banks on either side presented
only high hills covered to the top with impenetrable forests. While the
canoes were working up a considerable rapid, I climbed the hills with
Mr. M'Gillis, and we walked on, following the course of the river, some
five or six miles. The snow was very deep in the ravines or narrow
gorges which are found between the bases of the hills. The most common
trees are the Norway pine and the cedar: the last is here, as on the
borders of the sea, of a prodigious size.

On the 9th and 10th, as we advanced but slowly, the country presented
the same aspect as on the 8th. Toward evening of the 10th, we perceived
a-head of us a chain of high mountains entirely covered with snow. The
bed of the river was hardly more than sixty yards wide, and was filled
with dry banks composed of coarse gravel and small pebble.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Course of the Columbia River.--Canoe River.--Foot-march toward the
Rocky Mountains.--Passage of the Mountains.

On the 11th, that is to say, one month, day for day, after our departure
from the falls, we quitted the Columbia, to enter a little stream to
which Mr. Thompson had given, in 1811, the name of _Canoe_ river, from
the fact that it was on this fork that he constructed the canoes which
carried him to the Pacific.

The Columbia, which in the portion above the falls (not taking into
consideration some local sinuosities) comes from the N.N.E., takes a
bend here so that the stream appears to flow from the S.E.[AE] Some
boatmen, and particularly Mr. Regis Bruguier, who had ascended that
river to its source, informed me that it came out of two small lakes,
not far from the chain of the Rocky Mountains, which, at that place,
diverges considerably to the east. According to Arrowsmith's map, the
course of the _Tacoutche Tesse_, from its mouth in the Pacific Ocean, to
its source in the Rocky mountains, is about twelve hundred English
miles, or four hundred French leagues of twenty-five to a degree; that
is to say, from two hundred and forty to two hundred and eighty miles
from west to east, from its mouth to the first falls: seven hundred and
fifty miles nearly from S.S.W. to N.N.E., from the first rapids to the
bend at the confluence of _Canoe_ river; and one hundred and fifty or
one hundred and eighty miles from that confluence to its source. We were
not provided with the necessary instruments to determine the latitude,
and still less the longitude, of our di