n
the wassailing governor and the other partners. Emboldened, the
underlings and hangers-on indulged in all sorts of theft. "All the
gentlemen were intoxicated," writes one who was present; _seven hours
rowing one mile_, innocently states the record of another day, _the tide
running seven feet high past the fort_.

The spring rains had ceased. Mountain peaks emerged from the empurpled
horizon in domes of opal above the clouds, and the Columbia was running
its annual mill-race of spring floods, waters milky from the silt of
countless glaciers and turbulent from the rush of a thousand cataracts.
Governor MacTavish[20] and Alexander Henry had embarked with six
_voyageurs_ to cross the river. A blustering wind caught the sail. A
tidal wave pitched amidships. The craft filled and sank within sight of
the fort.

So perished the conquerors of Astoria!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment
in the American War of Independence.]

[Footnote 19: Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first
white woman on the Columbia.]

[Footnote 20: In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan
MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish should be
distinguished from others of blameless lives.]

CHAPTER IV

THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP

Those eighty[21] Astorians and Nor' Westers who set inland with their
ten canoes and boats under protection of two swivels encountered as many
dangers on the long trip across the continent as they had left at Fort
George.

Following the wandering course of the Columbia, the traders soon passed
the international boundary northward into the Arrow Lakes with their
towering sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the Columbia
where the river becomes a tumultuous torrent milky with glacial
sediment, now raving through a narrow canon, now teased into a white
whirlpool by obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy
forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of some great glacier,
and always mountain-girt by the tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.

"_A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Bellefeuille_," wrote the mighty
MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-sixth year for a son; but the old
trader's tale needed no varnish of rhetoric. "_Nearing the mountains we
got scarce of provisions; ... bought horses for beef.... Here_ (at the
Great Bend) _we left canoes and began a mountain pass_