Over sixty years after Purcell’s Range was first labeled on a map it had unexpectedly transformed into one of the major mountain ranges in British Columbia. Unfortunately, by the time this change occurred, it had become very difficult to determine where its name had come from.
The Mitchell Range straddles part of Kootenay National Park to the east of Kootenay River. It is the range with the “Heart of the Rockies.”
It seems that Captain Arthur Brisco, in searching for adventure in western British North America, was also in the right place at the right time to have a mountain range named after him.
Sabine was “the artful dodger of the British scientific establishment. Bright, energetic, shrewd, he could have been the very model of Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern major general.”23
Palliser would likely have been just one more wealthy nineteenth century British man if not for his involvement in the Expedition through what is now western Canada that is colloquially named after him.
In The Windermere 