Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/36

26 David Thompson outfitted in 1807 was called Rocky Mountain House, and was situated on a branch of the North Saskatchewan river some distance southwest from the present city of Edmonton. That city has grown up on a later site of Fort Augustus, which was, in 1807, some twenty miles distant from where Edmonton now is.

The pass over which David Thompson crossed, came to be and still is mapped as the Howse pass, a name applied by David Thompson himself in honor of a rival trader of the H. B. Co., who followed him through it. Very fittingly it might have been named the Thompson pass. The engineers who selected the route for the Canadian Pacific railroad explored this pass and some of them much preferred it to the pass actually used some distance to the south. The stream which David Thompson followed westward from the summit was afterward named Blaeberry creek: he referred to it merely as the portage stream. This pass has not been used for many years, and is blocked with fallen timber, the merchantable timber having been logged off and there being few meadows fitted for agriculture. This stream flows into the Columbia six or seven miles north of the divisional town of Golden of the Canadian Pacific railroad, near a siding called Moberly.

From that point David Thompson ascended the Columbia about one hundred miles and came to Windermere lake, a beautiful sheet of water, and further south to Columbia lake, which he described as being shallow, and quite properly so as compared with the former. Now the river flows northward out of Windermere lake at the edge of the bench or bluff at its eastern side, but in 1807 it probably used a channel at the western side of the lake (or at least partly flowed that way) and joined the stream coming in from the Selkirk range on the west now known as Tobey creek, but which David Thompson then named Kootenae river. It was close to the junction of those two streams that he built his permanent Kootenae House, as described. Just where he had built his warehouse for a