Up on Canoe River, Thompson and his voyageurs worked feverishly--building canoes, and getting the fur packs ready against spring. Toward spring, ten men are sent back with the furs; seven are to go on with Thompson down Columbia River for the Pacific. Their names are Bordeaux, Pariel, Coté, Bourland, Gregoire, Charles and Ignace. His men are on the verge of mutiny from starvation, but provisions come through from Henry at Howse’s Pass, and when these provisions run out, Thompson’s party kill all their horses and dogs for food. Very early in the year, the river is free of ice, for Thompson is in a warmer region than on the plains, and the canoe is launched down the Columbia through the Big Bend--a swollen, rolling, milky tide, past what is now Revelstoke, past Nakusp, through the Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes and what is now known as the Rossland mining region. It is a region of shadowy moss-grown forests, of hazy summer air resinous with the odor of pines, of mountains rising sheer on each side in walls with belts of mist marking the cloud line, the white peaks opal and shimmering and fading in a cloudland. Each night careful camping ground was chosen ashore with unblocked way to the water in case of Piegan attack. July 3rd, Thompson reached Kettle Falls. For a week he followed the great circular sweep of the Columbia south through what is now Washington. At Spokane River, at Okanogan River, near Walla Walla where the Snake comes in, he heard rumors among the Indians that white men from the East had come to the sea, whether overland or round the world he could not tell, so on Tuesday, July 9th, Thompson judges it wise to pre-empt other claimants. Near Snake River, “I erected a small pole,” he writes, “with a half sheet of paper tied about it, with these words: “Know hereby, this country is claimed by Great Britain and the N W Company from Canada do hereby intend to erect a factory on this place for the commerce of the country--D. Thompson.” Broader spread the waters, larger the empire rolling away north and south as the river swerved straight west. The river, that he had found up at Blaeberry Creek near Howse’s Pass, was sweeping him to the sea. This was the river, Gray, the Boston man, had found, and Alexander MacKenzie had missed when he touched the Fraser. Thompson had now explored it from source to sea, from the Columbia and Windermere Lakes north through East Kootenay, south through West Kootenay, south through Washington, west between Washington and Oregon to the Pacific--a region in all as large as Germany and France and Spain.