Alexander Mackenzie was the first man to cross continental
North America, a trip he accomplished by canoe in 1793 -- twelve years
before Lewis and Clark. Mackenzie’s journal of his explorations appeared
in 1801.
Both the Lewis and Clark and the Mackenzie expeditions were
conceived as waterborne explorations and owed their strategy to the French
explorers, who had proposed, sixty years earlier, that the North American
continent could be crossed by going west on either the Saskatchewan or the
Missouri, and then linking up with the unidentified "River of the
West."
Acting on this overly-simple thesis, Mackenzie took the fur
traders’ route along the Saskatchewan and found his way over to the
Fraser, and thence by an Indian trail to the coast.
Mackenzie had an amazingly naive attitude about the
wilderness around him and the proper way one should interact with it. But
somehow his Dudley Doright personality worked:
My tent was no sooner pitched, than I summoned the
Indians together, and gave each of them about four inches of Brazil
tobacco, a dram of spirits, and lighted the pipe...I informed them that I
had heard of their misconduct, and was come among them to inquire into the
truth of it. I added also that it would be an established rule with me to
treat them with kindness, if their behavior should be such as to deserve
it; but at the same time, that I should be equally severe if they failed
in those returns which I had a right to expect from them. I then presented
them with a quantity of rum, which I recommended to be used with
discretion, and then added some tobacco, as a token of peace. They, in
return, made me the fairest promises; and, having expressed the pride they
felt on beholding me in their country, took their leave.
It seemed as if his handful of men were often on the verge
of mutiny. At least one of his guides deserted him. They found a new one:
About midnight a rustling noise was heard in the woods
which created a general alarm, and I was awakened to be informed of the
circumstance, but heard nothing...At two in the morning the sentinel
informed me, that he saw something like a human figure creeping along on
all-fours about fifty paces above us...it proved to be an old, grey-haired,
blind man, who had been compelled to leave his hiding-place by extreme
hunger, being too infirm to join in the flight of the natives to whom he
belonged.
Mackenzie fed the old man, then drafted the blind Indian as
his guide. The party groped its way westward.
Mackenzie's route to the Pacific Ocean proved too difficult
for others to follow, but this does not diminish the value of this great
expedition across wild America.
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