Volume 1

290 LONG LAKE— PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE.
ber of freemen are passing the summer.
Two of our horses
were knocked up, and could not move even upon a slow
trot ; I therefore left them to come on slowly, and pursued
the cart road. Soon afterward I overtook a cart which
proved to be Mr. Dorion's, with a load of buffalo meat from
Lac Plat, where he has a hunter employed. We proceeded
on to Raft lake,^ where we unsaddled and allowed the
Here we found Madame Dorion,
horses two hours to rest.
who had made a good fire to drive away the mosquitoes.
She was sent on ahead for that purpose, and had also prepared
some excellent appalats of buffalo meat, and gathered
some nearly ripe pears. Having refreshed ourselves, and
our fatigued party joining us, we saddled and mounted, but
their pace was so slow that I
left them to come on with the
cart, and went ahead with Ducharme, directing our course
S. S. W. until five o'clock, when we arrived at Portage la
Prairie.^
* Present Long 1., of narrow curved form, lying partly in the parish of Baie
St. Paul, but mostly in the adjoining township on the N. (Tp. 13, R. iv, W.
princ. merid). Henry is at or near Redburn sta. of the main C. P. Ry., between
Marquette and Poplar Point sta. , a little below a place on the N. bank
of the river called Belcourt.
' Observe the change in Henry's course from N. W. to S. S. W. since leaving
Long or Raft 1., opp. which the Assiniboine is at its northernmost bend. Soon
after passing Poplar Point sta. he crossed the boundary between Selkirk and
Macdonald districts of Manitoba, entering the latter ;
he then passed Assiniboine,
a place on the N. bank of the river, and next High Bluff sta, on the
main C. P. Ry. In High Bluff parish, at or near the place on the river where
the N. P. and Manitoba R. R. now crosses, named Bridge Spur, was Adhemar's
fort, said by McDonnell, /. c, p. 270, to be 6 m. by land, and a day by water
(going up stream) below Portage la Prairie ; he camped there May 17th, 1794.
He gives Blondishe's fort as below Adhemar's—the lowest on the river at the
time of which he writes.
Jacques Adhemar of the N. W. Co. was in the Nepigon
district in 1799. Portage la Prairie, as a locality, as a carrying-place from
the Assiniboine over to Lake Manitoba, and as a station of the N. W. Co. in
Henry's time, has been repeatedly mentioned in this work already, and reference
has been made to Verendrye's Fort la Reine, on the S. or right bank of
the river, founded Oct. 3d, 1738, when Verendrye was on his way to the Mandans,
as Henry is now. This fort was burned by the Crees about 1752. The
place was also called Prairie portage, Meadow portage (as Thompson, 1798) and
Plain portage (Harmon, 1805); but the full form of the F. phrase persists, for