Summits of the Backbone.
Gray's Peak, 14,341 feet. Torrey's Peak, 14,336 feet.
Photograph by U. S. Geol. Survey.
Many of these people were trappers and hunters. The fur trade was yearly becoming a greater business; hundreds, despite danger or privation, were eager to pursue wherever it might lead. The pressure of civilised life with its rigid financial demands was, and is, so intense that whenever a channel of escape opens, the flow through it is as natural as that of water through a puncture in the bottom of the kettle. There were large profits to be made in furs, though it was usually the organiser and business manager who reaped the full rewards. The Pacific coast offered in this line brilliant prospects, and American vessels pushed around Cape Horn and sailed up the western shores to secure a share of the trade of that region. Spain, Great Britain, and Russia were also active there in the fur business, as well as in that of "claiming." The Americans then had no claims in that quarter.
The year following the agreement on the western boundary of the United States, 1784, found a number of Montreal merchants organising with the determination of participating in the rich returns of the fur trade; a business where a penny whistle was traded for a gold dollar. These men of Montreal formed an association which they entitled the North-west Company, consolidating with it a number of small rival concerns which for some years had been operating separately, and often disastrously, for they were frequently at war. The North-west Company intended to occupy the country beyond Lake Superior and oppose there the increasing power of the Hudson Bay Company. One of the men taken into this partnership was Alexander Mackenzie. He was the man for the hour. He proceeded to the far shores of the Saskatchewan, where posts had been established beyond those of the Verendryes and earlier Frenchmen, whose former presence was now marked only by the names they had applied to the natural features of the country. But though the Verendryes were forgotten, the voyageur was still a chief factor in travel and in trapping operations, and the chansons yet echoed through the forests of that wild landscape, where, in the words of Butler,[57]
"there are rivers whose single lengths roll through twice a thousand miles of shoreland; prairies over which a rider can steer for months without resting his gaze on aught save the dim verge of the ever-shifting horizon; mountains rent by rivers, ice-topped, glacier seared, impassable; forests whose sombre pines darken a region half as large as Europe; sterile, treeless wilds, whose 400,000 square miles lie spread in awful desolation.... In summer, a land of sound, a land echoing with the voices of birds, the ripple of running water, the mournful music of the waving pine branch; in winter, a land of silence, a land hushed to its inmost depths by the weight of ice, the thick falling snow, the intense rigour of a merciless cold."
This was the country the trapper first entered on his way to the Wilderness we are specially considering; here where the voyageur received some of the experience that made him so valuable in this kind of work, the voyageur whom Harmon elaborately describes[58] as lively, fickle, cheerful in privation, talkative, thoughtless, unrevengeful, not brave, deceitful, smooth, polite, dishonest, unveracious, generous, ungrateful, obedient, and unfaithful. Yet he was a man who served the time admirably, who braved many dangers, whose labours helped more than those of any other single element to open the pathways of the Wilderness.
By 1778 the British had founded a trading-post within forty miles of Lake Athabasca, and ten years after one on the shore of Lake Athabasca itself. This was named Fort Chepewyan, and historically is of great prominence, as it was the headquarters of Alexander Mackenzie for eight years, and was his starting-point on both the expeditions which are recorded among the remarkable exploits of the modern world.[59] The North-west Company was making systematic war upon the Hudson Bay Company, and in order to gain advantage for his association Mackenzie undertook the two expeditions, which practically solved the geographical problems of the North-west and determined the impossibility of the existence of any north-west passage. In 1789 he descended, as far as its discharge into the Arctic Ocean, the river that now bears his name, but he was not the first to reach the Arctic overland, for Samuel Hearne, of the Hudson Bay Company, eighteen years before, had touched the shore some miles east of the Mackenzie, having first discovered Great Slave Lake.