Path Finding in the Kootenay Country, &c. 305 



experts who had repeatedly attempted the feat, but (1897) by an 

 Italian expedition led personally by H.R.H. the Duke of the 

 Abruzzi (Prince Louis of Savoy) who thus earned the hearty 

 congratulations of all mountaineers.* 



Four previous attempts had been made to reach the top of St. 

 Elias, the difficulties being not so much those of climbing, but 

 rather of approach and of transportation. Mount St. Elias is a 

 superb peak rising in one grand sweep from the Pacific Ocean, and 

 those who have seen from the ocean what is the greatest vertical 

 sweep of snow and ice yet discovered in the world Malaspina 

 glacier alone is said to cover 1500 square miles will ever 

 remember that most impressive sight. 



Let me say a few words about the Indians of the North- West. 

 The native tribes inhabiting the country between the Rocky 

 Mountains and Manitoba have, as every traveller knows, long 

 passed from their primitive condition to one more akin to civilised 

 existence, i.e., poverty and debauched depravity. Very different 

 from these aboriginal inhabitants of the Great North-West were, at 

 the date of my Western rambles, the tribe immediately to the west 

 of the indicated locality, i.e., in the Kootenay country between 

 the crest of the main chain of the Rocky Mountains and 

 the Gold Range that runs parallel to the former, and cuts off 

 this most easterly strip of British Columbia from the rest of 

 the province. 



The Kootenay Indians were, in the days I refer to, with the 

 exception, perhaps, of some of the interior tribes of Alaska, at once 

 the least known, and, from an ethnographical point of view, one 

 of the most interesting families of the North American aboriginal 

 population. I had been hunting among United States Indians, 

 and also knew something of the tribes in Canada east of the 

 Rockies, and they had all impressed me as debased remnants of 

 once powerful and warlike clans, who, even as late as 1878 and 



* The Alpine Journal, of May, 1898, contains an account of this expedition 

 and the Duke, I was told, is writing a more voluminous account of it. 



X 



