was filled by a man subsequently engaged on the route northward.
A supply of trading goods having been got up from York Factory, and all the other arrangements being complete, Mr. Dease took his departure, on the 2lst of July, from Norway House for Athabasca, in company with Chief Factor Smith, the gentleman in charge of that department, who afforded every possible aid in transporting the goods and provisions destined for the expedition, during the long and laborious voyage to Fort Chipewyan, which they safely reached on the 28th of September. At the same time I returned to spend the autumn at Red River Settlement, chiefly with a view to refresh and extend my astronomical practice, which had for some years been interrupted by avocations of a very different nature.
It would be foreign to my purpose to enter into a lengthened description of this isolated colony: I shall merely bestow upon it a cursory glance, to give the reader some faint idea of its peculiar character. Situated under the 50th degree of north latitude, and 97th of west longitude, at an elevation of eight or nine hundred feet above the sea, and stretching for upwards of fifty miles along the wooded borders of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, which flow through a level
