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Kelsey reported to Geyer by letter and received from York fresh supplies and orders. Then on 15 July 1691 he set out from Derings Point “to discover & bring to a Commerce the Naywatame poets.” Where he went can never be known with perfect certainty, despite the survival of his journal; but C. N. Bell’s summary is the most circumstantial yet made and deserves quotation: “ [Kelsey] ascended the Saskatchewan to the Carrot River at a point on which he abandoned his canoes and proceeded on foot, taking three days under starving conditions to pass through the muskeg country, extending for many miles south of the Saskatchewan River, then entered upon the first firm land, with its wild pigeons and moose, and farther south a more open prairie country which afforded an abundance of red deer, where he met the Eagle Creek Assiniboines, and proceeding on reached the Red Deer River, with its ‘slate mines,’ and, ascending that stream south south-west farther on came to the edge of the timber country, where before him stretched the Great Salt Plain, forty-six miles wide, extending cast and west, and on which he met more of the Assiniboine Indians (these from the adjacent Thunder Hill district) he had journeyed so far to treat with, for he was indeed in ‘the country of the Assiniboines.’ That plain abounded with buffalo, and, crossing it, he again entered a wooded area and high champlain land, replete with ponds and lakes all inhabited by beaver, which was evidently the Touchwood Hills country.” In the course of this journey, on 20 Aug. 1691, Kelsey recorded descriptions of the buffalo and grizzly bear, the first white man to do so in the Canadian west.
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