But the question is--which way to go? The river is flowing north, not south to the sea, as Alexander MacKenzie thought. Thompson does not guess _this is not the river, which MacKenzie saw_. “_May God in His mercy give me to see where the waters of this river flow to the western ocean_,” records Thompson in his journal of June 22nd; but if he goes north, that will lead to a great detour--that much he can guess from what the Indians tell him--the Big Bend of the Columbia. He is facing the Rockies on the east. On the west are the Selkirks. He does not know that after a great circle about the north end of the Selkirks, the Columbia will come down south again through West Kootenay between the Selkirks and the Gold Range. To Thompson, it seems that he will reach the Pacific soonest, where American traders are heading, by ascending the river; so he follows through East Kootenay southward through Windermere Lake and Columbia Lake to the sources of the Columbia east of Nelson Mountain. There, where the Windermere of to-day exists, he builds a fort with Montour, the Frenchman, in charge--the Upper Kootenay House. Then he discovers that beyond the sources of the Columbia, a short portage of two miles, is another great river flowing south--the Kootenay. The portage he names after the Northwest partner--McGillivray, also the river, which we now know as Kootenay, and which Thompson follows, surveying as he goes, south of the Boundary into what are now known as Idaho and Montana, past what is now the town of Jennings and westerly as far as what is now Bonner’s Ferry--the roaring camp of old construction days when the Great Northern Railroad passed this way. Here Thompson is utterly confused, for the Kootenay River turns north to British Columbia again, not west to the Pacific, and he has no time to follow its winding course. His year is up. He must hasten eastward with his report. Leaving the fort well manned, Thompson goes back the way he has come, by Howse Pass down the Saskatchewan to Fort William. While Thompson is East, the Hudson’s Bay Company of Edmonton is not idle. Mr. Howse, who found the pass, follows Thompson’s tracks over the mountains and sets hunters ranging the forests of the Big Bend and south to Kootenay Lake.