Alexander’s Mackenzie’s Rivers of Disappointment Alexander Mackenzie was one of the greatest of the fur-trader explorers. Mackenzie came to Canada as a young scouts man to work in the fur trade. By 1787 he was a partner in the famous North-West Company. He was put in charge of the Athabasca fur trading area.
It was a large area rich with furs. Lying on the border between what is now Alberta and the Northwest. Mackenzie had his men build a fur trading post. He named it Fort Chipewyan.
Mackenzie set out to find a route to the Pacific in June of 1789. His journey began at Fort Chipewyan, from the fort he traveled to Great Slave Lake. Mackenzie had found the river. He had heard Indian tales that this river flowed west toward the setting sun. As they traveled along, Mackenzie thought to himself “here at last is the river that flows to the Pacific.” Flowing rapidly toward the Arctic, the river carried Mackenzie’s canoes swiftly along.
Some days their canoes were carried 150 kilometers or more. Less than a month later on July 14 th 1789. He reached the Arctic Ocean. Mackenzie was the first European to reach this shore of the Western Arctic ocean. Now Mackenzie was able to answer a question that had occupied explorers and geographers for nearly 3 centuries.
His trip showed that there was no water route across North America, south of the Arctic Ocean. This would not provide an easy route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, even if the fabled North-West Passage really did exist. In his journal he wrote “here the sea is eternally covered with ice.” He was bitterly disappointed that the river ran North rather than West, which he had hoped. He named the river the Great River of Disappointment. The North-West Company was not disappointed by Mackenzie’s discovery because the river was rich in which whereas in the future fur bearing animals would bring valuable amounts of cargo to Fort Chipewyan in the years to come. Today the river has another name; we call it the Mackenzie River, honoring a great explorer..
The Essay on The French Presence In North America
The French presence in North America was spearheaded by the exploration of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the great river leading inland by Jaques Cartier in the 1530s. The English immediately contested the French claims on the grounds that they conflicted with prior English claims dating from John Cabots landings on the east coast of North America in 1497, thus setting off a struggle which was to ...
