le from the river's entrance.
Here I made my final preparations for the ascent of the Winnipeg,
getting a fresh canoe better adapted for forcing the rapids, and at five
o'clock in the evening started on my journey up the river. Eight miles
above the fort the roar of a great fall of water sounded through the
twilight. In the surge and spray and foaming torrent the enormous volume
of the Winnipeg was making its last grand leap on its way to mingle its
waters with the lake. On the flat surface of an enormous rock which
stood well out into the boiling water we made our fire and our camp.

The pine-trees which gave the fall its name stood round us dark and
solemn, waving their long arms to and fro in the gusty winds that swept
the valley. It was a wild picture. The pine-trees standing in inky
blackness; the rushing water, white with foam; above, the rifted
thunder-clouds. Soon the lightning began to flash and the voice of
the thunder to sound above the roar of the cataract. My Indians made
me a rough shelter with cross poles and a sail-cloth, and, huddling
themselves together under the upturned canoe, we slept regardless of the
storm....

A man may journey very far through the lone spaces of the earth without
meeting with another Winnipeg River. In it nature has contrived to place
her two great units of earth and water in strange and wild combinations.
To say that the Winnipeg River has an immense volume of water, that it
descends three hundred and sixty feet in a distance of one hundred
and sixty miles, that it is full of eddies and whirlpools, of every
variation of waterfall from chutes to cataracts, that it expands into
lonely pine-cliffed lakes and far-reaching island-studded bays, that
its bed is cumbered with immense wave-polished rocks, that its vast
solitudes are silent and its cascades ceaselessly active,--to say all
this is but to tell in bare items of fact the narrative of its
beauty. For the Winnipeg, by the multiplicity of its perils and the
ever-changing beauty of its character, defies the description of
civilized men as it defies the puny efforts of civilized travel. It
seems part of the savage,--fitted alone for him and for his ways,
useless to carry the burdens of man's labor, but useful to shelter the
wild things of wood and water which dwell in its waves and along its
shores. And the red man who steers his little birch-bark canoe through
the foaming rapids of the Winnipeg, how well he knows its various wa