EARLY EXPLORER’S CAREER

Taranaki Daily News, 3 January 1930, Page 6

EARLY EXPLORER’S CAREER

THRILLING ADVENTURES.

Vancouver, Dec. 11.

Peter Erasmus, aged 97, a survivor of Captain John Palliser’s expedition of 1857, which discovered Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), is retained on the civil list of the Alberta Government, with a email salary, as well as an old-age pension. Extremely infirm and almost blind, he is living out his years on the Whitefish Indian Reserve, near Cold Lake, with his son David, also an old man in point of years. Mr. Erasmus was born in 1833 in the Red River settlement, founded by Lord Selkirk. His father was a Dane, who, like many another Hudson’s Bay Company trader in the early days, married an Indian woman. At the age of 22 Erasmus was attached to Dr. (later Sir James) Hector, geologist of the Palliser expedition, with whom he undertook many thrilling river and overland journeys into .the Rockies. On one of these trips Mr. Erasmus and his chief, after swimming the ice-jammed Miette River, ran for two hours through thq woods to Jasper House, their clothing a frozen mass, to be received by yet another famous voyageur, Trader Moberly.