Pioneer Journals 1844 101 



and Budd was sent five hundred miles off, up the 

 great Saskatchewan River, to open a new station 

 in the Cumberland District, which he did at a 

 placed called the Pas.&quot; 



Bishop Mountain describes his outfit: &quot;By Outflt 

 direction of Sir George Simpson the Governor of 

 the Company s Territory, who was at La Chine at 

 the time. A new birch-bark canoe was provided, 

 of the largest class, such as is called a &quot;canot de 

 maitre,&quot; having fourteen paddles, and being of the 

 length of thirty-six feet. The crew were picked 

 men, and most of them were, more or less, ex 

 perienced voyageurs. One had accompanied 

 Sir John Franklin to the Arctic regions in 1825. 

 Eight of them were French Canadians; six of 

 them were Iroquois Indians, from the village of 

 Caughnawaga. Our guide, a functionary who, 

 in a manner, controls the whole enterprise, was 

 an Iroquois, and a man of very first reputation in 

 his line: the steersmen of whom there are two, 

 on account of the practice of exchanging the large 

 canoe for two smaller ones, and dividing the crew 

 at the upper end of Lake Superior were Can 

 adians. The other eleven men are called middle 

 men. One of them, however, who acted as our 

 cook and had charge of our provisions and all 

 the apparatus connected with our culinary de 

 partment had certain privileges above the rest. 

 The Indians all spoke French sufficiently for the 

 common purposes of the day. We were thus 

 seventeen persons in the canoe. Our baggage, 

 bedding and provisions, with the equipments of 



