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Updated: June 28, 2025
Through the long evening they pressed forward till they came to the Kootenay River, having crossed which they ventured to camp for the night. After supper the Inspector announced his intention of riding on to the Fort for reinforcements, and gave his instructions to the Sergeant. "Sergeant Crisp," he said, "you will make an early start and bring in the bunch to-morrow morning. Mr.
Our chief interest is to enquire whether milk, jam and mail have come up from the wagon-lines; it seems a faery-tale that there are places where milk and jam can be had for the buying. See how simple we become. Poor little house at Kootenay! I hate to think of it empty. We had such good times there twelve months ago.
We had roughed it in East and West Kootenay and were working south to leave the country dead broke. We had found "float" in plenty, and had followed it up ridges and over divides across three ranges of mountains. Our horses were plumb played out. We had camped on a ridge to let them fatten up enough to beat it out of British Columbia for ever.
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.
Those who were risking their money on him were the older wilderness men men who had spent their lives among dogs, and who knew what the red glint in Kazan's eyes meant. An old Kootenay miner spoke low in another's ear: "I'd bet on 'im even. I'd give odds if I had to. He'll fight all around the Dane. The Dane won't have no method." "But he's got the weight," said the other dubiously.
I feel more than ever I did and I'm sure it's a feeling that you share since visiting the camp that I am setting out on a Crusade from which it would have been impossible to withhold myself with honour. I go quite gladly and contentedly, and pray that in God's good time we may all sit again in the little shack at Kootenay and listen to the rustling of the orchard outside.
Then followed the years when he, his wife and a little Maurice lived in the fastnesses of those mighty ranges; when he learned to know and follow the trail of the mountain goat; when the rugged passes grew familiar to him as the little village where he had been born in Quebec; when the countless forests of Douglas fir held no mysteries and no fears for him; and, because he had learned these things, because he was brave and courageous, because his life had been clean and honest, he was selected to carry His Majesty's mails from a primitive "landing" on one of the Kootenay Lakes to the great gold mines, forty miles into the interior, and over one of the wildest, loneliest mountain trails in all British Columbia.
Old Stephen kept him for three or four years and was as good to him as if he'd been his own son." "Most people out our way do mind Ben Butler," returned William Jeffers grimly, "even if he ain't been heard tell of for twenty years. He wasn't the kind you could forget in a hurry. Where'd he go? Out to the Kootenay, wasn't it?" "Somewhere there.
Eastward stretched the gloriously fertile plains of southern "Sunny Alberta," westward lay the limpid blue of the vast and indescribably beautiful Kootenay Lakes, but between these two arose a barrier of miles and miles of granite and stone and rock, over and through which a railway must be constructed. Tunnels, bridges, grades must be bored, built and blasted out.
And yet I can remember so many happy days, when I was a child in the summer and later at Kootenay. One almost thought he had caught the secret of carrying heaven in his heart. By the time this reaches you I'll be in the line again, but for the present I'm undergoing a special course of training.
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