How Kootenay Emerged from its Wild State. 227 



1882 a perfectly uninhabited wilderness, not a single settler, not a 

 single house marred the solitude of this vast tract, quite twice the 

 size of Wales. Its mountains were untrodden, and, excepting 

 caribou and mountain goat trails, without a path of any kind. Only 

 one of its broad rivers and lovely lakes was occasionally scored by 

 the quaintly modelled pine bark canoes of the Flatbows, craft 

 unlike any other in the whole world.* The Indians were a smiling, 

 primitive lot, a breechcloth their only garment, a tent-like teepee 

 made of reeds their only dwelling. Towards the north-east and west 

 the district was completely shut off from the rest of the province by 

 impassable mountains, for the old Dewdney trail that once passed 

 through West Kootenay had long become completely blocked by 

 timber and slides, and not a human being had been over it for more 

 than ten years. The three trans-continental railways that now tap 

 Kootenay were as yet things of the future, and it took weeks of 

 horseback and canoe travel to reach Kootenay Lake. The only 

 point from which it could be approached was from the south via 

 Sinyaquateen, near the present Sandpoint, the nearest larger 

 settlement being Walla Walla, more than 400 miles off. 



Up to 1883 no quartz mines of any sort had ever been found in 

 either of the Kootenays, for the good reason that no prospecting 

 had ever been done there for quartz. 



In East Kootenay, a country into which Wales could be fitted 

 one and a half times, matters then stood a little differently. It had 

 had a short-lived mining boom, but had long subsided into its 

 primeval state, the eleven grizzly old timers who made up the white 

 Copulation accentuating, if anything, the remoteness of Kootenay 

 from civilisation. How the one subject of their thoughts, the 

 " boom," had come about can be told very briefly. Indians had 

 discovered in 1862 rich alluvial diggings in a little gulch penetrating 

 into the western face of the Rockies, here rising from the valley 



* The Indians inhabiting the Lower Kootenay Valley for West Kootenay) 

 were often called Flatbows in the earlier histories of the North-west. It was 

 n literal translation of the name given to them by the French voyageurs in 

 the Fur Companies' days. 



Q 2 



