he Peace river and
between the Saskatchewan and the Churchill. In 1806 we find him in the
country south of the Peace, which was then in charge of that Jules
Quesnel who was to accompany Fraser in 1808. Fraser, as we have seen,
was already busy exploring the region between M'Leod Lake and Stuart
Lake, and had laid his plans to descend the great river which he
thought was Gray's Columbia. Now, while Thompson spent the winter of
1806-7 between the Peace and the North Saskatchewan, trading and
exploring, he doubtless learned of Fraser's explorations west of the
Rockies and of the vast extent of New Caledonia; and June 1807 saw him
over the mountains on the Kootenay plains, where to his infinite
delight he came upon a turbulent river, whose swollen current flowed
towards the Pacific. 'May God give me to see where its waters flow
into the ocean,' he ejaculated. This was, however, but a tributary of
the long-sought Columbia. It was the river now called the Blaeberry.
Thompson followed down the banks of this stream by a well-known Indian
trail, and on June 30 he came to the Columbia itself. Although the
river here flowed to the north, {105} he must have known, from the
deposits of blue silt and the turgidity of the current, that he had
found at least an upper reach of the River of the West; but he could
hardly guess that its winding course would lead him a dance of eleven
hundred miles before he should reach the sea.

The party camped and built the boats they needed, and a fortnight later
they were poling up-stream to the lake we to-day know as Windermere,
where Thompson built a fort which he called 'Kootenai.' Here he spent
the winter trading, and when the warm Chinook winds cleared away the
snows, in April 1808, about the time Fraser was preparing to descend
the Fraser river, he paddled up-stream to where the Columbia river has
its source in Upper Columbia Lake. A portage of about a mile and a
half brought him to another large river, which flowed southward. This
stream--the Kootenay--led him south into the country of the Flatheads,
then made a great bend and swept to the north. This was disappointing.
Thompson returned to his fort on Windermere Lake, packed the furs his
men had gathered, and retraced his trail of the previous year to Rocky
Mountain House. He had undoubtedly found the River {106} of the West,
but he had learned nothing of its course to the sea.

During nearly all of 1809 Thompson was exploring the