6 RETREAT IN CANOES. 



into a block-house, which stood in the middle of the fort, and 

 was meant to be used only in the last extremity, and out of 

 this they refused to come, till the officers and a few American 

 soldiers drove them out with their revolvers; the place being 

 saved by the two guns, which frightened the Indians by the 

 noise they made. Some of the settlers had been murdered 

 under circumstances of awful barbarity, and one poor woman 

 crawled seven miles into Fort Abercrombie with her nose, 

 ears, and both breasts cut off. 



On the morning of the second day from our arrival at the 

 station, orders came from the company at St. Paul's for the 

 agent to close the station, and make his way to the nearest 

 town with the horses, and we heard, just before leaving, that 

 the coach immediately following the one by which we had come 

 had been attacked by Indians, and the conductor killed, the 

 mails being thrown into the Red River. This made our staying 

 at the station any longer an impossibility ; so finding that the 

 steamboat which usually ran between this place and Fort Garry 

 had ceased to do so, owing to the unsafe state of the country, 

 we bought two bark canoes, and, laying in some provisions, 

 we started for a four hundred mile paddle down one of the 

 most crooked and, I should say, muddiest streams in the 

 world ; there being hardly a place on its banks where you 

 could land without sinking to your knees in black mud. 



Canoe travelling was a new experience to all of us, and we 

 were very nearly upsetting a great many times, as the canoes 

 were round-bottomed and very light. At the time I am speak- 

 ing of, the banks of the Red River were entirely uninhabited, 

 and the course of it is mostly through vast prairies, making it 

 very monotonous, especially as we often paddled for an hour 



