Six years afterwards an Indian brought to the governor of the fort a letter written by Kellsey in charcoal on a piece of white birch bark.  In this he asked the governor’s pardon for running away, and his permission to return to the fort.  As a kind reply was sent, Kellsey appeared not long afterwards grown into a young man, accompanied by an Indian wife and attended by a party of Indians.  He was dressed exactly like them, but differed from them in the respect which he showed to his native wife.  She attempted to accompany her husband into the factory or place of business, and the governor stopped her; but Kellsey at once told him in English that he would not enter himself if his wife was not suffered to go with him, and so the governor relented.  After this Kellsey (who must then have been about seventeen) seems to have regularly enrolled himself in 1688 in the service of the Company, and he was employed as a kind of commercial traveller who made long journeys to the north-west to beat up a fur trade for the Company and induce tribes of Indians to make long journeys every summer to the Company’s factory with the skins they had secured between the autumn and the spring.  In this way Kellsey penetrated into the country of the Assiniboines, and he finally reached a more distant tribe or nation called by the long name of Newatamipoet.[1] Kellsey first of all made for Split Lake, up the Nelson River, and thence paddled westwards in his canoe for a distance of 71 miles.  Here he abandoned the canoe, and, for what he estimated as 316 miles, he tramped through a wooded country, first covered with fir and pine trees, and farther on with poplar and birch.  Apparently he then reached a river flowing into Reindeer Lake.  In a general way his steps must have taken him in the direction of Lake Athapaska.

[Footnote 1:  Spelt in the documents of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Naywatame-poet.]

On the way he had much trouble with the Assiniboin Indians and Kris, with whom he had caught up, and with whom he was to travel in the direction of these mysterious Newatamipoets.  The last-named tribe, who were probably of the Athapaskan group, had killed, a few months previously, three of the Kri women, and the Kri Indians who belonged to Kellsey’s party were bent, above all things, on attacking the Newatamipoets and punishing them for this outrage.  Kellsey only wished to open up peaceful relations with them and create a great trade in furs with the Hudson’s Bay Company, so he kept pleading with the Indians not to go to war with the Newatamipoets.  On this journey, however, one of the Kri Indians fell ill and died.  The next day the body was burnt with much ceremony—­first the flesh, and then the bones—­and after this funeral the companions of the dead man began to reason as to the cause of his death, and suddenly blamed Kellsey.  Kellsey had obstructed them from their purpose of avenging their slain women, therefore the gods of the tribe were angry and claimed this victim in the man who