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often traveled with tribal guides, who showed him the most efficient way to get from one place to the next. As he trekked across the region multiple times, he observed how local people circled through their known world to gather essential resources. Because of Thompson’s close attention, it is possible to trace the ways in which the Plateau peoples of the early nineteenth century fit into the landscape shaped by the Ice Age floods.
    When paddling on Lake Pend Oreille near modern Sandpoint, Idaho, Thompson set his course—undoubtedly with the help of his Kalispel guide—by a distinctive rock that marks the narrowing of the river as it leaves the lake. This knoll, now known as Tank Hill, was stripped bare by the Ice Age floods, creating a landmark that served as a beacon for travelers on the lake and on land. The roiling waters dropped a pendant bar of gravel on Tank Hill’s downstream side; this lode of handy aggregate has served as a commercial pit for many years, providing the road gravel that transformed many of the tribal trails that Thompson traveled into modern highways.
    When the fur agent journeyed southwest from the Pend Oreille to the Spokane drainage, his guides directed him to a trail that followed the path of the deluge as it burst from Lake Pend Oreille’s southern basin and overran a low divide, where it dropped sediments on a plain known today as Rathdrum Prairie. Bars of flood gravel there created several small lakes that appear onThompson’s maps. He recorded how water flowing from one of these pocket lakes, instead of following the expected stream course to the Spokane River, “disappears” into hundreds of feet of porous flood deposits.
    In the spring of 1812, Thompson led a horse brigade along the north bank of the Spokane River. Where the river bent south to crash through a series of formidable falls that today mark the city’s center, he and his voyageurs followed a tribal trail west across grasslands spotted with well-spaced ponderosa pines. The brigade was heading for an ancient fishing village nine miles downstream from the falls, where a handful of Thompson’s men had built the Spokane House fur trading post two seasons before. In a typically terse daybook entry along the way, he marked his course by“a range of Knowls to our Right.”
    A knoll to Thompson meant a distinct feature, often rocky, and the one he sighted as he cruised through what is now north Spokane was a distinct circular mesa, fairly flat on top, that had been carved and recarved by successive Ice Age floods. Thompson took advantage of the open parkland around the southern edge of the knoll to trot his horses straight through to Spokane House. From that outpost, more dotted lines on his large map trace tribal trails through flood coulees of the Cheney-Palouse scablands all the way south to the Snake River.
    The coarse gravels that form the beds of the Spokane and Little Spokane Rivers, dropped there by subtle flow changes in the last of the Lake Missoula floods, cover a range of sizes. For untold generations, several species of trout, as well as steelhead and salmon, thrashed their tails in these gravels to form redds for laying eggs. The fish nourished local people and visitors from far away—including David Thompson, who upon arriving at Spokane House in spring 1812 found“all well, they have these 2 days caught many Trout.”
    For the past thirteen thousand years, features carved by the Ice Age floods have shaped the way people live in and move across a large swath of the Inland Northwest landscape. The deluge may read like a signature origin myth to someone from the outside, but for anyone who travels along the many paths gouged by ice or swept clear by rushing water, each detail of the story points to a practical reality: from Mesoproterozoic time to the Pleistocene, from the sweep of open landscape to the range of a single plant species, from the frenzy of spawning fish to the continuous trickle of new people who