having seen whole tribes on horseback, he was laughed out of the service as a romancer, and the whole report of his trip discredited. The Indians’ object was to reach the buffalo grounds and lay up store of meat for the winter. They told Hendry he would presently see whole tribes of Indians on horseback—Archithinues, the famous Blackfoot Confederacy of Bloods, Blackfeet, Piegans and Sarcees.
On the 15th of August, they were among the buffalo, where to-day the great grooves and ruts left by the marching herds can still be seen between the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine Rivers toward Qu’ Appelle. For the most part, the Indians hunted the buffalo with bow and arrow, and at night there was often a casualty list like the wounded after a battle. “Sunday—dressed a lame man’s leg and he gave me for my trouble a moose nose, which is considered a great delicacy among the Indians.” “I killed a bull buffalo,” he writes on September 8, “he was nothing but skin and bones. I took out his tongue and left his remains to the wolves, which were waiting around in great numbers. We cannot afford to expend ammunition on them. My feet are swelled with marching, but otherwise I am in perfect health. So expert are the natives buffalo hunting, they will take an arrow out of the buffalo when the beasts are foaming and raging and tearing the ground up with their feet and horns. The buffalo are so numerous, like herds of English cattle that we are obliged to make them sheer out of our way.”
Sometimes more dangerous game than buffalo was encountered. On September 17, Hendry writes: “Two young men were miserably wounded by a grizzly bear that they were hunting to-day. One may recover but the other never can. His arm is torn from his body, one eye gouged out and his stomach ripped open.” The next day the Indian died.