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 harmonize 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.



Chapter III

Treaty At Lesser Slave Lake.


On the 19th of June our little fleet landed at Willow Point.
There was a rude jetty, or wharf, at this place, below the
little trading village referred to, at which loaded boats
discharged. Formerly they could ascend the sluggish and shallow
channel connecting the expansion of the Heart River, called
Buffalo Lake, with the head of Lesser Slave Lake, a distance
of about three miles, and as far as the Hudson's Bay Company's
post, around which another trading village had gathered. This
temporary fall in the water level partly accounted for the growth
of the village at Willow Point, where sufficient interests had
arisen to cause a jealousy between the two hamlets. Once upon
a time Atawaywé Kamick was supreme. This is the name the
Crees give to the Hudson's Bay Company, meaning literally "the