his name, and so crossed the watershed and pushed on towards the Columbia and the Kootenay.
The next notable traveller came in 1845, crossing the watershed of White Man's Pass south of Mt. Assiniboine. It was Father De Smet, the Jesuit Missionary journeying from his Missions recently established in the Kootenay Valley, to minister also to the spiritual needs of the Indians along the eastern foothills of the Rockies. On the summit of White Man's Pass he set up a wooden cross which he called the "Cross of Peace." When the late Dr. G. M. Dawson eplored the Pass, an Indian showed him the spot where the cross had once stood. This is the circumstantial evidence to prove De Smet's route eastward, his book "Oregon Missions and Travels over the Rocky Mountains 1845-6" giving no records of the route travelled. But there seems to be no doubt that from White Man's Pass De Smet descended the little Spray River to the Bow Valley on his way to the encampment of Assiniboines at a place in the foothills near the present village of Morley, the headquarters of the Methodist Mission. De Smet spent sometime at this place preaching and baptising, then journeying north to the Hudson's Bay Post at Edmonton where he continued his missionary labours until spring, recrossing the mountains via the Athabasca Pass. This is the only transmontane journey for religion's sake in the early history of the Canadian Rockies.
And now, in 1846, the year of the Jesuit Father's return, there came a traveller for art's sake who made a round journey, as thrilling and as picturesque as any in the history of the Canadian Mountains. Paul Kane, who is to Canada what George Catlin is to the United States, travelled in that year from Toronto to Fort Vancouver, a post of the Hudson's Bay Co. on the Columbia River, 100 miles from its outer ocean-bar. His object was to record in paint what the pioneers recorded in ink; and he carried back with him over 300 oil sketches of the Indians and Indian life, of the buffalo, of Hudson's Bay trading posts, and many a bit of landscape besides.
In 1858 came several exploring parties belonging to Captain Palliser's expedition sent out by the British Government to find one or more practicable passes south of the pass between Mt. Brown and Mt. Hooker (Athabasca Pass) over the Rocky mountains. In other words, it was to search for some shortest and easiest route for a possible railway. Palliser's official journal contains in detail the story of these most important explorations, and there is not one dull page in it. But it is a very scarce book. The most lucid synopsis in any modern book found by the writer is in "The Selkirk Range."
By far the most interesting and most fruitful discoveries were made by that section of the expedition led by Dr. James Hector, the geologist. Hector ascended the Bow Valley passing Cascade Mt., called by the Indians "the place where the water falls," to Castle Mt. where he crossed the Bow, turned south and followed a stream (Little Vermillion Creek) to the height of land, Vermillion Pass; descended Vermillion River to its junction with the Kootenay, turned north towards the Kootenay's headwaters; and portaged to the Beaverfoot River which he followed to its confluence with the Kick-
