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 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 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.