LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LAKE 61 



pins. About one a.m. a cry arose from the night-watch that 

 the boats were swamping. All hands turned out, lading was 

 removed, and the scows hauled up on the shingle, the rollers 

 piling on shore with a height and fury perfectly astonishing 

 for such a lake. By morning the tempest was at its height, 

 continuing all day and into the night. The sunset that even- 

 ing exhibited some of the grandest and wildest sky scenery 

 we liad ever beheld. In the west a vast bank of luminous- 

 orange cloud, edged by torn fringes of green and gray; in 

 the south a sea of amethyst, and stretching from north tO' 

 east masses of steel gray and pearl, shot with brilliant shafts 

 and tufts of golden vapour. The whole sky streamed with 

 rich colouring in the fierce wind, as if possessed at once by 

 the genii of beauty and storm. The boatmen, noting its 

 aspect, predicted worse weather; but, fortunately, morning 

 belied the omens — our trials were over. 



We were now nearing Shaw's Point, a long willowed spit 

 of land, called after a whimsical old chief-factor of the Hud- 

 son's Bay Company who had charge of this district over sixty 

 years before. He appears to have been a man of many eccen- 

 tricities, one of which was the cultivation a la Chinois of a 

 very long finger-nail, which he used as a spoon to eat his 

 egg. But of him anon. By four p.m. we had rounded his 

 Point, and come into view of Wyaweekamon — " The Out- 

 let " — a rudimentary street with several trading stores, a 

 billiard saloon and other accessories of a brand-new village in 

 a very old wilderness. 



Here we were at the treaty point at last, safe and sound,, 

 with new interests and excitements before us ; with wild man 

 instead of wild weather to encounter; with discords to har- 

 monize and suspicions to allay by human kindness, perhaps by 

 human firmness, but mainly by the just and generous terms 

 proffered by Government to an isolated but highly interesting, 

 and deserving people. ' 



