“Some say he was an Iroquois Indian who had red hair—in which case he must have been part white, I should say. Others say he was a Swede. Yet others say that ‘Tête Jaune,’ or ‘Yellowhead,’ was an old Indian chief who had gray hair. Now, I’ve seen a few white-haired Indians—for instance, old White Calf, down in the Blackfoot reservation—and their hair seems rather yellow more than pure white when they are very old. At any rate, whoever the original Tête Jaune was, we are bound now for his old bivouac on the Fraser, fifty miles below, the Tête Jaune Cache.
“Every man who wants to do mountain exploring has heard of the Tête Jaune Cache on the Fraser River. It has been one of the most inaccessible places in the Rockies. But now it will be easy to get there in a year or so, and I am sure on this beautiful Yellowhead Lake just ahead of us somebody will put up a hotel one day or other, and they will make trails around in these mountains and kill all these goats and bear.”
“How far is it down to the lake?” inquired Jesse, pushing up his riding-pony alongside the others.
“About half an hour,” replied his uncle. “Not too good a trail, and about a hundred feet drop from the summit down.”
Surely enough, they had gone but a little distance over the winding and difficult blazed route when they came out into an open spot whence they could see Yellowhead Lake lying before them. It was a lovely sheet of water about four miles long, with bold mountains rising on either side.
“Now, young men,” said their leader, as they paused, “we’ll not take the liberties with these mountains that some of the earlier travelers did. We’ll call that big mountain on the south side of the lake Mount Fitzwilliam. On the north side is old Bingley, but I presume we’d just as well call it Yellowhead Mountain now. Some called it Mount Pelee, but we’ll call it Yellowhead, because it seems too bad the pass and mountain should not have the same name from the same man—whoever he was. That’s the guardian of the pass from this side, at any rate. It looks as though it shut up the pass, because, you see, it bends around the foot of the mountain. I’ve climbed that mountain in my time—none too easy a job. In that way you can see the headwaters of the Fraser River, and glaciers twenty miles south of here. From the top of Yellowhead you can see Mount Geikie, although we are past it now.”
“When are we going to do our fishing?” inquired John, in his practical fashion.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said his uncle; “if you’ll be good and travel steadily, we’ll make camp at the side of this lake and fish this afternoon.”
“Agreed,” said John; “go ahead.”