BY EDWARD DOUBLEDAY. 275 



fishing done in Lake Superior ; in fact, the fishery here pro- 

 mises to be a very great and important trade. Hitherto the 

 trade on the Lake has been principally in fur, but the Com- 

 pany's schooner has this year realized a large amount, and 

 there is no doubt that next year the fishery will be well attended 

 to. The climate is very cold ; even the potato this year has 

 failed. 



Leaving Machinan, we entered Lake Huron. I have little 

 to note, except the extreme beauty of its clear green waters, 

 and the countless thousands of its geese, ducks, terns, gulls, 

 and divers ; the glaucous gull, or at any rate one without the 

 black feather, was very abundant. There is a vast variety of 

 ducks, and amongst them, the surf duck, Oidemia perspicillata, 

 is not at all rare. 



We left Lake Huron by the River St. Clair, as a matter of 

 course. I was awakened at five in the morning by our stop- 

 ping on the Canada side for M^ood ; it was a cold night, so I 

 had slept in the cabin instead of in my state-room on the upper 

 deck. I got up to look about, but it was dark, or nearly so; 

 there was the clamour of ducks and geese innumerable, and 

 the yell of Indians to be heard, and there was a glorious sky 

 above us. I paced the upper deck till sun-rise, whilst the 

 wooded banks of the river St. Clair rose more and more 

 distinctly on my view. There is nothing very peculiar in 

 them ; but the river is most beautifully clear. As we entered 

 the Lake St. Clair, the flocks of geese and ducks still in- 

 creased ; there were broad black patches of them on the water, 

 looking like islands. 



Along the shore there soon began to be more signs of culti- 

 vation. The settlers here are^ mostly French. The land was 

 curiously laid out by these people : every man must have a 

 little bit of the shore of the river or lake to himself; so they 

 laid out the ground in little lots of a few yards only — I believe 

 twenty rods — and running back one, two, and even three miles; 

 so every farm is about the form of a long straight drive to some 

 of our old English mansions. The French make but poor 

 settlers in a new country. When they first settled in Indiana, 

 they used to assemble together to clear the timber ; three or 

 four would begin at once to chop all round the trunk of a huge 

 sycamore, or some such tree ; when it began to totter, away 

 then all ran, and fortunate was that day in which no one got 



