260 Sport and Life. 



To understand the scheme I was desirous of carrying through 

 by means of my concessions it is necessary to cast a glance at the 

 map. It will elucidate the somewhat remarkable orographical 

 features which came into play. The Kootenay river heading in 

 the heart of the Rocky Mountains, in a region where not half a 

 dozen white men had then been, and which is not more than a 

 score of miles south of the Kicking Horse Pass, over which the 

 Canadian Pacific Railway now crosses this formidable chain. After 

 winding for some eighty miles through dark canons, the river finally 

 debouches in a westerly direction from its mountain home at a 

 spot called Canal Flat.* Turning sharply southwards it keeps, for 

 upwards of 120 miles, along the western base of the main Rocky 

 Mountains, and forms the Upper Kootenay valley, now generally 

 called East Kootenay valley. This southward course leads it across 

 the international boundary line into Montana, where it again, turning 

 to the west, strikes into a mountain chain known as the Purcell 

 range, which is nothing but a southern extension of the Selkirk 

 Mountains. After forcing a passage through these uninhabited 

 regions by a series of canons, the river, apparently disgusted with 

 the inhospitable fastnesses through which it has delved its way, enters^ 

 Idaho, gradually turning northwards. This it does near Fry's 

 ranch, where once more it exchanges the gloomy solitudes of canons 

 for a smiling valley, viz., the Lower Kootenai valley. Reminded of 

 its unpatriotic desertion of its native soil, the now Sooft. broad 

 and 3oft. deep river re-enters British territory at a point already 

 described, i.e., the pyramid in Dave MacLoughlin's potato patch. 

 Another twenty-five miles of great loops through the three miles 

 wide valley, which consists here of the broad stretches of rich 

 alluvial bottom land which had taken my fancy, and the Kootenay 

 river empties itself into the Kootenay lake. This large sheet of 

 water has only one outlet, an unnavigable gorge with numerous 

 falls and rapids, some twenty miles in length, by which the water 



* On some of the official maps this place is called Grohman, the Dominion 

 Government naming after me the post-office it established at this point during 

 the duration of the canal works. 



