ARRIVAL AT THE COAST 77 



Macoun, Armstrong and the Indians, with the horses, arrived. 

 We pushed off at one p.m. on October the twenty-fourth, on our 

 one hundred and forty-mile trip." 



"The boat being heavy and the Indians perfectly unused to 

 pulling an oar, we started with three men on the line while Wil- 

 liam steered the unwieldy craft by the aid of a long sweep, and 

 I took up a station in the bow with a pole. In this manner we 

 proceeded up stream for the whole one hundred and forty miles." 



During the first two or three days we had little difficulty in 

 getting along; the weather was mild and pleasant, but on the 

 night of the twenty-seventh it suddenly changed and began to 

 snow. At this time we were entering the main chain and, for the 

 next few days, we hardly ever saw the sun. 



Our last day in the mountains, I shall never forget. About 

 the middle of the afternoon when the snow was falling very thick- 

 ly, Mr. Horetzky called to me to look up and I looked and ap- 

 parently right over my head I saw a mountain top over a mile 

 high in the bright sunlight with fleecy clouds tossing over the sun. 

 In a few minutes, the mountain was obscured and we saw the sun 

 no more until the next day at five o'clock, when we turned out of 

 Peace River into the Parsnip and faced south and in a few minutes 

 we were in the bright sunlight. Three years later, I discovered 

 the cause of our trouble of the day before. We were then passing 

 through what is called the real Peace River Pass, called by the 

 Hudson's Bay Company, "Hell's Gate," and the mountain that 

 we saw turned out to be the same mountain I named, in 1875, 

 Mount Selwyn. 



We were now on the Parsnip River, seventy miles from Fort 

 McLeod, and, at this time, we were certain the winter was about 

 to set in as we found the water was thirty-three degrees when we 

 tested it with a thermometer, and, indeed, the next day, after we 

 entered this river, little films of ice were to be seen floating. The 

 stream was very tortuous and shallow in places with a strong 

 current in others. 



The second day on this river, William, our steersman, missed 

 his stroke and swung into the river and would have been drowned 

 had he not held on to the oar which we kept still in the boat. We 



