E. Petitot on the Athabasca District. 39 



water it contained grass ; instead of resembling a vast turquoise 

 sec in a jasper border, it seemed an emerald, silver-v< ined. This 

 part of the lake was also transformed into a prairie, from Bustard 

 Island to the Rocky River, and its former islands, now surrounded 

 by fertile land, only lacking the plough to produce splendid crops, 

 were mere isolated elevations — landmarks destined in future ages 

 to show that once the white-fish, the carp, and the pike disported in 

 places destined, I hope, to be improved ere long by high cultiva- 

 tion. 



This condition of the waters endured till I left the North-west ; 

 for in 1881 Mr. R. McFarlane wrote to me that this drying-uphad 

 proved a severe calamity to the Redskins of the lake, who had 

 hitherto derived plentiful supplies of food from the well-known 

 fisheries of the Four Forks and Bustard Island, now of course 

 entirely destroyed. 



It seems that the four mouths of the Athabasca, the embou- 

 chure of Lake Mamawi, and the eastern (or Egg River) channel 

 of the Peace River, retained their respective currents beneath the 

 waters of the lake, before filling it up ; and when the level of the 

 lake had become considerably heightened by their numerous inter- 

 connections, their beds remained like so many narrow rivers, which 

 now run through the dried-up mud, far from the ancient isles, to 

 reunite in the great outlet of the Rocky River. 



Unless some extraordinary flood remodifies this newly formed 

 estuary, the Athabasca district will thus have gained an immense 

 space of land, excellent for cultivation, and not requiring artifi- 

 cial fertilisation for very many years ; and it should be noted that 

 the climate of the lake is far from being an obstacle to the ripen- 

 ing of cereals and vegetables, for at the Philadelphia Centennial 

 Exhibition in 1876, the Catholic Mission near Fort Chipewyan 

 obtained a silver medil and honourable mention for cereals of the 

 first quality and remarkable size. In fact, the chief want of the 

 lake-district as regards colonization is vegetable mould. With 

 the exception of the estuary above mentioned, and of the still 

 more extensive and no less extraordinary one of the Peace River, 

 only rocks are found in it ; and it may be said with truth that 

 the entire north from the Slave Lake and River to Hudson's Bay 

 is only a gigantic bed of crystalline rocks, where the planetary 

 nucleus is exposed under the form of various granites, feldspar, 



