Mackenzie had accomplished his object. In the race to the Pacific overland he was the first of the explorers of North America to cross the continent and reach the ocean. Late in August the voyageurs were back at the little fort on the Peace river. Mackenzie shortly afterwards quitted the fur country and retired to Scotland, where he wrote the story of his explorations. His book appeared in 1801, and in the following year he was knighted by the king for his great achievements.
[1] See another volume of this Series, _Adventurers of the Far North_, chap. iii.
[2] The Takulli. This tribe cremated the dead, and the widows collected the ashes of their dead husbands and carried them during a period of three years: hence the name 'Carriers.'
American traders were not slow to follow up the discovery of Robert Gray on the Pacific. Spain, the pioneer pathfinder, had ceded Louisiana to France; and France, by way of checkmating British advance in North America, had sold Louisiana to the United States for fifteen million dollars. What did Louisiana include? Certainly, from New Orleans to the Missouri. Did it also include from the Missouri to Gray's river, the Columbia? The United States had sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark overland from the Missouri to the Columbia, ostensibly on a scientific expedition, but in reality to lay claim to the new territory for the United States. This brings the exploration of the Pacific down to 1806.
Take a look at the map! Mackenzie had crossed overland from the Peace river to Bella Coola. Who was to own the great belt of { 87} empire--a third larger than Germany--between Mackenzie's trail westward and Lewis and Clark's trail to the mouth of the Columbia? In 1805 Simon Fraser, who as a child had come from the United States to Canada with his widowed mother in the Loyalist migration, and now in his thirtieth year was a partner in the North-West Company of Montreal, had crossed the Rockies by way of the Peace river. He had followed Mackenzie's trail over the terrible nine-mile carrying-place and had built there a fur-post--Rocky Mountain Portage. He had ascended that same Parsnip river, which Mackenzie had found so appalling, to a little emerald lake set like a jewel in the mountains. There he had built another fur-trading post, and named it after his friend, Archibald Norman M'Leod. This was the first fur-post known to have been erected in the interior of New Caledonia, now British Columbia. The new fort had been left in charge of James M'Dougall; and during the winter of 1806 M'Dougall had crossed the heavily drifted carrying-place and descended the Bad River as far as the south fork of the Fraser, which all traders at that time mistook for the upper reaches of Gray's Columbia. Instead of going down the main stream of the { 88} Fraser, M'Dougall ascended both the Nechaco and the Stuart; and if he did not actually behold the beautiful alpine tarns since known as Fraser Lake and Stuart Lake, he was at least the first white man to hear of them.