The communications which the chief and the guides then gave respecting the route to the Copper-Mine River and its course to the sea coincided in every material point with the statements which were made by Boileau and Black Meat at Chipewyan, but they differed in their descriptions of the coast.  The information however, collected from both sources, was very vague and unsatisfactory.  None of his tribe had been more than three days’ march along the sea-coast to the eastward of the river’s mouth.

As the water was unusually high this season the Indian guides recommended our going by a shorter route to the Copper-Mine River than that they had first proposed to Mr. Wentzel, and they assigned as a reason for the change that the reindeer would be sooner found upon this track.  They then drew a chart of the proposed route on the floor with charcoal, exhibiting a chain of twenty-five small lakes extending towards the north, about one-half of them connected by a river which flows into Slave Lake near Fort Providence.  One of the guides named Keskarrah drew the Copper-Mine River running through the Upper Lake in a westerly direction towards the Great Bear Lake and then northerly to the sea.  The other guide drew the river in a straight line to the sea from the above-mentioned place but, after some dispute, admitted the correctness of the first delineation.  The latter was elder brother to Akaitcho and he said that he had accompanied Mr. Hearne on his journey and, though very young at the time, still remembered many of the circumstances and particularly the massacre committed by the Indians on the Esquimaux.

They pointed out another lake to the southward of the river, about three days’ journey distant from it, on which the chief proposed the next winter’s establishment should be formed as the reindeer would pass there in the autumn and spring.  Its waters contained fish and there was a sufficiency of wood for building as well as for the winter’s consumption.  These were important considerations and determined me in pursuing the route they now proposed.  They could not inform us what time we should take in reaching the lake until they saw our manner of travelling in the large canoes, but they supposed we might be about twenty days, in which case I entertained the hope that, if we could then procure provision, we should have time to descend the Copper-Mine River for a considerable distance, if not to the sea itself, and return to the lake before the winter set in.

It may here be proper to mention that it had been my original plan to descend the Mackenzie’s River and to cross the Great Bear Lake, from the eastern side of which, Boileau informed me, there is a communication with the Copper-Mine River by four small lakes and portages; but under our present circumstances this course could not be followed because it would remove us too far from the establishments at the Great Slave Lake to receive the supplies of ammunition and some other stores in the winter which were absolutely necessary for the prosecution of our journey, or to get the Esquimaux interpreter whom we expected.  If I had not deemed these circumstances paramount I should have preferred the route by Bear Lake.