ed by Hendry, after they crossed the
south branch in September and struck up into the Eagle Hills. Winter was
passed in hunting between the points where Calgary and Edmonton now
stand. Hendry remarks on the outcropping of coal on the north branch.
The same outcroppings can be seen to-day in the high banks below
Edmonton.

It was on October 14 that Hendry was conveyed to the main Blackfeet
camp.

The leader's tent was large enough to contain fifty persons. He
received us seated on a buffalo skin, attended by twenty elderly
men. He made signs for me to sit down on his right hand, which I
did. Our leaders [the Assiniboines] set several great pipes going
the rounds and we smoked according to their custom. Not one word
was spoken. Smoking over, boiled buffalo flesh was served in
baskets of bent wood. I was presented with ten buffalo tongues. My
guide informed the leader I was sent by the grand leader who lives
on the Great Waters to invite his young men down with their furs.
They would receive in return powder, shot, guns and cloth. He made
little answer; said it was far off, and his people could not
paddle. We were then ordered to depart to our tents, which we
pitched a quarter of a mile outside their lines. The chief told me
his tribe never wanted food, as they followed the buffalo, but he
was informed the natives who frequented the settlements often
starved on their journey, which was exceedingly true.

Hendry gave his position for the winter as eight hundred and ten miles
west of York, or between the sites of modern Edmonton and Battleford.
Everywhere he presented gifts to the Indians to induce them to go down
to the Bay. On the way back to York, the explorers canoed all the way
down the Saskatchewan, and Hendry paused at Fort La Corne, half-way down
to Lake Winnipeg. The banks were high, high as the Hudson river
ramparts, and like those of the Hudson, heavily wooded. Trees and hills
were intensest green, and everywhere through the high banks for a
hundred miles below what is now Edmonton bulged great seams of coal. The
river gradually widened until it was as broad as the Hudson at New York
or the St Lawrence at Quebec. Hawks shrieked from the topmost boughs of
black poplars ashore. Whole colonies of black eagles nodded and babbled
and screamed from the long sand-bars. Wolf tracks dotted the soft mud
of the shore, and sometimes what looked