But the prairie had its nuisances as well as its wonders of animal life.  From the end of April to the end of July the woods and grass swarmed with ticks (Ixodes), which covered the clothes of the Europeans and entered their ears and there caused serious inflammations.  They would in time get such a firm hold by the insertion of their heads into the skin that they could not be removed without pulling the body from the head, which caused a terrible itching lasting for months.  If left alone they adhered to the flesh until they swelled to the size of a musket ball, when they fell off of themselves.  In the summertime gadflies were exasperating in their attacks on men and cattle.  Mosquitoes were a veritable plague, and midges also, between June and the end of September.

Not the least of the terrors of life in the far north-west in those days was the vermin that collected in the houses or huts built for a winter sojourn.  It is frequently mentioned, in the records of the pioneers, how the lodges or tents of the Amerindians swarmed with fleas and lice.  Henry notes on the 19th of April, 1803:  “The men began to demolish our dwelling houses, which were built of bad wood, and to build new ones of oak.  The nests of mice we found, and the swarms of fleas hopping in every direction, were astonishing.”

Henry reached the Pacific coast in 1814, by way of the Kootenay, Spokane, and Columbia River route, which had been discovered by David Thompson.  He describes well the forests of remarkable trees on this portion of the Pacific coast, opposite the south end of Vancouver Island:  the crooked oaks loaded with mistletoe, the tall wild cherry trees, the hazels with trunks thicker than a man’s thigh, the evergreen arbutus, the bracken fern, blackberries, and black raspberries; and the game in these glades of trees and fern:  small Columbian Mazama deer, large lynxes, bears, gluttons, wolves, foxes, racoons, and squirrels.  Overhead soared huge Californian condors (Pseudogryphus).

Henry was drowned in 1812 in the estuary of the Columbia River, through the capsizing of a boat.

The question of the identity of the great river flowing to the Pacific from near the headwaters of the Peace—­the river which Mackenzie had discovered and been forced to leave—­was finally decided by SIMON FRASER, one of the most celebrated among the North-west Company’s pioneers.  Like Mackenzie, he believed this stream to be the upper Columbia.

Accompanied by John Stuart and Jules Quesnel, he left the Fraser River at its junction with the Nechaco on May 22, 1807, and, keeping as near as he could to the course of the river, found himself in the country of the Atna tribe, Amerindians of a diminutive size but active appearance, from whom he obtained an invaluable guide and faithful interpreter, Little Fellow, but for whose bravery, wise advice, and clever diplomacy the journey must have ended in disaster or disappointment—­a remark which might be made about nearly all the Amerindian guides of the pioneers.