Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/248

194 opposite to the waters of the Upper Columbia Lake and distant from that lake not more than three miles across the low divide since known as Canal Flat but to him as McGillivray's Portage. This portage he had reached by canoes up the Columbia from Canoe river at the extreme bend of the river in British Columbia, so named by himself because of his enforced encampment there from January until April of this same year 1811 in preparation for his voyage to the mouth of the Columbia. The occasion for this was the permission given him and the instructions received from his partners of the North-West Company at their annual meeting at Fort William on Lake Superior in the summer of 1810, for the North-Westers had declined to join with Mr. Astor in the enterprise to occupy the mouth of the Columbia and expected to develop the Indian trade there on their own account, as they afterward did.

But let me revert to David Thompson's own records. He was at Astoria on the 15th of July and from there visited Chinook Point near the mouth of the river, but at once started up river again, for his journal reads: "August 8th, 1811, Chapaton River, at noon, latitude 46 degrees 36 minutes 26 seconds north, longitude 118 degrees 53 minutes 47 seconds west. Laid up our canoe." The Chapaton (Shahaptin) was the Snake river and this entry shows him to have been at the mouth of the Palouse River, a well-known camping place for the Nez Perces Indians; from whence the party took to the hurricane decks of as many Nez Perces horses and followed the well established Indian trail to the Spokane (August 18th) and thence to Kettle Falls again (August 23rd). By the third of September he was again prepared with canoe and provisions and proceeded up the Columbia, through the Arrow Lakes and the Dalles des Mort to Boat Encampment on Canoe River, and from there crossed the Rocky Mountains to the Athabasca and returned in October.