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In May they began again pushing upstream through the Peace River canyons until they came to the fork of the Finley and Parsnip Rivers where Indians warned them of the difficulties of the former even though it was the larger stream. This book is good introduction to exploration in the north. A complete cycle of exchanges took four years. Further upstream he founded Fort Fork where he an the others wintered, finishing the buildings around Christmas in zero degree cold. In 1771 Samuel Hearne was sent with a group of Chippewas to find both copper and a northwest passage. If I have any criticism of the book it is that there are redundancies in the sidebars. Trading in furs was truly and international corporate business: it required credit, stocks of goods, and pelts all of which took months and months to arrive. Mackenzie followed up on Pond's ideas.
Reading the book inspired me to look for a really critical history of the explorers. In pursuit of furs and shipping routes via the Pacific Ocean, especially to the orient, the fur companies sent lightly loaded explorers north and west. He found the Slave River exiting Lake Athabasca and passed the Peace River heading north. The copper was minimal and he arrived at the wrong ocean. Trying this time the Peace River, he traveled upstream passed the last trading outpost, the furthest west from the interior.
One coming down the precipitous descent into the Bella Coola valley they knew they had reached the Pacific even though the ocean lay beyond a complex inlet. Hayes' book combines geography (he loves maps and treats us to many of them), the business side of trapping (which he says was the motive behind all the explorations---unlike Lewis and Clark's more nation building effort), and selections of trappers journals and published books. Starting with Champlain in early 17th century French trappers began exploiting the interior of what is now the mid-western border of the US and Canada. He made it to the Arctic Ocean going down (up on the map) the Coppermine River where at Bloody Fall his First Nations companions massacred some Inuit. He began again in 1792 armed with better navigational instruments and training. The defeat of France in what was truly the first world war, the Seven Years War, in 1763 utterly changed the history of North America.
He knew it was the wrong one, realizing he was going in the wrong direction when he encountered its north bend less than half way down it. Why do Lewis and Clark get so much attention when explorers of Hudson Bay and what become the North West Companies made earlier and much more daring crossings of the continent. It was as difficult as the Frazer would turn out to be and neither was the Colombia the desired goal which had it been reachable might have upstaged the Americans and led to a very different history for Washington state. It was discovery on the par with Lewis and Clark but being far less cutthroat and speculative than the hoards south of the border, the British in Canada had a less frightful impact on the First Nations and the landscape than did us gringos.
He continued on despite the fact that a continued exploration wouldn't contribute any commercially valuable information. This volume is mostly about Alexander Mackenzie with abundant quotes from his journals and published works. Then in about 11 days of down river paddling he arrive at the delta. While Hearne's river ran north a successor and ornery trapper named Peter Pond came upon the first rivers running west in central Canada and by including native description believed these to be the route to the Pacific. It is in some ways more like a coffee table book, admirably illustrated, than a critical history but he does get into aspects of that history. Until late in that century the English were restricted to lands lying near the middle western coast of Hudson's Bay. Because of the volume of flow it took him days to figure out that he was actually at the ocean.
Although this book gives no evidence of it I have often suspected that Lewis and Clark were not the first Europeans seen by the inland Indians of the US Pacific Northwest. He was able to cross Great Slave Lake fighting ice, wind and bugs and travel along its northern shore until he came to the exit of the river which bears his name. There are excellent volumes about both Hearne and John Ray, who came much later, by Ken McGoogan but I have found nothing on Sam Black. Although it was the first crossing of the continent, beating Lewis and Clark by 12 years, it had little commercial value. They achieved their goal which turned out to have much more hostile natives having already been part of the Russian trade networks for more than half a century.
It is the same old myopia which makes invisible our biggest trading partner, crucial supplier of oil, and much more civilized neighbor to the north. Heading south on the Parsnip they passed the Pack River which would have taken them to the divide with the Frazer, their sought after goal because they thought it was the Columbia. They eventually came to another divide which was well used and followed it to the Western slope. Charlie Fisher emeritus professor and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World For all the outward flow of the rivers thereabout eventually head north to empty into the Arctic Ocean, whereas at the headwaters of the Peace Mackenzie could cross the great divide where the rivers run into the Pacific.
This he did on a subsequent trip. The Hudson Bay Company took over the network of Voyageurs and pushed westward. Mackenzie worked on for a while in Canada and went back to England to marry and promote western fur trading, but occupied with Napoleon, the British government was little interested in northwestern North America. Reading a sidebar I would think, "Didn't I just read the exact same words in the text." This could have been easily corrected by a good editor. In so doing he missed the route west.
The route was not useful for the fur trade. Lucky for Canada.
This book is a welcome collection of facts about the stupendous exploits of Alexander Mackenzie's Canadian exploration. But the words are curiously bleak & dispassionate, and separate panels of information on the pages, intrude into the flow of the narrative.What is needed now is for someone to take on the story, light it up with the raw romance of the period, paint the picture of the landscape, add colour photos of the places in the text, tell us about the man, and keep the size of the book down to normal. Let us see the landscapes in all their glory. The raw detailed story of the man remains to be told.
First Crossing by historian Derek Hayes is the amazing story of Alexander Mackenzie, and his trailblazing journey across the North American continent before civilized society conquered the North American wilderness. Illustrated throughout with maps and photographs in black-and-white and color, the deftly researched and meticulously reported details of Mackenzie's voyage vividly reconstruct an 18th Century expedition of truly insurmountable bravery and pivotally important discovery.
Maybe having read the previous two books makes me jaded but Mackenzie's voyages can only be retold so many times. OK, there is some new information here. Hayes has presented us with a slightly new take on telling the story with pictures, maps and historical vignettes but I hunger for a more thorough job. Mostly it seems that Hayes has helped illustrate the travels of Mackenzie, something that was not available previously. Barry Gough's book is notoriously lacking in any illustration of Mackenzie's voyages and Mackenzie's own book is virtually without useful illustration. Perhaps more in the nature of Moulton's "Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition". Finding someone willing to wade through Mackenzie's rather impenetrable prose may be a challenge.Notwithstanding the above this is probably the best explanation of Mackenzie's voyages since the original journals.
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