United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In such districts as Pelly and Swan River, where fish and other food for dogs was scarce, we had frequently to feed both men and dogs on rations of flour. Some of the half-breeds would leave their ration of flour with their family, and count on eating the dog's ration while on the trip and letting the poor brutes go hungry, just because the dogs belonged to the Company.
Thus it was not until 1850 that he could establish, what he says he all along believed, 'that the Pelly and Yukon were identical. This he did by descending the river to where the Porcupine joins it, and where in 1847 Fort Yukon was established by Mr. A.H. Murray for the Hudson's Bay Company.
"Whatever it is, there's men with it! Hurry, Pelly, into the cabin with our dogs and sledge! Those are dogs we hear dogs who are howling because they smell us and there are hundreds of 'em! Where there's dogs there's men but who in Heaven's name can they be?" He dragged the sledge into the cabin while Pelliter unleashed the huskies from the lean-to.
Two days later Cheyenne was able to get his feet into his boots, but even then he walked as though he did not care to let his left foot know what his right foot was doing. Lon Pelly, just in from a ride out to the line shack, remarked to the boys in the bunk-house that Cheyenne walked as though his brains were in his feet and he didn't want to get stone bruises stepping on them.
Close up against the bars came the faces of Pelly, Carter, and the special constable, filled with the expressions of men who had expected to look in upon tragedy. And then, behind their backs, Kent saw the other thing happen. Swift as a flash Marette Radisson's hand went in and out of her raincoat, and at the backs of the three men she was leveling a revolver!
He, Kent, was to start for Edmonton the following morning under charge of Pelly and a special constable! After this Kent felt a strange change come over him. Years seemed to multiply themselves in his body. His mind, beaten back, no longer continued in its old channels of thought. The thing pressed upon him now as fatalistic. Fingers had failed him. Fortune had failed him.
'Oh! said I, on a rather happy inspiration, 'I believe you're one of the vain people who fancy they are indispensable. I am sure Mrs. Pelly would be delighted for you to come; wouldn't you, Mrs. Pelly? There will be no lodgers home till late this fine evening. Mrs. Pelly simpered at me, with a rather forbidding light in her eye, I thought.
"About a mile below the Pelly, just at the ruins of Fort Selkirk, the Yukon was found to be 565 yards wide; about two-thirds being ten feet deep, with a current of about four and three-quarter miles per hour; the remaining third was more than half taken up by a bar, and the current between it and the south shore was very slack.
On October 2nd, anchored in Apia bay H.B.M.S. Calliope, Captain Kane, carrying the flag of Rear-Admiral Fairfax, and the gunboat Lizard, Lieutenant-Commander Pelly. It was rumoured the admiral had come to recognise the government of Tamasese, I believe in error. And at least the day for that was quite gone by; and he arrived not to salute the king's accession, but to arbitrate on his remains.
"And day by day we passed in the snow the sleeping-places of the two ghosts Passuk and I and we knew we would be glad for such ere we made Salt Water. Then we came to the Indian, like another ghost, with his face set toward Pelly. They had not whacked up fair, the man and the boy, he said, and he had had no flour for three days. Each night he boiled pieces of his moccasins in a cup, and ate them.
Word Of The Day