The conquest of the great Northwest, Volume 2 (of 2) /

by Agnes C. Laut

CHAPTER XXV

1800-1810

DAVID THOMPSON, THE NOR’WESTER, DASHES FOR THE COLUMBIA—HE EXPLORES EAST KOOTENAY, WEST KOOTENAY, WASHINGTON AND OREGON, BUT FINDS ASTOR’S MEN ON THE FIELD—HOW THE ASTORIANS ARE JOCKEYED OUT OF ASTORIA—FRASER FINDS HIS WAY TO THE SEA BY ANOTHER GREAT RIVER.

Let us follow Thompson first. He had joined the Nor’Westers just when the question of the International Boundary was in dispute between Canada and the United States.

(1) In 1796, lest other Northwest forts were south of the Boundary, he first explored from Lake Superior to Rainy Lake and the Lake of the Woods and Winnipeg River and Winnipeg Lake, advancing as fast as the brigades traveled, running his lines at lightning pace. Then he struck across to Lake Manitoba and the Assiniboine and Qu’ Appelle. His first survey practically ran in a circle round the bounds of the modern Manitoba, except on the south.

(2) After wintering on the Assiniboine, he prepared in the summer of 1797 for exploration south to the Missouri, but his work must pay in coin of the realm to the Company. This was accomplished by Thompson obtaining credit from McDonell of the Assiniboine Department for goods to trade with the Mandanes. With three horses, thirty-eight dogs and several voyageurs, he set out southwest, in mid-winter, 1797. This was long before Henry or Chaboillez of the Assiniboine had sent men from Pembina to the Missouri. The cold was terrific. The winds blew keen as whip lashes, and the journey of three hundred miles lasted a month. To Thompson’s amazement, he found Hudson’s Bay traders from the Albany Department on the Missouri. They must have come south across Minnesota.

(3) By February of ’98, Thompson was back on the Assiniboine, and now to complete the southern survey of Manitoba, he struck east for Red River, and in March up Red River to Pembina where the partner, Charles Chaboillez, happened to be in charge. No doubt it was what Thompson told Chaboillez of the Missouri that induced the Nor’Westers to go there. Still ascending the Red, Thompson passed Grand Forks—then a cluster of log houses inhabited by traders—and struck eastward through what is now Minnesota to that Red Lake, where Hudson’s Bays and Nor’Westers were to have such bitter fights. Six miles farther east he made the mistake of thinking he had found the sources of the Mississippi in Turtle Lake. Still pressing eastward, he came to Lake Superior and along the north shore to the Company’s headquarters. From 1799 to 1805 he ranges up the South Saskatchewan to that old Bow Fort near Banff; then up the North Saskatchewan all the way from Lesser Slave Lake to Athabasca. This, then, was the man whom the Nor’Westers now appointed to explore the Rockies.

Only two passes across the mountains north of Bow River were known to the fur traders—Peace River Pass and Howse River Pass of the Upper Saskatchewan. It was perfectly natural that Thompson should follow the latter—the trail of his old co-workers in the Hudson’s Bay service. Striking up the Saskatchewan from Edmonton in the fall of 1806, by October Thompson was in that wonderful glacier field which has only been thoroughly explored in recent days—where Howse River leads over to a branch of the Blaeberry Creek, with Mt. Hector and Mt. Thompson and Mt. Balfour and the beautiful Bow Lakes on the southeast; and Mt. Bryce, and Mt. Athabasca and Mt. Stutfield and the wonderful Freshfield Glaciers on the northwest. This is one of the largest and most wonderful glacial fields of the world. It is the region where the tourists of Laggan, and Field, and Golden, and Donald strike north up the Pipestone and Bow and Blaeberry Creek—raging torrents all of them, not in the least like creeks, broad as the Upper Hudson, or the Thames at Chelsea, wild as the cataracts of the St. Lawrence. From the Pipestone, or Bow, or Blaeberry, one can pass northeast down to the tributaries of the Saskatchewan. Cloud-capped mountains, whose upland meadows present fields of eternal snow, line each side of the river. Once when I attempted to enter this region by pack horse late in September, we wakened below Mt. Hector to find eight inches of snow on our tent roof, the river swollen to a rolling lake, the valley swamped high as the pack horses’ saddles.

Hither came Thompson by a branch of the Saskatchewan, and Howse’s River and Howse’s Pass to Blaeberry Creek. Dense spruce and hemlock forests covered the mountains to the water’s edge. The scream of the eagle perched on some dead tree, the lonely whistle of the hoary marmot—a kind of large rock squirrel—the roar of the waters swelling to a great chorus during mid-day sun, fading to a long-drawn, sibilant hush during the cool of night, the soughing of the winds through the great forests like the tide of a sea—only emphasize the solitude, the stillness, the utter aloneness of feeling that comes over man amid such wilderness grandeur.

On the Upper Blaeberry, Thompson constructs a rough log raft—safer than canoe, for it will neither sink nor upset—whipsawing two long logs over a dozen spruce rollers. A sapling tree for a pole, packs in a heap in the center on brush boughs to keep them free of damp, and down the Blaeberry whirls the explorer with his Indian guides. Here, the water is clearest crystal from the upland snows. There, it becomes milky with the silt of glaciers grinding over stone beds; and glimpses through the forests reveal the boundless ice fields. By October, snow begins to fall on the uplands. The hoary evergreens become heaped with drifts in huge mushrooms. The upper snow fields curl over the edges of lofty precipices in great cornices that break and fall with the boom of thunder, setting the avalanches roaring down the mountain flanks, sweeping the slopes clean of forests as if leveled by some giant trowel.