MacKenzie’s second journey was much more difficult, up the Peace River through the Rocky Mountains, then by a portage to the Fraser Valley, and down Bad River. All the rivers were bad, but the birch bark canoe, however much it smashes, can be repaired with fresh sheets of bark, stuck on with gum from the pine trees. Still, after their canoe was totally destroyed in Bad River and the stock of bullets went to the bottom, the Indians sat down and wept, while the Frenchmen, after a square meal with a lot of rum, patched up the wreck to go on. Far down the Fraser Valley there is a meadow of tall grass and flowers with clumps of wild fruit orchard and brier rose, gardens of tiger lilies and goldenrod. Nobody lived there in my time, but the place is known as Alexandria in memory of Alexander Mackenzie and of the only moment in his life when he turned back, beaten. Below Alexandria the Fraser plunges for two hundred miles through a range of mountains in one long roaring swoop. So the explorers, warned by friendly Indians, climbed back up-stream to the Blackwater River; and if any big game hunter wants to shoot mosquitoes for their hides that valley would make a first-class hunting ground. The journey from here to the coast was made afoot with heavy loads by a broad Indian trail across the coast range to the Bilthqula River, and here the explorers were the guests of rich powerful tribes. One young chief unclasped a splendid robe of sea-otter skins, and threw it around MacKenzie, such a gift as no king could offer now. They feasted on salmon, service berries in grease, and cakes of inner hemlock bark sprinkled with oil of salmon, a three-hour banquet, followed by sleep in beds of furs, and blankets woven from wool of the mountain sheep. The houses were low-pitched barns of cedar, each large enough to seat several hundred people, and at the gable end rose a cedar pole carved in heraldic sculpture gaily painted, with a little round hole cut through for the front door. Each canoe was a cedar log hollowed with fire, then spread with boiling water, a vessel not unlike a gondola. One such canoe, the _Tillicum_, has made a voyage round the world, but she is small compared with the larger dugouts up to seven tons burden. An old chief showed MacKenzie a canoe forty-five feet in length, of four foot beam painted with white animals on a black hull, and set with ivory of otter teeth. In this he had made a voyage some years before, when he met white men and saw ships, most likely those of the great Captain Cook. MacKenzie’s account of the native doctors describes them to the life as they are to-day. “They blew on the patient, and then whistled; they rubbed him violently on the stomach; they thrust their forefingers into his mouth, and spouted water into his face.” MacKenzie, had he only waited, would have seen them jump on the patient’s stomach to drive the devils out.