There a flatboat, twelve by thirty feet in dimension, was constructed on lines similar to a western ferry boat, having a carrying capacity of eight tons with a twenty-two foot oar at each end to direct its course.

The rapid current averaging about four miles per hour precluded any thought of going up stream in a large boat, so it was constructed on lines sufficiently generous to form a living boat as well as to carry the season's collection of fossils.
Supplied with a season's provisions, lumber for boxes, and plaster for encasing bones, we began our fossil cruise down a canyon which once echoed songs of the _Bois brule_, for this was at one time the fur territory of the great Hudson Bay Company.
[Illustration: Fig.

47 .-- American Museum Expedition on the Red Deer River.

Fossils secured along the banks were packed and loaded aboard the large scow and floated down the river to the railway station.] No more interesting or instructive journey has ever been taken by the writer.

High up on the plateau, buildings and haystacks proclaim a well-settled country, but habitations are rarely seen from the river and for miles we floated through picturesque solitude unbroken save by the roar of the rapids.
Especially characteristic of this canyon are the slides where the current setting against the bank has undermined it until a mountain of earth slips into the river, in some cases almost choking its course.
A continual sorting thus goes on, the finer material being carried away while the boulders are left as barriers forming slow moving reaches of calm water and stretches of rapids difficult to navigate during low water.