﻿1848. COAL BEDS. 195 



The Mackenzie traverses the basin in which the 

 tertiary coal is deposited very obliquely, and the 

 Great Bear Lake River cuts it more directly across. 



in Colonel Emory's report to Congress (pp. 522. 547.). Nuttal 

 observed lignite beds associated with the pink-coloured pipe-clay 

 on the Arkansas, somewhere near the 48th parallel. Sir Alex- 

 ander M'Kenzie states that a narrow strip of marshy, boggy, 

 and uneven ground, producing coal and bitumen, runs along the 

 eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, and he specifies latitude 

 52° N., longitude 1 12|° W., on the southern branch of the Sas- 

 katchewan, and latitude 56° N., longitude 116° "W. (Edgecoal 

 Creek) in the Peace River, as places where coal beds are 

 exposed. Mr. Drummond procured me specimens of coal with 

 its associated rocks at Edmonton (latitude 53° 45' N., longitude 

 113° 20' W.) on the north branch of the Saskatchewan, and, 

 consequently, between the places mentioned by Sir Alexander 

 M'Kenzie. According to Mr. Drummond the coal was in beds 

 varying in thickness from six inches to two feet, and inter- 

 stratified with clay and sandstone. The examples he selected 

 were pi'ecisely similar to the slaty and conchoidal varieties 

 which are found at the mouth of Great Bear River, and the 

 resemblance between the sandstone of the two localities is 

 equally close. He also found a black tertiary pitch coal which 

 breaks into small conchoidal and cubical fragments, which 

 Mr. Small, a clerk of the Hudson's Bay Company, who gave 

 me the first information of these beds, likened well to Spanish- 

 liquorice. At Edmonton the more slaty coal-beds pass gradually 

 into a thin, slaty, friable sandstone, which is much impregnated 

 with carbonaceous matter, and contains fragments of fibrous 

 lignite. Hand specimens of this cannot be distinguished from 

 others gathered from the shale cliffs on the Athabasca River, 

 Highly bituminised shale, considerably indurated, exists in the 

 vicinity of the coal at Edmonton, and clay-ironstones occur in 

 the clay beds. 



Chief Factor Alexander Stewart told me that beds of coal 



o 2 



