(2) After wintering on the Assiniboine, he prepared in the summer of 1797 for exploration south to the Missouri, but his work must pay in coin of the realm to the Company. This was accomplished by Thompson obtaining credit from McDonell of the Assiniboine Department for goods to trade with the Mandanes. With three horses, thirty-eight dogs and several voyageurs, he set out southwest, in mid-winter, 1797. This was long before Henry or Chaboillez of the Assiniboine had sent men from Pembina to the Missouri. The cold was terrific. The winds blew keen as whip lashes, and the journey of three hundred miles lasted a month. To Thompson’s amazement, he found Hudson’s Bay traders from the Albany Department on the Missouri. They must have come south across Minnesota. (3) By February of ’98, Thompson was back on the Assiniboine, and now to complete the southern survey of Manitoba, he struck east for Red River, and in March up Red River to Pembina where the partner, Charles Chaboillez, happened to be in charge. No doubt it was what Thompson told Chaboillez of the Missouri that induced the Nor’Westers to go there. Still ascending the Red, Thompson passed Grand Forks--then a cluster of log houses inhabited by traders--and struck eastward through what is now Minnesota to that Red Lake, where Hudson’s Bays and Nor’Westers were to have such bitter fights. Six miles farther east he made the mistake of thinking he had found the sources of the Mississippi in Turtle Lake. Still pressing eastward, he came to Lake Superior and along the north shore to the Company’s headquarters. From 1799 to 1805 he ranges up the South Saskatchewan to that old Bow Fort near Banff; then up the North Saskatchewan all the way from Lesser Slave Lake to Athabasca. This, then, was the man whom the Nor’Westers now appointed to explore the Rockies.