Volume 1

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ARRIVAL AT FORT WILLIAM. 219
the rivers on the new road. Met at Prairie portage J. M.
Bouch^,"" who has built a hut and an oven to bake bread to
sell to the winterers en passant for dressed leather, buffalo
robes, etc. He had a great stock of provisions and other
articles for sale. He dunned us with news from Canada, all
of which we knew better than himself, having met our dispatches
from Montreal, etc., at Lac la Pluie. Those petty
traders are really a nuisance on the route. At Portage des
Chenes [Oak portage ^'] we found another one, but he was
not so loquacious as Bouch^. We therefore soon got rid
of him by taking wherewith to treat our men of
provisions.
liquor and
July ^d. In the afternoon we arrived at our new establishment
of Kamanistiquia." The first objects that struck
'" J. M. Bouche must have been a freeman, to have so stimulated Henry's
fine scorn. The surname is probably originally identical with Boucher, so long
famous in Canadian annals ; but with none of the many Bouchers who appear
in N. W. Co. records have we anything to do in this instance. Of Bouches I
have noted: — Joseph Bouche, N. W. Co., Fort Chipewyan, 1799.—One Bouche
of the X. Y. Co. at Fort George on the Saskatchewan Sept. 15th, 1799, when
Thompson says that " Buche's canoe of the little society" put up there.—One
Bouche of the N. W. Co., 1804, was arranged by Thompson with La Freniere
on the Missinipi.—One Bouche (or Boucher), guide and foreman N. W.
Co., was killed with two other persons, 1804, at or near Bois d'Orignal, under
John McDonald of Garth.—One Bouche or Buche was one of three men under
Jules Maurice Quesnel at the Rocky Mountain house when Thompson arr.
there, Oct. nth, 1806 ;
he was with Thompson in the Rocky mts. about headwaters
of the Columbia, etc., from May, 1807, to 1810, and very likely is the
the same as — Jean Baptiste Bouche, interpreter N. W. Co., in 1810-11 under
Harmon at Fraser 1. and Stuart 1., British Columbia, said to have taken to wife
the first
Tacully or Carrier squaw ever kept by a white man.
^' Compare Gabriel Franchere, orig. ed., p. 267, date of July 14th, 1814 :
" Nous embarquames avant le jour, et arrivames au Portage des Chiens, qui est
long et montueux.
Nous trouvames au bas de ce portage, une espece de cabaret
[restaurant] tenu par un nomme Botuher. Nous regalames nos gens d'un
peu d'eau-de-vie, et mangeames des saucissons detestables, tant ils etaient
sales." No doubt this was Henry's obnoxious freeman, still in business on
the Kaministiquia route.
'''^
The long name of the short river whose mouth we have reached has
fluctuated to some extent, but never irrecognizably since we have heard of it
say 1678, date of the first establishment there, made by D. G. Duluth. It has
settled as Kaministiquia, with some traces still of Kamanistiquia, the form