journey of 857 miles in the very "depth of winter, the thermometer frequently at 40°, and sometimes more than 50° below zero, arrived safely, on the 26th of March, at the Fort.

Travelling in winter can only be performed on sledges, which are drawn by dogs, or by walking in snow-shoes. The settlers attach to the former a covering of leather to protect the lower part of the body, and when "beautified" with a little paint and a few trifling ornaments, the sledge assumes the name of cariole. Every traveller takes care to supply himself with a pair of snow-shoes, a blanket, hatchet, steel, flint, and tinder, and generally with fire-arms. In mounting his cariole, he puts on a large skin cloak with a hood, a fur cap, leathern trowsers and Indian stockings and mocassins. Three dogs will draw a weight, besides that of the sledge, of three hundred pounds, at the rate of two miles and a half an hour, or about fifteen miles a day, when the snow is hard frozen. To the inexperienced, the suffering occasioned by walking in snow-shoes appears to be dreadful.

"The miseries," says lieutenant Hood, "endured during the first journey of this nature are so great, that nothing could induce the sufferer to undertake a second, while under the influence of present pain. He feels his frame crushed by unaccountable pressure, he drags a galling and stubborn weight at his feet, and his track is marked with blood. The dazzling scene around him affords no rest to his eye, no object to divert his attention from his own agonising sensations. When he rises from sleep, half his body seems dead, till quickened into feeling by the irritation of his

sores. But, fortunately for him, no evil makes an impression so evanescent as pain. The traveller soon forgets his sufferings, and at every future journey, their recurrence is attended with diminished acuteness."

The

On halting for the night, the first operation, in the Canadian phrase, is that of "flooring the hut." It consists in clearing away the snow, and covering the ground with pine branches, upon which the travellers spread their blankets, skins, cloaks, and coats. sleeping place being thus arranged, the next step is, to send out parties to collect a sufficiency of wood to serve as fuel for the night; the fire is then allowed to be kindled, the sledges are unstowed, the dogs unharnessed, and the provisions hung upon the trees, out of the reach of these voracious animals. Supper is then cooked; the voy. agers coil round the fire in the centre with their feet towards it; the dogs creep in among them wherever they can find a vacancy, receiving and communicating heat, and thus the whole party enjoy repose, without any other canopy than the heaven, even though the thermometer should be far below zero.

In journeys thus performed, the danger of the traveller is not so great from the severity of the cold, as from the risk of perishing for want of food. The servants of the North-west company are frequently obliged to set out in search of the hunting-parties of Indians, to receive the furs which they may have collected. A snowstorm arises; they lose all traces of them, miss their way, and are very often driven to the last resource of killing their dogs for food. The Indians themselves are

frequently reduced to the last extremity and even to death by famine. It would seem that they have either destroyed or frightened away those vast herds of the moose, the rein-deer, and the bison, which once frequented the wide plains over which the expedition passed; hitherto they had seen very few; and the fur-bearing animals are so scarce, that in the whole journey to the Polar Sea and back, one single habitation and one dam only of that industrious and ingenious creature, the beaver, were met with.

While captain Franklin and Mr. Back were travelling on foot and in sledges, in the manner described, to Fort Chepeywan, Dr. Richardson and Mr. Hood were not idle at Cumberland House; the one collecting objects of natural history, and the other making excursions among the Indians, joining in their hunting parties, and exercising his pencil on such subjects as might come before him. Of these Indians, called Crees, or Kristeneaux, by the French Canadians, Dr. Richardson says, the whole population, spread over an extent of 20,000 square miles, does not exceed five hundred. The hooping-cough and measles make fearful havoc among the children; spirituous liquors obtained at the company's posts, a precarious subsistence, and famine, destroy the adults. They are the victims of superstition, and the voluntary dupes of the more cunning of the tribe, who practise on their simple minds the arts of conjuration; and profess to avert evils and cure diseases, by the use of a drum, a rattle, and a sweating-house. The Crees are kind and hospitable while they have any thing to share either with friends or strangers:

when the winter sets in, when the beasts and birds scour away to the southward, and the lakes and rivers are bound up in frost, their provi sions fail them, and they usually make towards some of the company's posts for that relief which they have neglected to provide for this season of calamity; many of them linger so long as to be unable to reach these posts, and fall a sacrifice to all the horrors of fa mine; and instances are not rare of their being reduced to feed upon the bodies of their own family, to prevent actual starvation.

The operation of tattooing is as universal among the Crees and more southerly Indians as in the Oriental islands; it is represented as extremely painful, being per formed by running an awl under the cuticle, and then drawing a cord dipt in charcoal and water through the canal thus formed. "A half-breed," says Dr. Richardson, "whose arm I amputated, de clared that tattooing was not only the most painful operation of the two, but rendered infinitely more difficult to bear by its tediousness, having lasted in his case three days."

There are another set of people, the offspring of those employed by the two companies as agents and clerks, and Indian or half-breed women. These métifs, or, as the Canadians term them, bois-brulés, are a good looking people, apt to learn and willing to be taught, but hitherto their education has been wholly neglected. The males are consequently without principle and the females without chastity. Many of them are brought up and intermarry with the Indians. The girls at the forts are frequently wives at the age of twelve, and mothers before fourteen; instances

are not rare of a voyager taking to wife a child of ten years. No objection is ever made by the partners, or residents of the companies, to this and other criminal indulgence of the vices of their servants. These Canadian voyagers indeed have so little of moral feeling, that it is by no means unusual for one woman to be common to, and maintained at the joint expense of, two men ; or to sell a wife for a season, or altogether, for a sum of money, generally inferior to the price of a team of dogs.

The Stone Indians, a tribe residing near the company's post of Carlton House, are described by captain Franklin as more prepossessing in their looks than the Crees, but addicted to thieving, and grossly and habitually treacherous. Their figure is good, their limbs well-proportioned, their countenances affable and pleasing, their eyes large and expressive, nose aquiline, teeth white and regular, forehead bold, cheek-bones rather high, the colour that of light copper, and their heads covered with a profusion of very black hair. They are generally at war with the neighbouring tribes, and never fail to take the scalps of their prisoners as trophies. They are the only tribe who abuse the rights of hospitality by way-laying and plundering the very guest who had been apparently received with kindness, and just departed from their tents. They are exceedingly expert with the bow, and very young boys will hit a mark at a considerable distance.

Their neighbours, the Chepewyans, with more unpromising features, are at least honest, but rude in their manners and extremely superstitions. One of the tribes

of these people was found in the most forlorn condition. They had destroyed every thing which they possessed, as a token of grief for the loss they had sustained in the prevailing sickness of measles, hooping-cough, and dysentery. "It appears," says captain Franklin, "that no article is spared by those unhappy men when a near relative dies; their clothes and tents are cut to pieces, their guns broken, and every other weapon rendered useless, if some person do not remove these articles from their sight." The following is a most extraordinary instance of the effects of superstition:

"The Northen Indians suppose that they originally sprang from a dog; and, about five years ago, a superstitious fanatic so strongly pressed upon their minds the inpropriety of employing these animals, to which they were related, for purposes of labour, that they universally resolved against using them any more, and, strange as it may seem, destroyed them. They now have to drag every thing themselves on sledges. This laborious task falls most heavily on the women; nothing can more shock the feelings of a person, accustomed to civilized life, than to witness the state of their degradation. When a party is on a march the women have to drag the tent, the meat, and whatever the hunter possesses, whilst he only carries his gun and medicine case.. In the evening they form the encamp ment, cut wood, fetch water, and prepare the supper: and then, per haps, are not permitted to partake of the fare until the men have finished. A successful hunter sometimes has two or three wires; whoever happens to be the favourite, assumes authority over the

others, and has the management of the tent. These men usually treat their wives unkindly, and even with harshness; except, indeed, at the time when they are about to increase the family, and then they show them much indulgence. With all this they have a strong affection for their children."

As soon as the spring began to appear, Dr. Richardson and Mr. Hood set out to join their companions who had preceded them to Fort Chepewyan. It may readily be supposed, that the return of this season is, in such a dreary chilling climate, hailed with universal joy. The symptoms of its approach are unequivocal. About the middle of April flights of geese ducks, and swans from the south ward, indicate the breaking-up of the frost; gentle showers begin to fall: the whole face of the country is deluged by the melted snow. In a few days the upper grounds are dry, and teem with the fragrant offspring of the new year. "There can scarcely be a higher gratification," says captain Franklin," than that which is enjoyed in this country, in witnessing the rapid change which takes place in the course of a few days in the spring; scarcely does the snow disappear from the ground, before the trees are clothed with thick foliage, the shrubs open their leaves, and put forth their variegated flowers, and the whole prospect becomes animating." But it also brings its inconveniences, the first, and most annoying of which, are the clouds of huge full-grown musquitoes, which bursting forth at once, incessantly torment the traveller to a degree unknown even in the tropical regions of the globe. In Mr. Hood's account of the journey from Cumberland house to Fort

Chepewyan, the misery inflicted by these creatures is thus described. "We had sometimes before procured a little rest, by closing the tent, and burning wood, or flashing gunpowder within, the smoke driving the musquitoes into the crannies of the ground. But this remedy was now ineffectual, though we employed it so perseveringly as to hazard suffocation; they swarmed under our blankets, goring us with their envenomed trunks, and steeping our clothes in blood. We rose at day-light in a fever, and our misery was unmitigated during our whole stay.-The food of the musquito is blood, which it can extract by penetrating the hide of a buffalo; and if it is not disturbed, it gorges itself so as to swell its body into a transparent globe. The wound does not swell like that of the African musquito, but it is infinitely more painful; and when multiplied an hundred fold, and continued for so many successive days, it becomes an evil of such magnitude, that cold, famine, and every other concomitant of an inhospitable climate must yield the pre-eminence to it. It chases the buffalo to the plains, irritating him to madness; and the rein-deer to the sea-shore, from which they do not return till the scourge has ceased."

Such a dreadful annoyance, against which there is no defence, added to the tormenting attacks of the horse-fly, or bull-dog, which as Mr. Hood says, carries off a portion of flesh at every dart which it makes, together with the small but not less formidable sand-fly, known in Canada by the name of the brulot, is even worse than travelling by winter and sleeping under the canopy of heaven, with the thermometer at 40° below