Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Camp Flying Squirrel
March 2009

         Alexander Caulfield Anderson was a veteran of the Hudson’s Bay Company when he was posted to Fort Colvile for three years beginning in 1848. He had served at just about every trade house in the Columbia and New Caledonia Districts, and seemed to know everyone. Anderson was also a good letter writer who paid attention to people and places, and had already penned magazine articles describing his experiences in the western fur trade. At Kettle Falls he gathered more information, and after he retired published a guide to the Interior gold country. He capped that off in 1872 with a volume on the Columbia and Fraser River country entitled The Dominion at the West; a brief description of the Province of British Columbia, its climate and resources. In a way Anderson was our first recognized travel writer, introducing white settlers from far away to the attractions of this place.
Mr. A. C. Anderson organized his view of this region into several maps, including a large one on the scale of ten miles to the inch that stretches from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and is split about halfway up the 49th parallel. He covered it with what he knew, including many tribal and fur trade trails. The names he attached to places and landscape features on this big map evoke a world caught between the mixed-blood fur trade culture that began to wind down with the International Boundary Settlement of 1846, the gold rushes and wrenching tribal disruptions of the 1850s, and the white settlers who began to filter into the region in the 1860s and 70s.
Anderson places the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Colvile inside the horseshoe in the Columbia formed by Kettle Falls, but sets no American Fort Colville on the site of the modern town. Fort Shepard, described in last month’s North of the Border column, appears opposite the mouth of the Pend Oreille River in exactly the same-sized bold capital letters. The Colville River is called “Mill River,” because the Bay Company’s grist mill was well established at what we now call Meyer’s Falls.
Many of the Anderson’s other names are caught in the transition from the old culture to the new. What we call Mill Creek, just north of Colville, has a French name on Anderson’s map – “R. du Cedrier,” in honor of the cedar grove where David Thompson felled enough trees to build the plank canoe that he and his crew took down the Columbia in the summer of 1811. Kootenay Lake retains Thompson’s name of “Flat Bow Lake,” after the distinct flattened bows fashioned by the Lower Kootenai tribe, but the river connecting the lake to the Columbia is the “Kootannis.” “Arrow Rock” is boldly displayed in the elbow joint of “Lower Arrow Lake,” but Anderson is not so certain about what to call the lake at Sandpoint, Idaho, scattering Thompson’s name “Kullyspel Lake,” the later spelling of “Kalispelm Lake,” and our modern version, “Lake Pend Oreille” across its waters. Priest Lake appears as “Kaniksu,” but Christina Lake, named after a fur trade friend’s daughter, looks exactly as it does today.
Around the major drainages and trading posts on his map, Anderson scribbled many small, lightly penciled, difficult-to-read comments that emerge very slowly. The squinty-eyed viewer in time learns that Salmon ascend the San Poil River “early in June;” that “white sheep” did indeed live up modern Sheep Creek across the river from Northport; and that the lower Pend Oreille River is filled with “Violent Rapids and Overfalls.” A “Ferry” takes passengers across the lower Kootenay River near the ancient Ktunaxa village, and “The Lone Tree” serves as a landmark on an island in lower Lake Okanagan.
The most cryptic of Anderson’s comments are scratched in above Fort Colvile, within the inverted triangle formed between the Kettle and Columbia Rivers now known as The Wedge. Nancy Anderson, a descendent of A. C.’s who has looked at these words for years, renders it as
No 1 [can’t read] – [short word] encampment
[toward Athabasca?] or [short word] Assinboines
[summer?] 1842
small party
[lightly laden?]
[raid?] horses
We know that in 1842, A. C. Anderson did lead the spring express to Hudson’s Bay, and had to travel up the Columbia River past Fort Colvile and through the Arrow Lakes in a deluge of spring rain and heavy runoff. We can’t find any record of an Assinboine raiding party, but the company did hire Assinboine hunters to work in the Columbia Department at various times.
Despite such mysteries, Anderson found room on his map to mark some very clear travels. Opposite Fort Colvile he drew two solid lines to mark two separate “Horse Trails.” The more southerly of the two prepares the path of Washington Highway 20 up Sherman Creek, across Sherman Pass, then down O’Brien Creek to hit the San Poil River. Anderson, perhaps thinking of Christina Lake, attached then name of his own daughter Eliza to our modern Curlew Lake.
The upper trail follows the Kettle River upstream for a few miles, then turns northwest to cross the Kettle Range. The route appears to follow modern Boulder Creek to the Deer Creek Summit, then jumps north to Lone Ranch Creek and reconnects with the Kettle River just south of the 49th parallel. Given Anderson’s level of accuracy, it’s just as likely that he followed Deer Creek down to Curlew, but no matter – his map assures us that at least some fur trade traffic followed an established tribal route to get to the upper Kettle River, then over to the Okanogan, and on to the lower Fraser drainage.
At about the point where a horse brigade would have spent their first night on Boulder Creek, A. C. scribbled one of his little messages to the viewer: “Camp Flying Squirrel.” It is the only pure natural history comment I can find on the map, and once again, I had to ask Nancy Anderson where in the world she thought it might have come from. Since Anderson never mentioned a flying squirrel in any of his known writings, it seems likely that someone else must have been part of the story. And in fact, there is someone who fits that description.
On May 12, 1851, a naturalist named John Jeffrey arrived at Fort Colvile with a party that had made an early spring crossing of Athabasca Pass from the Prairies. Jeffrey had been hired by some enthusiastic gardeners in England to search the Pacific Northwest for new trees and shrubs, and had been snowshoeing all winter to get to the Columbia country in time for the growing season. He apparently collected around Fort Colvile and north to the lower Pend Oreille and Kootenay Rivers for a few weeks, then took off west. Although Jeffrey’s field notebook never made it back to England, the four boxes of his plant specimens that did arrive indicate he was working in the Okanogan and Similkameen valleys by July.
One way to get across to the Okanogan was via that horse trail up Boulder Creek. We know that Jeffrey was interested in other things besides plants, because beetles and bird skins show up in his collection boxes. We also know that another of A. C. Anderson’s children, a boy named James, spent time with John Jeffrey in Vancouver, and was impressed with the collector’s shooting ability. What better way to attract an enthusiastic child’s attention than to show him or her a flying squirrel? The image of that small creature, circling the campsite of a family on the move, gliding in a graceful arc from one big tree to latch onto the trunk of another, sounds exactly like the way to remember one place through time.

Many thanks to Nancy Anderson for keeping track of A. C.

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