Peninsula, the Pic River Region, and Modern Marathon – Spring 1948

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The Great Lakes… 84% of the continent’s fresh water… a different story in every drop.

By Grace Lee Nute

Guarding the little, ultra-modem hamlet of Marathon on Lake Superior’s rockbound, lonely, eastern shore, the Peninsula looks down, from its rocky heights, on an island-studded bay. It has watched Indians, French explorers, British traders, French Canadian voyageurs, and travelers of many nations and races come and go during the centuries. It must have been seen by a white man as early as the 1650s, for a map drawn before 1658 and now in Paris¹ shows the general shape of all Lake Superior in fair detail. Before 1670 it was clearly delineated on a map published by the Jesuits² and based on Father Claude Allouez’s³ circumnavigation of Lake Superior in 1667.

Just when the first trading post was established in the immediate vicinity of Peninsula Bay is uncertain. None is mentioned by Alexander Henry, a famous English colonial explorer and trader, who visited the mouth of Pic River, some ten miles south of Peninsula Bay, in June, 1775, and reported⁴ his impressions of the “Pijitic” River, as he called it; “a band of Wood Indians” living on the river, “who are sometimes troublesome to the traders passing”; and the general aspect of the countryside. By 1790, however, there must have been a fort at the Pic, for Count Andreani, of aviation fame, was on Lake Superior that year and reported that the Pic district produced “30 bundles of fine peltry.” In 1793 a clerk of the North West Company, John Macdonell, mentions⁵ ” Pic River, where there is a trading Post belonging to Mr. Cote and associates situated within half a mile of our encampment.”

This was probably Gabriel Cotté, who with John Grant and Maurice Blondeau was trading on Lake Superior at least from 1779 to 1785 and perhaps earlier and later. Fortunately, a detailed picture of Cotté’s post can be formed in our minds because of a document discovered in Edinburgh in 1938.⁶ It is an inventory written in French sometime between 1794 and 1804, which describes the buildings and lists their contents. It shows that the cleared land about the post amounted to about 193 feet in width and three-fourths that number in depth. About it stood the “fort,” or pickets, nine feet above ground. There were two buildings of Cotté’s -a warehouse 36 feet by 12 feet, made of round cedar logs laid horizontally, roofed with cedar bark, and with two little glassed sashes that opened and shut; and the residence, 30 feet by 20 feet, built similarly, divided into two rooms, and with two similar windows. Inside the residence the enumerator found tin plates, tin kettles, a copper kettle, eight goblets, a frying pan, two large wooden platters, twelve chairs, two little tables of poplar wood, a desk of the same material, and “two miserable bedsteads.” By the time the inventory was made there were buildings of three distinct periods: Cotté’s, the “old firm’s,” and the “new firm’s.” The old firm’s structures consisted of a shed 24 feet by 15 feet; the “big house,” 40 by 21 feet, roofed with boards, and divided into five rooms with eight glass windows and one fireplace; and the stable, 15 feet by 8 feet, which held carefully enumerated tools. The new firm’s establishment consisted of a large warehouse, 48 by 18 feet; a “big house, ” 40 by about 19 feet, a little forge building, and a cellar serving as a powder magazine.

Cotté was succeeded by a trader named St. Germain, perhaps Venant Lemaire St. Germain, who as early as 1777 in partnership with Jean Baptiste Nolin bought the fort at Michipicoten from Alexander Henry. Then came one who has preserved his memoirs of a long and exciting life as a trader for many companies and in many areas as widely separated as the Illinois, the upper Mississippi, and the Albany River regions. This was Jean Bte. Perrault, who served twice in the Pic district – six years for the North West Company, 1799-1805; and again for the winters of 1810- 1811 and 1811-1812 for an American trader and for the Hudson’s Bay Company respectively. This later sojourn was inland on the Pic River and on the watershed between Lake Superior and the Albany River. Perrault has left several very interesting sketch maps showing the posts and the canoe routes in the region between Lake Superior and James Bay.⁷

Perrault was succeeded in the North West Company post by still another famous trader, Dr. Henry Munro, who was at the Pic post in 1805. From 1807 to 1809 Charles Chaboillez was in charge of the post. He was followed by Alexander MacKenzie, a nephew of Sir Alexander Mackenzie. When Perrault returned to the district in 1810, he found the scion of one of France’s great colonial families in his former fort ­ Pierre Rastel de Rocheblave, son of Phillipe Rastel de Rocheblave, the governor of Illinois who capitulated to George Rogers Clark in 1778.

In 1812 and 1813 the trader was John Haldane. For the next two years James Grant was there. In 1817 the famous Astorians, Gabriel Franchere and Ross Cox, passed the Pic on their way from the mouth of the Columbia to New York and Montreal respectively. Both mention the fort in their accounts of the trip, Franchere calling it⁸ “a small trading establishment,” where he dined. Cox says of it,⁹ “The house is handsomely situated on the shores of a small bay. A proprietor was in charge, He was on the beach when we approached in shore and on seeing us disembark, he turned on his heel and retreated into the fort. This movement foreboded anything but a hospitable reception; and we therefore pitched our tent, and prepared for breakfast.” One of Cox’s companions visited the inhospitable gentleman, but not Cox, who left without an invitation to enter.

In North West Company days, especially while its offshoot and rival, the X Y Company, was in opposition, there was quite a complement of men at the Pic fort. Thus in 1804 there were three clerks, William Harris, Philo Lewis, and Henry Munro; one interpreter, Louis Boileau; and ten voyageurs. Sometime between the years 1812 and 1816 George Nelson was a trader at the post.

A Catholic missionary, Bishop Joseph N. Provencher of the Red River Settlement, visited the Pic fort and baptized one child in 1822. Two years earlier Colin Robertson of the same settlement, one of Lord Selkirk’s men, was detained at the Pic a full month by North West Company men on his way to trial at Montreal. This was the period of intense struggle between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company for the control of the fur trade of western Canada, when both sides were seizing their opponents and taking them down to Canada for trial.

In 1823 no fewer than three travelers of note visited the Pic post and have left us their impressions of it: Major Stephen H. Long, Major Joseph Delafield, and Dr. John J. Bigsby. The first two were Americans, the one sent by his government to determine the exact spot where the newly established boundary between British possessions and the United States crossed the Red River of the North; the second representing the United States among the many British and American groups at that time surveying the region between the mouth of the St. Louis River and that of the Kaministiquia River, and along the usual canoe routes inland to Lake of the Woods. Dr. Bigsby was the representative of science among the Englishmen of these groups. Bigsby writes,¹⁰ “The River Peek takes its name from an Indian word, signifying mud, as it pours out an ash­coloured, and when swollen, a reddish-yellow water, tinging the lake for a mile or two round its mouth, and derived from beds of yellow and white clay some distance up the river.” Major Delafield describes the Pic as “well-picketed,” and with “a capital dwelling house,” and refers to “several other houses &c. within the pickets” and to “Mr. McTavish” in charge of the post. This was Alexander McTavish, who was stationed at the Pic in 1821 when he and the post were taken over by the Hudson’s Bay Company at the merger of the two rival fur companies. On his return trip along the north shore of Lake Superior Delafield stopped again to visit McTavish, and was given a breakfast of fish and potatoes raised at the post. William H. Keating of Major Long’s expedition refers¹¹ to the fort as a “trading house of the Hudson’s Bay Company . . . . This establishment is called the Peek, which is an abbreviation of the term Pekatek, used by the Indians.”

In 1827 the man in charge of the fort was Donald Mcintosh, whose long report of that year to his Hudson’s Bay Company superiors has been preserved in the extensive archives of that corporation in London. It is quoted here by kind permission of the governor and committee of the company. It describes the Black and the White rivers which united to form the Pic River. Today this is confusing, because the White River enters the lake farther to the southeast. Both Perrault and Mcintosh, however, seem to indicate that the main Pic River above its junction with the Black was called the White River on occasion.

Mcintosh’s report describes¹² the mountainous terrain, the barren soil, the Indians, the furs, and so forth. The natives, he wrote, lived chiefly on rabbits in winter and on fish in summer. They made blankets and even capotes of rabbit skins. “The former are wrought with so much art and skill that they are as lasting and much warmer than any European Manufactured Blankets.” He describes in detail the Long Lake post, which is in the same trading district but back in the interior. The men at the Pic post “subsist mostly upon Salt Trouts and Potatoes during the winter,” he writes. The Indians of the district consisted of 72 men and lads, 50 women, and 116 children. He describes the natives as amiable and docile.

From 1828 to 1830 John Swanston was the clerk in charge of the Pic fort. From 1831 to 1834 Thomas McMurray, a chief trader, was in charge. On May 23, 1832, he wrote to a friend,¹³ “I passed an agreeable winter, at this Place . . . No Returns this year in this Dept.” The explanation was the disappearance of rabbits, probably in one of their cyclic declines. He mentions his “good wife & bairns.” He was in charge again from 1837 to 1841. In 1836 William Clouston had charge. In 1841 Cuthbert Cumming, the son-in-law of McMurray, was appointed to the post. The following year and until 1849 Erland Erlandson was the clerk in the district, with Louis D. de Laronde his subordinate.

In 1843 a young English artillery subaltern, John Henry Lefroy, visited the Pic country on an expedition dispatched to the Hudson Bay territories to make a magnetic survey of those little known regions. Since 1841 he had been in charge of the new observatory in Toronto. He spent eighteen months in the interior and many years later, when he had become General Sir J. H. Lefroy, C.B., K.C M.G., F.R.S., et cetera, he published his diary. It is a strictly scientific document and gives little other information about the countryside and its inhabitants. However, just before his death in 1890, he printed privately his autobiography, which is full of travel incident for this same trip. That document shows that he stopped at the Pic post both on the outward and inward trips. Indeed, he was windbound there from October 16 to 21, 1844. Even on the outward trip he experienced the dangers that beset all travelers on that bleak shore. He stayed behind to make afternoon observations, while his crew went on but were forced to put ashore on Pic Island. There after a tumultuous crossing from the mainland he found them “considerately engaged in erecting a cairn to our memory,”¹⁴ believing that he and his voyageurs could not have escaped death in such a violent sea.

In 1848 Laronde succeeded Erlandson. He was followed by Charles Begg, who remained the post master till the middle sixties at least. The Company’s records for the post seem to end about 1865, but an old lake captain at Port Arthur remembers calling at the “Hudson’s Bay Post” at the Pic in 1881. This is Captain Harry Nicholson, who will be mentioned again. He recalls four buildings, forming a hollow square, but no stockade. He saw three or four papooses and some dogs, but he found there was a contagious disease prevalent among the residents, and so he did not enter the establishment.

Erland Erlandson was a Dane, who reached England as a prisoner of war during the Napoleonic wars. He entered the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1814 as a laborer and lived in the Hudson Bay and Labrador districts until 1841. He was appointed clerk at Michipicoten, to the south of the Pic post, in 1842, was in charge at Long Lake, 1842-43, appointed in charge of the Pic during 1843-45, and of the Pic and Long Lake posts combined, 1845-1849. Sir George Simpson, who kept a sort of index to the characters of all his employees, gave him one of his few glowing tributes.

From 1823 to 1825 Lieutenant Surveyor H. W. Bayfield, later Admiral Bayfield, was making the first scientific survey of Lake Superior. His great map, so avidly sought by all early mariners on that otherwise uncharted and treacherous inland sea, has been preserved in its original, manuscript form, at Ottawa. It is interesting to find “Peninsula Harbour” and “The Peninsula” on it in some detail, as well as Pic Island and River, and much information of interest to those now living in or near Marathon, Ontario. Accompanying the main map is a smaller one entitled “Track Survey of the Pic River by Mr. Philip E. Collins Mids and assistant surveyor.” It shows the Pic River, with soundings, up to a little distance above the junction with Black River. There, at the junction, the “Woods principally of Tamarac & white spruce” are mentioned. Lower down, on the left bank of the main stream, the terrain is described as “Sandy Cliff.” On the right bank, sand dunes are indicated just where they are today; and the fort itself is seen on the site of the Marathon Corporation’s buildings. There were obviously six buildings inside one picketed enclosure, but three other adjoining areas seem also to have been fenced in in some fashion. Beside the fort occur the words, “H B Company’s Trading Post.” A gate is indicated on the river side of the fort.

In 1838-39 a famous Wesleyan Methodist missionary spent the winter near the Pic. This was James Evans, known especially for his work among the Cree Indians northeast of Lake Winnipeg, for whom he invented an alphabet and printed some devotional material. A Hudson’s Bay Company chief trader of importance, John McLean, who was Evans’ son-in-law, states in his reminiscences¹⁵ that Evans “and his brother missionaries [Thomas Hurlburt and Peter Jacobs, an Indian] began their operations by raising with their own hands, unassisted, a house at the Pic; themselves cutting and hauling the timber on the ice.”

Evans’s unpublished diary of 1838-39 devotes a few pages to his fearful autumn journeys to Michipicoten and back from the Sault in a bark canoe. The next April he records, “Thurs. 24. Made the Pic Establishment about 8 o’clock where we were most hospitable received & entertained by Mr. Mc Murray the Co. Factor. There are here 120 indians and 180 at Long Lake many of whom often visit this Fort. The Ind have never been visited by any missionary & are rejoiced almost to tears to learn that they may expect one . . . . I & B. J. spoke awhile in English . . . . promising them a Mission as early as possible.” At noon that day he “left the Fort . . . & pulled through a dense fog & against head wind about four miles where we encamped on the worst ground we have found since we left home.”

Next morning they crossed, with trepidation, “a bay of 15 miles in breadth & open to the lake.” This was surely Heron Bay. Next day they were windbound. Then, on the following morning, “crossed a ten or twelve miles bay all open to the sea . . . When about six miles from our old encampment we perceived a smoke on the point behind us, and in a short time three large Montreal canoes hove in sight. As we carried sail & they carried none, it took them some time to overhaul us but having 15 paddles constantly plying cheered by the boat song, and animated by the idea that they can pass anything like the wind we could see them paddle in rapid motion & even the gentlemen passengers were . . . helping in the chase. The wind falling about 3 o’clock, we honorably laid on our oars & waited for them & had the pleasure of dining with my old friends & winter associates once more.”

The next July he was back briefly on his way to Canada. He found that since his departure, “the Indians have been visited by the Am. Rem. Priest – who used every persuasion to induce them to be baptized.” Even the anxious father of a sick child refused. “God spared the child’s life & I had the pleasure of baptizing it with about 16 others before leaving these anxious & attentive people. Never did I see any poor people so thankful for & attentive to the word of life.”

Actually there had been two Catholic priests at the Pic during Evans’s absence. One was the Austrian, Franz Pierz, on a journey from his post at Grand Portage to the Sault. One sentence of his letter written in German from the Sault on July 2 reads: “Continuing my journey through the Pick and other villages, I baptized several Frenchmen and half breeds, but few adult Indians and their children.” The other priest was George Antoine Belcourt, the French Canadian missionary of the Red River Valley, en route from Quebec to his post. He writes, “On rounding the Pic, we met the schooner, the White Fish, coming from Fort Williams.” At the Pays Plat “we joined a Methodist minister, who had spent the winter for nothing at Michipicoten.” It is hardly necessary to point out that the missionaries of different faiths were not precisely cordial to one another even in the wilderness.

In 1847 a young English gentleman, Frederick Ulrich Graham, passed up Lake Superior on his way to hunt buffalo and grizzly bears on the western prairies. Sir George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company accompanied his party during much of the Lake Superior journey. Of him Graham wrote,¹⁶ ” Governor ran into the Pic Fort about four; and after crossing the bay we dined on a rock.” Next morning he wrote, “Friday, May 28th. Off at 3 a.m. Lovely day. A swim in the lake before breakfast . . . We had some fresh meat, having picked up half a calf and some eggs at the Pic.”

At the very end of the 1840’s Louis Agassiz, the renowned scientist, and quite a party of men passed up the north shore of Lake Superior from Sault Ste. Marie, stopping en route at the Pic. His printed volume¹⁷ reporting this trip states: “The Pic is a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the smallest of the three on the lake; the name is derived not as we at first supposed, from the pointed hills across the river, but from an Indian word, Peek or NeePeek. . . . The same word occurs in Neepeegon . . . . The establishment consists of a number of whitewashed red-trimmed buildings of one story, like the fishermen’s cottages of our coast, ranged round a hollow square and surrounded by a high palisade. The ground inside of this courtyard is covered with plank, and a plank road, also enclosed by a palisade, leads up the slope from the river to the gate-way, which is surmounted by a sort of barbican.”

By 1850 there were several missionaries on Lake Superior, and a few steamboats and many sailing vessels were bringing miners and some settlers to her shores. Some of the vessels put in to the mouth of the Pic River. After 1858 the Rescue, a twin-screw propeller, stopped regularly at the Pic on her trips as a mail carrier between Collingwood and Fort William. The Ploughboy also stopped after 1859. There was much prospecting for copper and other metals after 1845. The opening of the American locks at the Sault in 1855 meant that steamboats could now operate between Lake Superior and the lower lakes. Travel by canoe ceased rather abruptly, though occasionally a graceful birchbark vessel, like that of Mrs. Edward Hopkins in 1870, could be seen on the lake. Mrs. Hopkins’ oils and other pictures of canoe travel on Lake Superior are deservedly renowned.

By the early 1880’s a railroad was being planned along the mountainous north shore of Lake Superior from Heron Bay (between the mouth of Pic River and the Peninsula) to Prince Arthur’s Landing, now Port Arthur. There were few habitations and no ports on that rocky arc of shore. Whether the Hudson’s Bay Company post at the Pic, which persisted at least till 1865, was still there is problematical. When William Van Home actually began the task of building the Canadian Pacific Railroad along the north shore, west from Heron Bay, it was necessary to have a dock, to which rails, ties, other supplies, men, and provisions could be taken. Peninsula Bay, because of its great depth and protection from winds, was chosen. Remains of the pier could still be seen when, in the early 1940s, a large paper-pulp plant and a village for the operatives, officials, and others were begun on the same shores. To this pier came the well remembered vessels of many Great Lakes lines, both sailing vessels and steamboats: the Ontario, Ocean, Argyle, Prussia, Kinkadim, E. M Foster, and many stragglers carrying lumber for bridges and trestles, and rails. Then there were Smith and Mitchell’s meat vessels, The Butcher Maid and The Butcher Boy. Captain Nicholson was master of one of them and remembers well how the cattle and other meat on the hoof were carried by vessel to Peninsula, as the C.P.R.’s main camp on the picturesque bay of the same name came to be called. Here the cattle were driven from camp to camp as required. Slaughtering was done at the destination of the individual animal, and carcasses were wrapped in cheese cloth and hung up on neighboring trees till required.

Captain Nicholson also recalls how the navies were always passing to and fro, mainly between Port Arthur and Peninsula. Three gangs, it was commonly reported, were required on the railroad job, “one coming, one going, and one on the job. ”

Besides the dock there was a warehouse at Peninsula; and soon a rail­ road station went up. Houses mushroomed among the hosts of tents where the business part of Marathon, as the town of the 1940s is called, now is. A hotel was erected. A photograph of this motley village of about the year 1885 is still in existence. Twelve thousand men and 1500 horses were employed in constructing “two hundred miles of engineering impossibilities,” as the indomitable Yankee builder, William Van Home, termed his job.

Van Home chanced to be in Ottawa on a seemingly fruitless task of trying to bolster the dying credit of his undertaking, when the second Riel rebellion began in 1885. He was clever enough to see his chance to get public support for his railroad construction. It had taken from March to August in 1870 to ferry troops from eastern Canada to Prince Arthur’s Landing and Winnipeg in the first Riel rebellion. Van Home offered to move them in 1885 in eleven days from Ottawa to Fort Qu’Appelle, far beyond Winnipeg, on two days’ notice. His offer was accepted. Then little Peninsula witnessed an odd sight. Soldiers were brought to the end of the rails in midwinter weather on Lake Superior. The official report comments: “About 400 miles between the west end of the track and Red Rock or Nipigon – 66 miles from Port Arthur – had to be passed by a constantly varying process of embarking and disembarking guns and stores from flat cars to country team sleighs, and vice versa. There were 16 operations of this kind in cold weather and deep snow. On starting from the west end of the track on the night of 30th of March the roads were found so bad that it took the guns 17 hours to do the distance (30 miles) to Magpie Camp. On from there to the east end of the track by team sleighs and marching 23 miles further on; on flat cars (uncovered and open) 80 miles, with thermometer 50 degrees below zero. Heron Harbour, Port Munro, McKeller’s Bay, Jackfish, McKay’s Harbour were passed by alternate flat cars on construction tracks and in teaming in fearful weather round the north shore of Lake Superior. Nipigon or Red Rock was reached on the evening of 3rd of April. The men had had no sleep for four nights.” The C.P.R. construction camps, however, had supplied them with copious draughts of coffee and hot food.

Van Home fulfilled his promise and got the money he needed to complete his railroad. It took twelve million dollars to build the two hundred miles of difficult North Shore track between Heron Bay and Nipigon. Gradually fill-ins replaced the long timbered trestles that were improvised in so many places over otherwise impossible terrain. Building finally came to an end. Transcontinental trains sped past little Peninsula – and few passengers in them or since have dreamed of the drama that the high promontory, the peninsula proper, witnessed in the 1880’s. Gradually all traces of the railroad construction operations died away.

Only a small railroad station, a water tower, a post office, and a very few houses remained at Peninsula. Just before World War I the place was examined as a possible coaling station, but the idea was given up in favor of Port Munro. After the war, a black granite quarry was opened, but it closed during the depression of the 1930s. Finally, during World War II, the building program of the Marathon Corporation, a paper manufacturing company of Wisconsin, was begun. Almost overnight the busy construction scenes of 1885 were re-enacted, as the new village, a hotel, the great pulp factory, and hundreds of residences went up in record time. Though far beyond the reach of roads, the villagers have automobiles and just about everything else that modern man deems indispensable to civilized life, except close physical contact with other communities. For Marathon is truly in the wilderness.

The scenery is awe-inspiring. Wild life is abundant, with an occasional moose and a rare caribou to be seen. Indians are still common. There is a native village still near the mouth of Pic River. Great rafts of pulp logs are towed up coast from the river, and stored temporarily as enormous golden islands out in the bay in front of the village. The Pic River brings down the logs from the vast forests farther inland, toward the height of land between the Albany River and the Pic. The sand dunes at the mouth of the Pic are still a notable feature of that region. In them I have picked up without digging – for they shift constantly – quantities of voyageur pipe stems and bowls, fragments of dishes and bottles, beads, animal bones, handwrought nails, and so forth. The site could be a sort of New World “windy Troy” for a modern archaeologist with an urge to explore into the remote past of one of the best known spots, historically speaking, on Lake Superior.

 

 

1. Service Hydrographique B 4040. 1. Published in Grace Lee Nute’s Voyageur’s Highway, Paul, Minnesota Historical Society, 1941, p. 2.
2. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale 8695-Geo 2981. Published in Grace Lee Nute’s Lake Superior, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1944, p. 30.
3. Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699, by Louise P. Kellogg, New York, Scribner, 1917, pp. 93-160.
4. Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories Between the Years 1760 and 1776, by Alexander Henry; ed. by M. M. Quaife, Chicago, Lakeside Press, 1921. pp. 227-8.
5. Five Fur Traders of the Northwest, by Charles M. Gates, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1937, p. 90.
6. An anonymous manuscript in the General Register House, Edinburgh.
7. Perrault’s reminiscences in French may be found in Henry R. Schoolcraft’s manuscripts at the Library of Congress. In translation they have been edited by John S. Fox as a Narrative of the Travels . . . of a Merchant Voyageur . . . (Historical Collections and Researches of the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, 37, 1909-10, pp. 508-619.)
8. Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the Years 1811, 1812, 1813, 1814, by Gabriel Franchere, New York, Redfield, 1854, p. 348.
9. Adventures on the Columbia River, by Ross Cox, New York, J. & Harper, 1832, p. 290.
10. The Shoe and Canoe, or Pictures of Travel in the Canadas, London, Chapman and Hall. 1850, Vol. 2. p. 214.
11. Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnipeek, Lake of the Woods, &c.. London, Whittaker, 1825, vol. 2, p. 179.
12. Hudson Bay Company Archives in London, 162/e/1.
13. The Hargrave Correspondence, 1821-1843, ed. by G. P. De T. Glazebrook, p. 93. (Champlain Society Publications, Toronto, 1938.)
14. Journey to the Northwest in 1843-4, by Sir Henry Lefroy, ed. by W. S. Wallace. (Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada II, 1938, p. 69.)
15. Notes of a Twenty-five Years’ Service in the Hudson’s Bay Territory, by W. S. Wallace, p. 363. (Champlain Society Publications, Toronto, 1932.)
16. A diary kept by Graham on a trip to Fort Edmonton in 1847 was published privately in a few copies as Notes of a Sporting Expedition in the Far West of Canada, ed. by Jane Hermione Graham, London, 1898. It is a very rare Item, and the copy I used was kindly lent me by a member of the Graham family. The entries relating to the Pic are those of May 27 and 28.
17. Lake Superior, Boston, Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1858, pp. 71-2.

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This article first appeared in Inland Seas in Spring 1948.

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