XLIVA. D. 1793ALEXANDER MACKENZIE
Thevery greatest events in human annals are those which the historian forgets to mention. Now for example, in 1638 Louis XIV was born; the Scots set up their solemn league and covenant; the Turks romped into poor old Bagdad and wiped out thirty thousand Persians; Van Tromp, the Dutchman, whopped a Spanish fleet; the English founded Madras, the corner-stone of our Indian empire; but the real event of the year, the greatest event of the seventeenth century, was the hat act passed by the British parliament. Hatters were forbidden to make any hats except of beaver felt. Henceforth, for two centuries, slouch hats, cocked hats, top hats, all sorts of hats, were to be made of beaver fur felt, down to the flat brimmed Stetson hat, which was borrowed from the cowboys by the Northwest Mounted Police, adopted by the Irregular Horse of the Empire, and finally copied in rabbit for the Boy Scouts. The hatter must buy beaver, no matter what the cost, so Europe was stripped to the last pelt. Then far away to east and west the hunters and trappers explored from valley to valley. The traders followed, building fortswhere they dealt with the hunters and trappers, exchanging powder and shot, traps and provisions, for furs at so much a “castor” or beaver skin, and skins were used for money, instead of gold. Then came the settlers to fill the discovered lands, soldiers to guard them from attack by savages, judges and hangmen, flag and empire.
The Russian fur trade passed the Ural Hills, explored Siberia and crossed to Russian America.
Westward the French and British fur trade opened up the length and breadth of North America.
By the time the hatter invented the imitation “beaver,” our silk hat, this mad hat trade had pioneered the Russian empire, the United States and the Dominion of Canada, belting the planet with the white man’s power.
Now in this monstrous adventure the finest of all the adventurers were Scotch, and the greatest Scot of them all was Alexander MacKenzie, of Stornoway, in the Scotch Hebrides. At the age of seventeen he landed in Montreal, soon after Canada was taken by the British, and he grew up in the growing fur trade. In those days the Hudson’s Bay Company was a sleepy old corporation with four forts, but the Nor’westers of Montreal had the aid of the valiant French Canadian voyageurs as guides and canoe men in the far wilderness.
Their trade route crossed the upper lakes to Thunder Bay in Lake Superior, where they built Fort William; thence by Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods, and Rat Portage; thence up Lake Winnipeg to the Grand Saskatchewan. There were the forts where buffalo hunters boiled down pemmican, a sortof pressed beef spiced with service berries, to feed the northern posts. Northward the long trail, by lake and river, reached à la Crosse, which gave its name to a famous Indian ball game, and so to the source of the Churchill River at Lac la Loche, from whence the Methye portage opened the way into the Great Unknown.
When MacKenzie reached Clear-water River, Mr. Peter Pond of the Nor’westers had just shot Mr. Ross of the X. Y. Company. MacKenzie took charge, and he and his cousin moved the trade down to the meeting of the Athabasca and the Peace, at an inland sea, the Athabasca Lake, where they built the future capital of the North, Fort Chipewyan. From here the Slave River ran down to Great Slave Lake, a second inland sea whose outlet was unknown. MacKenzie found that outlet six miles wide. The waters teemed with wild fowl, the bush with deer, and the plains on either side had herds of bison.
MacKenzie took with him four French voyageurs, a German and some Indians, working them as a rule from threeA. M.till dusk, while they all with one accord shied at the terrors ahead, the cataracts, the savage tribes, the certainty of starvation. The days lengthened until there was no night, they passed coal fields on fire which a hundred years later were still burning, then frozen ground covered with grass and flowers, where the river parted into three main branches opening on the coast of an ice-clad sea. The water was still fresh, but there were seaweeds, they saw whales, the tides would wash the people out of camp, for this was the Arctic Ocean. So they turned back up that great river which bears MacKenzie’sname, six thousand miles of navigable waters draining a land so warm that wheat will ripen on the Arctic circle, a home for millions of healthy prosperous people in the days to come.
MacKenzie’s second journey was much more difficult, up the Peace River through the Rocky Mountains, then by a portage to the Fraser Valley, and down Bad River. All the rivers were bad, but the birch bark canoe, however much it smashes, can be repaired with fresh sheets of bark, stuck on with gum from the pine trees. Still, after their canoe was totally destroyed in Bad River and the stock of bullets went to the bottom, the Indians sat down and wept, while the Frenchmen, after a square meal with a lot of rum, patched up the wreck to go on. Far down the Fraser Valley there is a meadow of tall grass and flowers with clumps of wild fruit orchard and brier rose, gardens of tiger lilies and goldenrod. Nobody lived there in my time, but the place is known as Alexandria in memory of Alexander Mackenzie and of the only moment in his life when he turned back, beaten. Below Alexandria the Fraser plunges for two hundred miles through a range of mountains in one long roaring swoop.
So the explorers, warned by friendly Indians, climbed back up-stream to the Blackwater River; and if any big game hunter wants to shoot mosquitoes for their hides that valley would make a first-class hunting ground. The journey from here to the coast was made afoot with heavy loads by a broad Indian trail across the coast range to the Bilthqula River, and here the explorers were the guests of rich powerful tribes. One young chiefunclasped a splendid robe of sea-otter skins, and threw it around MacKenzie, such a gift as no king could offer now. They feasted on salmon, service berries in grease, and cakes of inner hemlock bark sprinkled with oil of salmon, a three-hour banquet, followed by sleep in beds of furs, and blankets woven from wool of the mountain sheep. The houses were low-pitched barns of cedar, each large enough to seat several hundred people, and at the gable end rose a cedar pole carved in heraldic sculpture gaily painted, with a little round hole cut through for the front door.
Each canoe was a cedar log hollowed with fire, then spread with boiling water, a vessel not unlike a gondola. One such canoe, theTillicum, has made a voyage round the world, but she is small compared with the larger dugouts up to seven tons burden. An old chief showed MacKenzie a canoe forty-five feet in length, of four foot beam painted with white animals on a black hull, and set with ivory of otter teeth. In this he had made a voyage some years before, when he met white men and saw ships, most likely those of the great Captain Cook. MacKenzie’s account of the native doctors describes them to the life as they are to-day. “They blew on the patient, and then whistled; they rubbed him violently on the stomach; they thrust their forefingers into his mouth, and spouted water into his face.” MacKenzie, had he only waited, would have seen them jump on the patient’s stomach to drive the devils out.
He borrowed canoes for the run down the Bilthqula to Salt Water at the head of one of British Columbia’s giant fiords. There the explorer heard that only two moons ago Captain Vancouver’s boats had beenin the inlet. An Indian chief must have been rude, for one officer fired upon him, while another struck him with the flat of a sword. For this the chief must needs get even with Alexander MacKenzie as he wandered about the channels in search of the open sea. He never found the actual Pacific, but made his final camp upon a rock at the entrance of Cascada inlet. Here is Vancouver’s description of the place. “The width of the channel did not anywhere exceed three-quarters of a mile; its shores were bounded by precipices much more perpendicular than any we had yet seen during this excursion; and from the summits of the mountains that overlooked it ... there fell several large cascades. These were extremely grand, and by much the most tremendous of any we had ever beheld.”
Those cataracts, like lace, fell from the cornice glaciers through belt after belt of clouds, to crash through the lower gloom in deafening thunder upon black abysmal channels. The eagles swirl and circle far above, the schools of porpoises are cleaving and gleaming through the white-maned tide. In such a place, beset by hostile Indians, as the dawn broke the great explorer mixed vermilion and grease to paint upon the precipice above him:
“Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada by land 22nd July, 1793.”
He had discovered one of the world’s great rivers, and made the first crossing of North America.