The wind being strong and fair, we spun along at a great rate, and expected to reach the treaty point before dark, reckoning, as usual, without our host.  The wind suddenly wheeled to the south-west, and a dangerous squall sprang up, which forced us to run back for shelter fully five miles.  There was barely time to camp before the gale became furious, raging all night, and throwing down tents like nine-pins.  About one a.m. a cry arose from the night-watch that the boats were swamping.  All hands turned out, lading was removed, and the scows hauled up on the shingle, the rollers piling on shore with a height and fury perfectly astonishing for such a lake.  By morning the tempest was at its height, continuing all day and into the night.  The sunset that evening exhibited some of the grandest and wildest sky scenery we had ever beheld.  In the west a vast bank of luminous orange cloud, edged by torn fringes of green and gray; in the south a sea of amethyst, and stretching from north to east masses of steel gray and pearl, shot with brilliant shafts and tufts of golden vapour.  The whole sky streamed with rich colouring in the fierce wind, as if possessed at once by the genii of beauty and storm.  The boatmen, noting its aspect, predicted worse weather; but, fortunately, morning belied the omens—­our trials were over.

We were now nearing Shaw’s Point, a long willowed spit of land, called after a whimsical old chief-factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company who had charge of this district over sixty years before.  He appears to have been a man of many eccentricities, one of which was the cultivation a la Chinois of a very long finger-nail, which he used as a spoon to eat his egg.  But of him anon.  By four p.m. we had rounded his Point, and come into view of Wyaweekamon—­“The Outlet”—­a rudimentary street with several trading stores, a billiard saloon and other accessories of a brand-new village in a very old wilderness.

Here we were at the treaty point at last, safe and sound, with new interests and excitements before us; with wild man instead of wild weather to encounter; with discords to harmonize and suspicions to allay by human kindness, perhaps by human firmness, but mainly by the just and generous terms proffered by Government to an isolated but highly interesting and deserving people.

Chapter III

Treaty At Lesser Slave Lake.

On the 19th of June our little fleet landed at Willow Point.  There was a rude jetty, or wharf, at this place, below the little trading village referred to, at which loaded boats discharged.  Formerly they could ascend the sluggish and shallow channel connecting the expansion of the Heart River, called Buffalo Lake, with the head of Lesser Slave Lake, a distance of about three miles, and as far as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post, around which another trading village had gathered.  This temporary fall in the water level partly accounted for the growth of