Free traders have to portage
their supplies over a very rough path beneath the cliffs. Both
banks of the river are of sandstone, capped on the left by a wall
of cream-coloured rock, seventy or eighty feet in height, at a
guess. A creek comes in from the west which has cloven the sandstone
bank almost to the water's edge; and running along the top of these
sandstone formations are, everywhere, thick layers of coal, which
is also found, in a great bed, on the opposite shore, and about
three miles back from the river. The coal had been used by a trapper
there, and is a good burner and heater, leaving little ash or clinker.
These coal beds seem to extend in all directions, on both sides of
the river, and underlie a very large extent of country. The inland
country for some eight or ten miles had been examined by Sergeant
Anderson, of the Mounted Police post here, who described it as
consisting of wide ridges, or tables, of first-rate soil, divided
by shallow muskegs; a good farming locality, with abundance of
large, merchantable spruce timber. Moose were plentiful in the
region, and it was a capital one for marten, one white trapper,
the winter before our visit, having secured over a hundred skins.
On the 25th we left our comfortable spruce beds and "long fires,"
and tracked on to House River, which we reached at nine a.m. Here
there is a low-lying, desolate-looking, but memorable, "Point,"
neighboured by a concave sweep of bank.
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