298 ACCOUNT OF THE PEACE RIVER. 



they provided themselves with an excellent canoe, and 

 having stored it with a full supply of provisions, they 

 set out for Fort Vermilion on the Peace River. 



They steered a westerly course, favoured by a good 

 breeze, until they struck the debouchure of the Slave 

 River, up which they turned. Late that evening they 

 reached the mouth of the Peace, which does not debouch 

 (as many suppose) into Lake Athabasca, with which it 

 communicates only by way of the Slave River, and, in 

 high water, by the channel of the Quatre Fourche. 



The Peace flows through the Rocky Mountains for 

 some three hundred miles, receiving on its way the waters 

 of innumerable smaller streams. It is doubtful if such 

 stupendous cliffs as frown down upon the last hundred 

 miles of this river exist elsewhere upon the American 

 continent. This awful chasm is six thousand feet deep, 

 and at the bottom the water flows along as black as 

 ink in the gloomy shadow of these inaccessible cliffs. 

 After leaving the mountains, the Peace winds for five 

 hundred miles through a deep narrow valley, sunk nearly 

 eight hundred feet below the level of the surrounding 

 plateaux. It next descends to a lower level, and, en- 

 closed by banks of no great height, it traverses a fine 

 alluvial valley densely wooded. Here its waters, once 

 rapid and turbulent, become calm and slow, and wind 

 their way along until, at the end of a course of eleven 

 hundred miles, they discharge themselves through a 

 delta into the Slave River. 



In a course of nine hundred miles., but two obstruc- 



