Page:The Selkirk mountains (1912).djvu/18

6 CHAPTER I. THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS OF CANADA. The Canadian Rocky Mountain system, covering an area of 200,000 square miles, extends from the Eastern Foothills to the Pacific Coast, 600 miles, and from the 49th parallel towards the Arctic, 1,000 miles, about as far north as a man can win. It is part of the North American Cordilleras and is subdivided into four great ranges: the Rockies, the Selkirks, the Gold, and the Pacific Coast Ranges. Of these, the Rockies and the Selkirks are the greatest. Within all this vast mountain region are resources to sustain a large population—agriculture, forests, mines, fisheries; resources of health—mineral springs, remote valleys without number where tents or chalets may be set up and where transportation is by broncho and pack-train; resources of sport—hunting, fishing, mountaineering.

The early history of the Canadian Rocky Mountains holds stories, written in reliable journals, of high and hardy and desperate adventure—adventure as dangerous as any story of any Norseman of old. All the earliest explorers were fur traders, and the oldest human landmarks in the Rocky Mountains were their trading posts. The wonder to us who travel by the splendid highway chosen by the Canadian Pacific Railway is that for well nigh a century after Sir Alexander MacKenzie in 179.3 crossed the Great Divide beyond the sources of the Peace River, no way was known from eastern foot-hills to western slopes except those paths discovered north and discovered south. Even in the middle of the century following, when Simpson and Palliser and Hector, penetrating the Rockies from the east, reached the Bow River in the vicinity of the present village of Banff, they did not seem curious to follow the wide valley upward, but turned south following Indian trails, one towards Simpson Pass, one towards Kananaskis Pass, and another towards Vermilion Pass each his own discovery. When Hector discovered the Kicking Horse River, he was beyond the Great Divide, having followed the route he found to the south of the beautiful glacier-bearing region lying about Lake Louise that forms a group of the Summit Range.

Before ever a white man saw the Rockies, the Indians had called them the Shining Mountains, and afterwards the Stony Mountains. The first white men to look upon them and to stand within their shadow were French Canadians, though it is an anachronism to call them so. On New Year's Day. 174.3, Francis and Pierre, two sons of De la Verendrye, a French nobleman born at Three Rivers in 1686, saw the grey skyline of the Bighorn Mountains, south of the parallel of latitude one day to mark the international boundary. Two weeks later Pierre was at the foot of the main range, eager to cross it and seek beyond, the western sea: but. owing to the defection of his Indian guides he was compelled to retrace his steps towards the Assiniboine River from which he had set out. It had been the elder De la Verendrye's purpose to find the fabled narrow sea supposed to separate the valley of the Great Forked River (the Mississippi) and China. A soldier who had fought in the New World and in the Old, he had returned to New France filled with a passion for discovery, bent on adding new territory to the French Crown. Disasters stopped his discoveries ere reaching the Rockies, but he was