Our Sunday school is generally attended by nearly fifty scholars, including adults, independent of the Indian children; and the congregation consists upon an average of from one hundred to one hundred and thirty persons. It is a most gratifying sight to see the Colonists, in groups, direct their steps on the Sabbath morning towards the Mission house, at the ringing of the bell, which is now elevated in a spire that is attached to the building. And it is no small satisfaction to have accomplished the wish so feelingly expressed by a deceased officer of the Company. ""I must confess, (he observed) that I am anxious to see the first little Christian church and steeple of wood, slowly rising among the wilds, to hear the sound of the first sabbath bell that has tolled here since the creation."" I never witnessed the Establishment but with peculiar feelings of delight, and contemplated it as the dawn of a brighter day in the dark interior of a moral wilderness. The lengthened shadows of the setting sun cast upon the buildings, as I returned from calling upon some of the Settlers a few evenings ago; and the consideration that there was now a landmark of Christianity in this wild waste of heathenism, raised in my mind a pleasing train of thought, with the sanguine hope that this Protestant Establishment might be the means of raising a spiritual temple to the Lord, to whom ""the heathen are given as an inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth as a possession.""
I considered it as [ a ] small point gained, to have a public building dedicated to religious purposes, whose spire should catch the eye, both of the wandering natives, and the stationary Colonists. It would have its effect on the population generally. The people of England look with a degree of veneration to the ancient tower and lofty spire of the Establishment; and they are bound in habitual attachment to her constitution, which protects the monument and turf graves of their ancestors. And where the lamp of spiritual Christianity burns but dimly around her altar, it cannot be denied, that even her established rites and outward form have some moral effect on the population at large.
On the 10th, I addressed a crowded congregation, in a farewell discourse, from the pulpit, previous to my leaving the Colony for the Factory: and having administered the sacrament to those who joined cordially with me in prayer, that the Missionary who was on his way to officiate in my absence, might be tenfold, yea a hundred fold, more blessed in his ministry than I had been, I parted with those upon the Church Mission Establishment with tears. It had been a long, and anxious, and arduous scene of labour to me; and my hope was, as about to embark for England, that I might return to the Settlement, and be the means of effecting a better order of things.
The weather was favourable on the morning of our departure; and stepping into the boat the current soon bore us down the river towards Lake Winipeg. As the spire of the church receded from my view, and we passed several of the houses of the Settlers, they hailed me with their cordial wishes for a safe voyage, and expressed a hope of better times for the Colony. Then it was that my heart renewed its supplications to that God,
—'who is ever present, ever felt,
In the void waste, as in the city full,'
for the welfare of the Settlement, as affording a resting place for numbers, after the toils of the wilderness in the Company's service, where they might dwell, through the divine blessing, in the broad day-light of Christianity; and being bound to the country from having families by native women, might find the protection and advantages of civilized life.
With light favourable winds we soon crossed the Lake and arrived at Norway House, and such is generally the quickness of the passage from this point to York Factory, that in the rapid stream of the rivers, a loaded boat will reach the depot in a few days, which will take three or four weeks to return with excessive toil, from the strength of the opposing current. It appears dangerous to the inexperienced traveller to run the rapids in the passage to the Factory, but it is seldom attended with any serious accident. The men who have charge of the boats are generally experienced steersmen, and it is an interesting sight to see them take the rush of water with their boats, and with cool intrepidity and skill direct the sweep, or steer-oar to their arrival in safety at the bottom of a rapid of almost a perpendicular fall of many feet, or through a torrent of water of a quarter of a mile or more in length. Sometimes, however the boats strike in the violence of their descent, so as to cause a fracture, and hurry the crew to pull ashore to save the cargo from damage. This accident befel us several times in our passage down, but a kind Providence protected us, and we arrived in safety at York Factory.
Immediately on my arrival, I made arrangements for fulfilling my Missionary engagement to visit the Esquimaux at Churchill, the Company's most northern Post on the Bay. It was the advice of Captain Franklin, that I should walk the distance of about one hundred and eighty miles, from York Fort to that Factory, as I might be delayed in a canoe, by the vast quantities of floating ice in the Bay, so as not to meet these Indians in time. I followed this advice, and having engaged one of the Company's servants, with an Indian who was an excellent hunter, we set off on our expedition, on the morning of the 11th of July, accompanied by two Indians, who had come express from Churchill, and were returning thither. It was necessary that we should embark in a boat, to cross the North River; and in rowing round the Point of Marsh, we perceived a brightness in the northern horizon, like that reflected from ice, usually called the blink, and which led us to suppose that vast fields of it were floating along the coast in the direction that we were going. It happened to be low water when we crossed the mouth of the river, so that the boat could not approach nearer than about a mile from the shore, which obliged us to walk this distance through the mud and water, to the place where we made our encampment for the night, and where the mosquitoes inflicted their torments upon us. We were dreadfully annoyed by them, from the swampy country we had to traverse, and I was glad to start with the dawn of the following morning, from a spot where they literally blackened a small canvass tent that was pitched, and hovered around us in clouds so as to render life itself burdensome. The day, however, afforded us very little relief, while walking, nearly ancle deep in water, through the marshes; and such was their torture upon the poor animals, that we frequently saw the deer coming out of the woods, apparently almost blinded and distracted with their numbers, to rush into the water on the shore for relief. This gave an opportunity to the hunter to kill two of them in the course of the afternoon, so that we had plenty of venison, and a good supply of wild fowl, which he had shot for our evening repast. We started at sunrise the next morning, after having had but little sleep, as I had been wrapped in my blanket almost to suffocation, to escape in a degree the misery of our unceasing torment. Towards noon, we had much better walking than we had before met with, and were relieved from the mosquitoes by a change of wind blowing cold from off the ice, which was now seen from the horizon to the shores of the bay. The relief to us was like a cessation from an agony of pain; and as the hunter had just killed another deer, and the wild fowl flew around us in abundance, we pitched the tent, and halted for several hours, and refreshed ourselves with sleep, after the irritation and almost sleepless nights that we had endured. We were on the march again at five o'clock; and after we had forded Stoney River, we came upon the track of a polar bear. The Indian hunter was very keen in his desire to fall in with it, and I lamented that I had not an opportunity of seeing him engage the ferocious animal, which seemed to have taken a survey of the party, and to have gone into the wood a short distance from us. The bears are now coming off the ice in the Bay, on which they have been for several months past, to live upon seals, which they catch as they lie sleeping by the sides of the holes in the drift ice, when it dissolves or is driven far from shore. They seek their food among the sea-weed and every trash that is washed up along the coast, or go upon the rocks, or to the woods, for berries, during the summer months. Savage, however, as this animal is, it is not so much dreaded by the Indians as the grizzly bear, which is more ferocious and forward in his attack. These are found towards the Rocky Mountains, and none but very expert hunters like to attack them. A gentleman who was travelling to a distance on the plains to the West of the Red River Colony, told me of a narrow escape he once had, with his servant boy, in meeting a grizzly bear. They were riding slowly along, near the close of the day, when they espied the animal coming from the verge of a wood in the direction towards them. They immediately quickened the pace of their horses, but being jaded with the day's journey, the bear was soon seen to gain upon them. In this emergency, he hit upon an expedient, which was probably the means of saving their lives. He took the boy, who was screaming with terror, behind him, and abandoned the horse that he rode. When the ferocious animal came up to it, the gentleman, who stopped at some distance, expected to see the bear rend it immediately with his paws; but to his surprise, after having walked round and smelt at the horse, as it stood motionless with fear, the bear returned to the wood, and the horse was afterwards recovered without injury.
The morning of the 14th was very cold, from the wind blowing off the ice in the Bay; and when we stopped to breakfast, I was obliged to put a blanket over my shoulders, as I stood by the fire, for warmth. The comfortable sensation however was, that we were free from the annoyance and misery of the mosquitoes; cold, hunger, and thirst, are not to be compared with the incessant suffering which they inflict. We waded knee-deep through Owl River, in the afternoon of the 15th. The weather was cold, and nothing was to be seen in the Bay but floating ice. It was rather late before we pitched the tent, and we met with some difficulty in collecting a sufficient quantity of drift wood on the shore, to kindle a fire large enough to boil the kettle, and cook the wild fowl that we had shot. The next day we forded Broad River, on the banks of which we saw several dens, which the bears had scratched for shelter: and seeing the smoke of an Indian tent at some distance before us, in the direction we were going, we quickened our step, and reached it before we stopped to breakfast. We found the whole family clothed in deer-skins, and upon a hunting excursion from Churchill. The Indian, or rather a half-breed, was very communicative, and told me that though he was leading an Indian life, his father was formerly a master at one of the Company's Posts, and proposed accompanying our party to the Factory. He had two sons, he said, who were gone in the pursuit of a deer; and, on quitting the encampment to travel with us, he would leave some signs for them to follow us on their return. They were the following, and drawn upon a broad piece of wood, which he prepared with an axe.