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Updated: June 30, 2025
Misfortune, however, still dogged the path of La Vérendrye. The day before that on which he had arranged to leave for the north, he was taken violently ill and for three days could not move from his bed. As ill luck would have it, his stock of medicines was in the bag which the Assiniboines had carried off to their village, so that he could do nothing for himself until he reached that place.
Thus white men passed their first winter in the Great Northwest. Toward winter four hundred Crees came to escort the explorers to the wooded lake region yet farther west towards the land of the Assiniboines, the modern Manitoba. "We were Caesars," writes Radisson. "There was no one to contradict us.
The result could not have been more satisfactory. "Whirlwind is a bad horse," said Deerfoot, feeling that it was time to have a little sport with him. "He ran away from Deerfoot on purpose. If he had had any sense he would have left the Assiniboines and set out to find Deerfoot instead of making Deerfoot travel so far to find him."
They damaged the gate considerably in their hurried flight. I soon laid down my brand, and then I had nothing more exciting to do than to close the gate of the fort. Soon after this incident with the Assiniboines, Saint-Pierre gave up his half-hearted attempt to find a route to the Western Sea, and returned to Montreal. He had proved himself a brave man enough.
He, too, like the two Frenchmen from Green Bay, heard of wandering tribes who had no settled lodge like the Hurons and Iroquois, but lived by the chase, Crees and Sioux and Assiniboines of the prairie, at constant war round a lake called "Ouinipegouek."
A red man always prefers to slay a captive rather than surrender him. With the horse shot Deerfoot would be forced to have it out with the warriors at such disadvantage that only one result could follow, for the Assiniboines were not only armed with guns at least several were thus equipped but they were daring and resolute.
Their Chiefs were, with their names translated into pronounceable English, "the Premier," "the Black Robe," "the Black Man," while seemingly Mache Wheskab "the Noisy Man" represented the Assiniboines. The Crees, so well represented by their doughty Chiefs, are a sturdy race. They adapt themselves readily enough to new conditions.
The Blackfeet Indians tell us to-day that the Assiniboines and Crees used to meet the Blackfeet to exchange the trade of the Bay at Wetaskiwin, 'the Hills of Peace. This exactly agrees with the itinerary, described by Hendry, after they crossed the south branch in September and struck up into the Eagle Hills. Winter was passed in hunting between the points where Calgary and Edmonton now stand.
The thought had been in the mind of our friend from the first that this misshapen red man had seen the party of Assiniboines who held Whirlwind. How was the question to be asked? Deerfoot stepped to a tree resembling the water maple that grew a few feet to the right of them. Its diameter was a foot or more.
Hardly had the singular race opened when the astounded pursuers saw no fugitive before them! He had been swallowed up in the darkness like an arrow launched from a powerful bow. The Assiniboines must have come to the belief that whoever the stranger was he knew how to run. You and I came to that belief long ago. One of the chagrined pursuers fired in the direction of the flying fugitive.
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