Pioneering in Kootenay. 257 



grandeza of the old school. Old Dave, I soon discovered, was a 

 most interesting relic of the early pioneers of the Slope, and it was 

 indeed singular to meet this son of a remote past in these late 

 times, when literally millions inhabit the country over which this 

 man's father had ruled in days when, outside the Fur Company's 

 employees, there were not a score of white men in the whole vast 

 territory. Close to the hovel in which he and his large Indian 

 family dwelt in all the unspeakable squalor and filth of savage life, 

 there stood a big log structure, which had once been the Hudson's 

 Bay Company's trading post, known as Fort Flatbow. It was 

 entirely empty, and as the ill-fitting logs of which it was built 

 were shaped with the axe, the storms and sunshine of half a 

 century had not improved their weather resisting qualities. Hence 

 the chinks and crannies were numerous and big enough to 

 dispense with the windows, over the sashless emptiness of whu-h 

 rough boards had been nailed. This building and the .miserable 

 pigsty inhabited by MacLoughlin were the only roofed habitations 

 in the Kootenai Valley, when once Fry's ranch, at the extreme 

 south end of the valley, was left. The former stood but a stone's 

 throw from the boundary ; in fact, the stone pyramid which the 

 Boundary Commissioners caused to be built at this point a quarter 

 of a century before, to mark the place where the line crossed the 

 river, stood in Old Dave's potato patch at the back of his hut. 

 Erected by the Hudson's Bay Company, the post had reverted 

 to the United States, when, after the Washington treaty, the 

 Company abandoned its possessions south of the 4Qth Par. Old 

 Dave, born and reared in a similar, though much larger, fort, i.e., 

 Fort George on the Columbia, had in him all the instincts of the 

 old days, and had settled on the spot on which I found him more 

 than a third of a century before. He pre-empted 320 acres of 

 the land round it, and on a quarter of an acre of it he grew his 

 only crop of potatoes. The old barn-like main building was far 

 too roomy for his wants in summer and too cold in winter, so he 

 forsook it, and took up his abode in the pigsty close by. 



A hasty examination of the walls of the former convinced me 



s 



