The next year, 1783, ended the war between the nations; but the trade war between the Company and the other fur traders went on more bitterly than ever. A rival “North West Company” was formed by Scottish merchants down in Canada, who engaged many of the French “voyageurs” and “coureurs de bois,” and their half-Indian sons, and sent them out skirmishing for trade and building forts among the tribes of the far west. The old Company met the competition by building more forts and organizing on its own account more bands of hardy Frenchmen and “Métis”—the name given to men of mingled French and Indian blood.
The names of three great western rivers, the Mackenzie, the Thompson and the Fraser, still remind us that some of the North West Company’s men were famous explorers as well as traders.
Alexander Mackenzie, a young Scot from the Hebrides, was the officer in charge of Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca. With the old dream of the North-west Passage in his mind, he set off on the 2nd of June, 1789, to descend a river flowing from the lake towards the north. His little flotilla of canoes presently came out on another lake, the Great Slave. Following its shores to the West, Mackenzie found the water at last pouring [a]First Across to the Pacific] out to form another river. This he followed day after day, starting at three or four every morning, till the stream widened out into a bay of many islands, where the tide rose and fell and whales were playing. It was only the 14th of July, but the homeward journey would be against the current, and the freeze-up would come early. Mackenzie swiftly turned his back on the Arctic Sea, and reached his fort on the 12th of September. His tremendous dash had carried him nearly 3,000 miles in 102 days.
This adventure by no means took the edge off his appetite for exploration. As he had proved that Mackenzie River did not flow to the Pacific Ocean, he made up his mind to get there some other way. In 1793, early in May, he once more left Lake Athabasca behind, and this time steered his canoes up the Peace River to its source in the mountains. He crossed the divide, and began to descend an unknown stream, but as this only flowed south he struck over land to the west, and on the 22nd of July came out on salt water, near Bella Coola. He had then only twenty pounds of pemmican left, with fifteen of rice and six of flour, for his party of ten; but they managed to get safely home to the fort after a month’s hard travel across the mountains. Mackenzie’s troubles had been many and great, from cataract and precipice, from hostile Indians and cowardly guides; but he won the fame of the first man to cross the whole width of the continent from Atlantic to Pacific.
In 1806, the year after Trafalgar, the young Welshman, David Thompson, another of this Company’s officers, went up the North Saskatchewan to Rocky Mountain House and across the Rockies to the Columbia. He spent several years exploring the mountains and [a]Thompson and Fraser] establishing posts for trade, and at last descended the whole length of the Columbia to the Pacific. At the mouth of the river he found that another party had got there ahead of him, and had built a fort under the flag of the United States.
As a matter of fact, two explorers named Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had reached that point in 1806, being the first white men to cross the height of land from the Missouri to the coast. The fort had been established five years later by a trading expedition sent round Cape Horn from New York by John Jacob Astor. It was captured by the North West Company’s men during the War of 1812, and Astor allowed the Company to buy out his rights; but later on, as we shall see, it was decided that this part of the coast should belong to the United States.
The North West Company meanwhile had sent young Simon Fraser up into the mountains to discover the true course of the river which Mackenzie had left because it seemed to go south instead of west. It was supposed to be the head waters of the Columbia. Fraser and a brother Scot, John Stuart, began by building little forts for trade. One of these, where the mysterious river was joined by the Nechaco, he called Fort George, after the King. There he embarked on one of the most perilous voyages ever undertaken. With Stuart, and Jules Maurice Quesnel, nineteen voyageurs and two Indians, in four birch-bark canoes, he trusted himself to a torrent of which he knew nothing except that Indians living on its banks declared no man could ever get through alive. Running rapids where the chances were ten to one for death, clinging with heavy loads on their backs to the precipitous walls of canyons when the raging torrent [a]Rival Companies at War] absolutely compelled a portage, building new bark canoes when the old were smashed beyond repair, those brave men came out at last on smooth water where the tides of the Pacific rose and fell. Near where they landed, the city of New Westminster now stands. They had explored the whole length of the Fraser River, which to-day thrills even railway travellers in the safety of an observation car.
The dangers conquered by these brave young men were great enough; but, after all, it was only the grim force of nature they had to fight as they broke their way through the mountains, with some little trouble now and then from timid guides and suspicious bands of Indians. Back on the plains and woodlands in the heart of the continent, there was danger of another kind, and a most disgraceful one. The two companies were practically at war.