Thompson is forthwith dispatched back to the mountains in 1810, given a crew of eighteen or twenty and urged forward to the Pacific; but the Piegans are playing the mischief with the fur trade this year. Though Henry drowns them in whiskey drugged with laudanum at Rocky Mountain House, they infest Howse’s Pass and lie in wait at the Big Bend to catch the canoes bringing up the furs from Idaho and to plunder Thompson’s goods bound south to Kootenay House. Thompson’s voyageurs scatter like lambs before wolves. He retreats under protection of Henry’s men back through Howse’s Pass to Rocky Mountain House, but he is a hard man to beat. Reach the Pacific before Astor’s men he must, Piegans or no Piegans; so he forms his plans. Look at the map! This Kootenay River flowing through Idaho does not lead to the Pacific. It turns north into Kootenay Lake of West Kootenay. The Columbia takes a great circle north. Thompson aims for the Big Bend. He hurries overland by pack horse to the Athabasca River, enters the mountains at the head of the river on December 20, 1810, at once cuts his way through the forest tangle up between Mt. Brown and Mt. Hooker, literally “swims the dogs through snowdrifts, the brute Du Nord beating a dog to death,” and finds a new trail to the Columbia--Athabasca Pass! Down on the west side of the Divide flows a river southwest, to the Big Bend of the Columbia. Thompson winters here to build canoes for the spring of 1811, naming the river that gladdens his heart--Canoe River. Down in Idaho, his men on Flathead Lake and the Pend d’Oreille are panicky with forebodings. Thompson has not come with provisions. Their fur brigade has been driven back. The Piegans are on the ramp, and there are all sorts of wild rumors about white men--Astor’s voyageurs, of course--coming through the mountains by way of the Snake Indian’s territory to “the rivers of the setting sun.”