60 ASSINNIBOINE AND SASKATCHEWAN EXPEDITION. 



Mr. Fleming took charge of the boat, to return by Moss 

 Eiver, while I remained with one half-breed with the 

 intention of making a land journey round the south side 

 of Dauphin Lake to the Company's post on Lake Mani- 

 tobah, which was to be our rendezvous. 



October Uth. — Ta-wa-pit stayed during the greater part 

 of the night by our camp-fire, talking with the half-breed, 

 smoking and drinking tea. He pointed out the spot near 

 to us, where he was accustomed to take salt from the 

 edges of a spring during the summer months. He de- 

 scribed also at length the appearance and virtues of some 

 gigantic bones exposed in the bank of Valley Eiver near 

 where it cuts through the old Lake Eidge. Ta-wa-pit 

 calls these bones a great medicine, and, contrary to the 

 usual custom of the Lidians, he now and then takes small 

 fragments, bruises them to powder, and uses them as a 

 medicinal preparation. From his description I infer that 

 the bones are those of a mammoth ; his rough drawing 

 of the ribs and teeth in the sand corresponded, in point of 

 dimensions, with those of that gigantic animal. 



Ta-wa-pit and family live a very retired life on the 

 shores of Dauphin Lake. The old man is evidently 

 of a misanthropic turn of mind ; he does not associate 

 with other Indians who hunt and live on Moss Eiver, and 

 the northern part of the lake. His potatoes, of which he 

 planted a small patch in the spring, were completely 

 destroyed by grasshoppers ; affording another proof of 

 the immense range and devastating progress .of these 

 insects in Eupert's Land, during the past two or three 

 years. Ta-wa-pit showed me a knife he had made out of 

 an old file, and some pipes he was making from a soft 

 shale, procured in the Eiding Mountain some miles south- 

 west of his tent. The shale was similar in all respects to 

 a band I had noticed on the Little Souris, also a few days 



