Page:The Selkirk mountains (1912).djvu/24

12 has produced. And his career, from a Charity School in London to an obscure death in poverty at the great age of eighty-seven in a village near Montreal, is one of the most remarkable and romantic in the annals of the great geographers. He entered the service of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1789, exploring and surveying the Nelson, Churchill, Athabasca, Peace and Saskatchewan Rivers. In 1797 he went over to its great rival, the North-West Fur Company as geographer and astronomer, and in 1800 first entered the Rocky Mountains in latitude 51, probably near the Pass followed by the C. P. Railway. Thompson discovered the source of the Mississippi in 1814. In 181C he was appointed by the British Government astronomer and surveyor to define the boundary line between British North America and the United States. Nine years were occupied in this international survey, and the maps then made are still and will always be the ultimate authority on the line dividing the two nations, from the State of Maine to the north-west angle of Lake of the Woods. Thompson married a "Child of the Western Country."

There were other outstanding explorers to cross the Great Divide far north of the C.P.R. highway or south of it, and to navigate at least a portion of the great river surrounding the Selkirks. Notable among them was Alexander Henry of the North-West Fur Company, sometime companion of Thompson in his travels. He was drowned in the lower reaches of the Columbia in 1814. His journals appear in Dr. Elliott Coues's book. Many of these travellers were in the employ of the Fur Companies, notably Sir George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, whose progress through the mountains was both imposing and speedy, his cavalcade making at least forty miles a day. Ross Cox's ill-fated expedition of 1817, consisting of eighty-six persons of various nationalities, which proceeded from Astoria, a fur trading post at the mouth of the Columbia, to Athabasca Pass, is one of the tragedies of the river.

A picturesque traveller of the forties was Father de Smet, the devoted Jesuit missionary called "Black Robe" by the Indians. De Smet paddled the river in the Kootenay region where his missions were, and crossed the Great Divide south over the White Man's Pass in 1845, to preach the gospel to the tribes along the eastern Foothills. He returned to the Kootenay Missions by way of Athabasca Pass and the Columbia. His are the only early transmontane travels in the interest of religion.

The next traveller to skirt the Selkirks by the waters of the Columbia was Paul Kane in 1846, who came in the interest of art. His story is written in a scarce book sure to be reprinted, "Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America." Its title, as was the way with titles in the early and middle nineteenth century, is more cumbersome still. Here is the rest of it: "From Canada to Vancouver's Island and Oregon, through the Hudson's Bay Company's Territories and back again." The record in this volume of the inland voyage of the Columbia has a touch of epic in it. Kane went down the River from the Big Bend to Fort Vancouver in Oregon (roughly 1,100 miles by its windings) in fifteen days. And the reader will concede that the voyage itself was epic whether the story of it was epic or no. The return voyage upstream occupied four strenuous months. Kane was that artist who crossed the