250 T. C. ELLIOTT
as a trading post in that general locality. The -third was the only attempt of the Hudson's Bay Company to compete with their rival, the North-West Company, for the Indian trade west of the Rocky Mountains. Alexander Henry makes mention in his journal of the starting off of this expedition from Rocky Mountain House on the Saskatchewan in the summer of 1810, under the charge of Joseph Howse, and states that James Mc- Millan was sent to follow and keep watch of them. David Thompson, when near the source of the Columbia in May, 1811, on his way from Canoe River to the Saleesh Country and beyond, met an Indian who told him that this Hudson's Bay Company party was already returning and was then at Flathead Lake. It is not positive where this party spent the winter, but in his "Fur Hunters of the Far West" (Vol. 2, p. 9), Alexander Ross places them on Jocko Creek in Missoula County, Montana, near where the town of Ravalli is now sit- uated ; while an early edition of the Arrowsmith map of British North America (which maps were dedicated to the Hudson's Bay Company, and purported to contain the latest informa- tion furnished by that company), shows their trading post at the head of Flathead Lake very near to where the city of Kalispell, Montana, now is.
The editor of a prominent newspaper in Montana, upon read- ing of the establishment of Saleesh House by David Thomp- son in the year 1809, wrote that they were beginning to feel quite antiquated in Western Montana. Trade in the Kootenay District of British Columbia antedated the building of Astoria by three and a half years, and that in the Flathead Country of Montana by one and a half years, and that at Spokane, Washington, by at least six months. The cities that have become the commercial centers of these interior districts have not been built upon the exact sites of the early trading posts unless that may be said as to Spokane, Washington, but have all been built along the same established Indian trails or roads, and these have become the transcontinental railroads of today.
Search for the existing records of these early enterprises and for physical remains of the early trading posts may be
