262 EXTRACTS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE. 



From the Rev. E. Petitot to \Vm. L. Iiardisty, Esq., (communicated by Mr. 



Hardisty.) 



[Translation. ] 



Fort Rae, Hudson's Bay Territory, June 20, 1864. 



My Dear Sir : I take advantage of Mr. Smith's departure to offer you the 

 assurance of my respect and perfect consideration. I thank you for myself 

 and my converts for the permission you have kindly given me to take up my 

 quarters within the bounds of Fort Rae. 



As Mr. Smith will perhaps tell you, I have had an opportunity of visiting 

 the tribes which inhabit the interior of the country comprised between Great 

 Bear lake, Copper Mine river and Fort Rae. It is through the kindness of that 

 gentleman that I have been able to comply with the desire of the Indians, and 

 I am infinitely indebted to him for it. As many incidents of this journey were 

 of a kind to interest a " voyageur," I shall allow myself to amuse you with a 

 few. 



In the first place I will spare you the fatigues of a journey on snow-shoes,, 

 which, notwithstanding your reputation as a pedestrian, you will doubtless not 

 regret performing without stirring from your easy-cbair. I will transport you, 

 therefore, at once to Lake Kleritie, eight days' travel by that method to the north- 

 northeast of Fort Rae, and ten or twelve days by canoe. There, upon a pretty 

 high hill, is situated the camp. 



A magnificent view is enjoyed from this point of the above-named lake and 

 of Lake Kamitie", which empties into it. Their immovable and frozen surfacs 

 winds between feldspathic mountains, sometimes naked or eaten into by lichene 

 and mosses, sometimes covered with forests of thorns. But these trees are only 

 pigmies of five or six feet in height; wretched shrubs whose roots are buried 

 in a thick bed of yellowish lichens, and whose dwarfed and vertical branches 

 allow the rays of the sun to pass through. On the left extend arid steppes, 

 dotted with pools of stagnant water, scrviug as a pasturage for herds of rein 

 deer which run unceasingly over the surface of the lake. This country is a 

 true Arabia Petrcea, where the eye takes in only blocks of granite, masses of 

 coarse porphyry, diorite, and especially of feldspathic orthose. Here there is 

 no stratification, no talus of debris or metamorphism; the mountains have under- 

 gone no degradation, and the waves which beat against their foundations dash 

 themselves in vain. Upon the slope opposite to these rocks stretches the 

 Ot'-el-nere or flat country of the Esquimaux, which, despite its name, is com- 

 posed only of mounds and rounded hills. I did not go there only because I 

 had more work than I could perform among my Indians. It is time that I 

 spoke of them. 



They belong to the great Montagnais or Teue nation and to the Slave tribe, 

 but their idiom is very different from the language of 1»ie Tenes. Many of 

 these Indians have already made the voyage from Portage la Roche, and this 

 present year two of them are preparing to repeat it. The young people and 

 grown men alone visit Fort Rae, or that at the Forks, or have intercourse with 

 the whites. The rest of the tribe, the old men, women and children, not only 

 have never seen the missionaries, but even a white man of any sort. 1 except, 

 however, King Beaulieu, who visited their midst in May, 1863, but did not 

 ascend as far as I, by nearly three days' journey. 



It is a singular spectacle, that of a horde of these savages on their march over 

 a frozen lake, and it was the first time that I have been permitted to witness it. 

 As far as the eye could reach, a long file of sledges and dogs, women loaded 

 with burdens and young children, the cries of infants, the barking of dogs, and 

 the shouts which their conductors uttered — the whole forming a picture as cu- 

 rious as wild. 



