—W.H. Carruth.
At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons, which weigh over ten pounds each.
To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and the Pouce Coupé. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been damaged by frost.
Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their cattle longer than six weeks each winter.
Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace
The Pouce Coupé would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September. Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in, tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn, and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that tickle his palate,—blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries, willow-berries, and saskatoons.
