SIMON FRASER
Simon Fraser is sent in 1806 to build posts west of the Rockies in New Caledonia, and to follow that unknown river which MacKenzie mistook for the Columbia, on down to the sea. Two years he passed building the posts, that exist to this day as Fraser planned them: Fort MacLeod at the head of Parsnip River, on a little lake set like an emerald among the mountains; Fort St. James on Stuart Lake, a reach of sheeny green waters like the Trossachs, dotted with islands and ensconced in mountains; Fraser Fort on another lake southward; Fort St. George on the main Fraser River. Then, in May of 1808, with four canoes Fraser descends the river named after him, accompanied by Stuart and Quesnel and nineteen voyageurs. This was the river where the rapids had turned MacKenzie back, canyon after canyon tumultuous with the black whirlpools and roaring like a tempest. Before essaying the worst runs of the cascades Fraser ordered a canoe lightened at the prow and manned by the five best voyageurs. It shot down the current like a stone from a catapult. "She flew from one danger to another," relates Fraser, who was watching the canoe from the bank, "till the current drove her on a rock. The men disembarked, and we had to plunge our daggers into the bank to keep from sliding into the river as we went down to their aid, our lives hanging on a thread." Like MacKenzie, Fraser was compelled to abandon canoes. Each with a pack of eighty pounds, the voyageurs set out on foot down that steep gorge where the traveler to-day can see the trail along the side of the precipice like basket work between Lilloet and Thompson River. In Fraser's day was no trail, only here and there bridges of trembling twig ladders across chasms; and over these swinging footholds the marchers had to carry their packs, the river rolling below, deep and ominous and treacherous. At Spuzzum the river turned from the south straight west. Fraser knew it was not the Columbia. His men named it after himself. Forty days was Fraser going from St. George to tide water. Early in August he was back at his fur posts of New Caledonia.
ASTORIA IN 1813
Yet another explorer did the Nor'westers send to take possession of the region beyond the mountains. David Thompson had been surveying the bounds between the United States and what is now Manitoba, when he was ordered to explore the Rockies in the region of the modern Banff. Up on Canoe River, Thompson and his men build canoes to descend the Columbia. Following the Big Bend, they go down the rolling milky tide past Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes, a region of mountains sheer on each side as walls, with wisps of mist marking the cloud line. Then a circular sweep westward through what is now Washington, pausing at Snake River to erect formal claim of possession for England, then a riffle on the current, a smell of the sea, and at 1 P.M. on July 15, 1811, Thompson glides within view of a little raw new fort, Astoria. In the race to the Pacific the Americans have gained the ground at the mouth of the Columbia just two months before Thompson came. In Astor's fort Thompson finds old friends of the Northwest Company hired over by Astor.
