NARRATIVE. 41 



July 1st. — Early this morning our companions in the bateau 

 joined us. They had run some danger of swamping, the day before, 

 and had been forced to put in on the Canada side, not much above the 

 Sault, where they found good quarters on board a steamboat that 

 had been seized for smuggling and laid up in ordinary by the Cana- 

 dian government. After breakfast we started in company and got 

 up to Gros-Cap, about fifteen miles, where we halted, there being no 

 good camping-ground for some distance beyond. 



From the Pointe-aux-Pins to the mouth of the river, some four or 

 five miles, the width of the stream varies from one to two miles. 

 Here it enlarges rather suddenly, so that Gros-Cap and Point-Iro- 

 quois, the Pillars of Hercules of Lake Superior, as some one calls them, 

 are six or seven miles apart. This is the true entrance of the lake. 

 The shore continues low and marshy for some distance beyond ; then 

 the high land of the Cape comes in sight, stretching across at right 

 angles with the course of the river, and soon the scenery in the im- 

 mediate neighborhood also assumes the proper character of the lake. 

 I was struck with the similarity to some portions of our sea-coast, 

 for instance, in the neighborhood of Gloucester in Massachusetts, 

 or Cape Elizabeth, near Portland. Rocky points, covered with 

 vegetation, rising abruptly from deep water, alternate with pebble 

 beaches ; back of this, the land slopes gradually upward, densely 

 covered with white pine, canoe-birch and aspen, to the foot of 

 the cliff, which rises steeply to the height of seven hundred feet, 

 showing vertical faces of bare rock, and crowned on the top with 

 evergreens. 



We encamped early in the day in a narrow cove, formed by a 

 point of low rocks, running almost parallel to the shore. Here 

 we encamped among large aspens, and thickets of the beautiful 

 (white-flowering raspberry of the lakes, (^Ruhus Nutkanus.~) \ Omtj 

 friends joined us from the Sault with a large seven-fathom canoe 

 pulling three oars, which was christened the " Dancing Feather." 



After dinner, two of us set off for the top of the cliff. The slope 

 forming the border of the lake in this spot seems to be merely the 

 (Uhris fallen from the face of the cliff, which rises so abruptly that 

 we were obhged to skirt along its base for some distance before we 

 found a practicable ascent in a gully in the face of the rock, and here 



4 



