Striking across Lake Winnipeg from Winnipeg River, the southbound canoes ascend the central channel of the three entrances to Red River, passing Nettley Creek on the west, or River au Mort, as the French called it, in memory of the terrible massacre of Cree families by Sioux raiders in 1780, while the women and children were waiting here for the men to return from York Factory. South of Lake Winnipeg, the woodland banks of the mud-colored river give place to glimpses and patches of the plains rolling westward in seas of billowing grass. It was August when the brigades left Fort William. It is September now, with the crisp nutty tang of parched grasses in the air, a shimmer as of Indian summer across the horizon that turns the setting sun to a blood-red shield. Bluest of blue are the prairie skies. Scarcely a feathering of wind clouds, and where the marsh lands lie--“sloughs” and “muskegs,” they are called in the West--so still is the atmosphere of the primeval silences that the waters are glass with the shadows of the rushes etched as by stencil. Here and there, thin spirals of smoke rise from the far prairie--camp fires of wandering Assiniboine and Cree and Saulteur. The brigades fire guns to call them to trade, or else land on the banks and light their own signal fires. Past what is now St. Peter’s Indian Reserve, and the two Selkirk towns, and the St. Andrew Rapids where, if water is high, canoes need only be tracked, if low the voyageurs may step from stone to stone; past the bare meadow where to-day stands the last and only walled stone fort of the fur trade, Lower Fort Garry--the brigades come to what is now Winnipeg, the Forks of the Red and Assiniboine. Of the French fur traders’ old post here, all that remains are the charred ruins and cellars. Near the flats where the two rivers overflow in spring are the high scaffoldings of a Cree graveyard used during the smallpox plague of the eighties. Back from the swamp of the forks are half a dozen tents--Hudson’s Bay traders--that same Robert Goodwin whom Cameron tricked at Osnaburg, come up the Albany River and across country to Manitoba--forty days from the bay--with another trader, Brown.