432 PHABIGALVUASBRERCTE OF THE 
months of March and April to make sugar. It is said that an industrious family 
will make from one thousand to fifteen hundred pounds, and that the trees produce 
from four to ten pounds each. Sugar is with the Chippewa an article of food; 
and the sugar-making season is hailed with joy, as putting a period to the starva- 
tion of winter. White men affirm that the trees would yield much more if the 
sap was carefully saved and gathered. The rushes furnish food all winter for 
Canadian and Indian ponies, and for such cattle as have been brought there. Mr. 
Woods, who has resided four years at the Falls, says his cattle winter well on 
rushes alone, which they pick out of the snow, sheltering themselves at night in 
the thick evergreen timber. 
The bar at the mouth of this river is such that vessels cannot enter; but the 
mode of improvement adopted on Lakes Erie and Michigan would insure a good 
harbour. 
About six miles above the Mission, or ten miles from the mouth, in low water, 
the shoals commence, and occasionally the current is strong. The red clay-banks 
are first seen about two miles above the Mission, where the river approaches the 
outside of its immediate valley; and they vary from forty to one hundred feet in 
height. 
The “ fall” consists of a series of leaps, of one to three feet each, over the tilted 
edges of red sand-rock. The descent, which is very straight, regular, and beau- 
tiful, is in all twenty-two feet; affording water for a large amount of machinery. 
In floods it rises eight to eleven feet below the Falls, but near the mouth the rise 
diminishes to five, four, and three feet, the waters spreading out through bayous 
and marsh meadows. 
From Woods's it is necessary to make a portage of two miles, on the west side of 
the river, around the falls and the rapids above, rising, according to my barometer, 
forty-five feet. After this, we found no difficulty in ascending, with a birch canoe, 
by estimate, fourteen miles, to a raft on the next westerly fork, passing on our way 
the mouth of the East Fork, and the Middle Fork, or main stream. 
The second branch from the west having, as I could learn, no name, I have 
called it the “ Maringouin Fork” in my map, in commemoration of the myriads of 
musquitoes that inhabit its banks, that being the name the half-breed French give 
to those pests of the Bad River region. The Maringouin has its sources near 
Long Lake, on the west, and on the south interlocks with the upper branches of 
the Chippewa River, among some lakes, enclosed by drift ridges, which are, by 
barometrical measurement, eight hundred and seventy-one feet above Lake Supe- 
rior. As there is but little rise from Woods's Falls to the raft, it is easy to perceive 
that the remainder of this fork must have numerous rapids, chutes, and falls. 
Where the last-named branch leaves Bladder Lake, there is a wild cataract, 
through a gorge, where the water plunges over one hundred feet in one-fourth of a 
mile. Also, at the outlet of Lac des Anglais, the chutes commence at the very 
lake, and as it is about six hundred feet above the Maringouin Fork, and not more 
than seven miles distant, there must be a succession of chutes till it leaves the 
mountains. 
About ten miles up, the “ East Fork” tumbles down from the mountain range of 
