This, then, was the man (and this the wife, who accompanied him) chosen to lead the mountain brigades through the unexplored mountain fastnesses between the prairie and the Pacific. Lewis and Clarke had crossed to the Columbia, and the Spaniards to the Colorado, but between the Colorado and the Columbia was an absolutely unknown region. With Ogden as first lieutenant went Tom McKay. McKay was the best shot in the brigade, a fearless fighter, a tireless pathfinder, and one old record says “combined the affable manners of a French seigneur with the wild-eyed alertness of a mountaineer.” With hatred of the Indian bred in him from the time of his father’s murder, he could no more see a savage hostile without cracking off his rifle than a war horse could smell powder and not prance. Among the trappers were rough, brave fellows--freemen, French Canadians--whose names became famous in Oregon history: La Framboise, Astor’s old interpreter, who became a pathfinder in California; Gervais, who alternately served American and British fur traders, helped to find Mt. Shasta, finally sold his trapping outfit and retired to the French colony of the Willamette; Goddin and Payette and Pierre, the Iroquois, and Portneuf, who have left their names to famous places of Idaho. The brigade numbered a score of white men, some fifty or sixty nondescript trappers, as many women, some children and an average of three horses for each rider in the party. These horses came from the Cayuse Indians of the Walla Walla plain. This was the rendezvous after leaving Fort Vancouver. Here was always good pasturage for the horses, and the fur post had store of pemmican traded from the buffalo hunters of the Cayuse and Flathead nations.