HAMILTON SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION. 95 



numbers. Within a few minutes at one island where we landed for 

 lunch we killed seventeen, and at another place we shot fifteen fine 

 fat birds within as many minutes. 



Though moving rapidly northward, the great ice banks were 

 all passed during our second day's travel on the Churchill and the 

 country assumed a much more habitable appearance generally, 

 though but thinly wooded with small spruce and tamarack. With 

 the disappearance of the ice, we also lost the high velocity of the 

 current and our third day upon the river was a pleasant though 

 uneventful one excepting that we shot several more, and saw great 

 numbers of wild geese. We reached Fort Churchill at one o'clock 

 on Friday, the 28th of July, just three days from the time we had 

 left the portage to the Lrittle Deer River, and had averaged a 

 distance of about fifty miles per day, and during the trip, excepting 

 to camp at night, we had not once unloaded our canoes. We had 

 encountered many rapids, but none so bad as to prevent us from 

 either running or passing our canoes down by hand and thus by 

 descending the "Great Strange River" we had saved ourselves 

 about five days of the most slavish kind of travel, and no one was 

 more pleased with our success than Daniel, the guide, who dis- 

 claimed any further use for the lyittle Deer River route. 



Finding ourselves at Fort Churchill, the natural sea-port for 

 Western Canada, we had reached our objective point and had com- 

 pleted a boat journey of about eleven hundred miles, making an 

 average of thirty miles per day, including stops at several H. B- 

 posts and fishing stations on the way. This I consider an exceed- 

 ingly good rate for such a distance with canoes. 



Of Fort Churchill much has been written and more may be 

 said regarding its past history, its present condition and its future 

 prospects, but of these I must of necessity be brief. 



Fort Churchill as we find it to-day is merely a small trading 

 post of the H. B. Co. and Church of England mission station, con- 

 taining three while men, Mr. Ray, his clerk, and Mr. Sevier, the 

 young missionary. Mr. Ray, the chief trader, has his wife and 

 two children with him, and these, together with two or three half- 



