EXPLORATION OF THE PRAIRIES, 1879 143 



and, for the next four months, we never travelled without its being 

 full. John Matheson, who owned the horses, had been a buffalo 

 hunter and he regaled the boys and myself with stories of buffalo 

 hunting and, if all his experiences were recorded, they would fill a 

 volume. He earned from us a nickname of "Lying Jack Mathe- 

 son," as we were never able to tell the difference between what 

 was a true story and what was a fabrication. However, he knew 

 many things that were of great value to us and, amongst others, 

 how to obtain fuel when our wood would be gone. 



He asked me what I thought we would do and I instantly 

 said to him : " I f necessary, we can burn dry grass." He laughed at 

 me and said: "We can do better than that. When we were 

 hunting on the paririe, we used buffalo chips." I learned that the 

 chips were not wood, but droppings of the buffalo that were per- 

 fectly dry, and for months, this was the fuel we used. As soon 

 as I learned this, I had a bag attached to the rear cart and ordered 

 each man to put any droppings that he saw in the bag and, in 

 this way, we carried with us every day, a supply of fuel. 



Another thing that we discovered was that our horses pre- 

 ferred brackish water to pure so that, if we arrived at a pool that 

 contained brackish water, we could camp and use the water we 

 carried while the horses drank from the pool. 



As there was no regular cook attached to the party, each 

 man took on part of the work and, at any rate, it was always 

 accomplished in good time and suited all hands. Our bread con- 

 stantly consisted all summer of bannocks, baked in a spider. 



I do not remember how many days we were in crossing to 

 the Elbow of the South Saskatchewan, but we reached it in due 

 time, although we found ourselves, as usual, eight miles to the 

 east of it, showing that our map was not correct. When we 

 reached the Saskatchewan, I had another work to do besides the 

 crossing of the river. I had been instructed at Ottawa, before I 

 left, that when I reached the Elbow of the South Saskatchewan, 

 I was to see if it were possible to make a canal that would carry 

 water from the Saskatchewan into the Qu' Appelle. This was 

 one of Mr. Mackenzie's pet schemes of "water stretches." Mr. 

 Wilkins and the young men worked on that job and Matheson 



