“Yes, and the Canoe River rises in these hills, and it runs north quite a way before it bends down and comes into the Columbia, although it runs to the southeast ultimately, and not to the southwest.
“You see, these mountains are all laid out along great parallels, and the rivers have to do just as we did, hunt a way through if they want to get west. This is the pass of the Columbia where we are now, the way it has found downhill between the Selkirks and the Rockies. Always in getting through from east to west, as I have told you, men have followed the rivers up on one side and down on the other. So you can see, right on this ground, the way in which much of our history has been made.”
“One thing about this sort of geography is that when you see it this way you don’t forget it. And I rather like those old books which tell about the trips across the country,” said John.
“Yes,” said his uncle, “they are interesting, and useful as well, and it is interesting to follow their story, as we have done. If you would read The Northwest Passage—Rob’s book which he has just mentioned—you will see that they had even worse troubles than we, I should say, for, although they had one good guide, most of them were rank tenderfeet. They were five days getting from Jasper House up to the Yellowhead Pass, and they were a month and a half in getting from Edmonton to the Tête Jaune Cache—very much longer than we were, as you will remember.
“And worst of all—and here’s what I want you to remember—they delayed so much from time to time that when they got out of this country they met all the rivers at their swollen stages. They reached the Cache in the middle of July, and that was why they found the Canoe River so swollen and dangerous near its sources. We are about a month ahead of them. And now you will see why I have been crowding so hard all along this trip—I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the earliest explorers who crossed this country, not knowing what they were to find in it. But I give them all honor, these two Englishmen, Milton and Cheadle, for making one of the best trips ever made over the Rockies, all things considered, and contributing as they did to the growth and civilization of this country. For they were among the first to have the vision of all these great developments which have come since then.”
“They must have had a hard old time,” said Rob, “plugging along and not knowing where they were coming out. But, then, you told us that everybody who crossed the mountains in those times had native guides.”
“And so did they. At Edmonton they met a man who had been west with the emigrants the year before, who had started for the gold-fields. This guide had taken the party right up by Cranberry Lake, where we were a few days ago, over the Albreda Pass, and down the Thompson, until he showed them what he called the Cariboo country—which none of them ever reached.
“And when they reached Jasper House they found some of Leo’s people—the Rocky Mountain Shuswaps—living over there. In that way they got more directions on how to reach the Cache. There an old woman told them about the country to the west, and a man took them up to the pass into the Thompson and showed them their way down—if way it could be called. Then, when they got down toward Kamloops, they met yet other natives, and if they had not they must have starved to death, near as they were to the settlements. Left alone, these men perhaps never would have gotten even to the Yellowhead Pass. I’ll warrant it was some Indian who first ran the rapids on the Columbia. Eh, Leo?”
“Maybe-so,” smiled Leo, who had been listening intently to every word of this. “Injun not always ’fraid of water, some tribes.”
“Well,” said Uncle Dick, “I don’t know whether it was courage or laziness, Leo, but certainly a great many of your people were the ones to tell the whites about the rapids on some of these bad rivers.”