blackfoot-valley

tidbits, mentions of white men where no white men were known to be, men- tions of boatloads of Carolina adventurers at the mouth of the Ohio a hundred years before Daniel Boone was born, of that party of French people who went west from Illinois to Washington before Lewis and Clark’s trek over almost the same route. In almost every instance where somebody was supposed to be the first, we find there was somebody already there. No doubt many a long hunter went west and never returned; no doubt other explorers did the same. We must always understand that we have only a small place in history. Our forefathers were a restless, venturesome lot and that vast land to the westward, beyond the blue mountains, was always a challenge. To understand what happened in our country, it is enough to read the major histories, which follow the main lines of thought and our affairs, but to get down to the nitty-gritty, one must go to the lessor known books, the pam- phlets, the individual memoirs....local histories. Newspapers frequently ran the life histories of local pioneers, and they are often valuable additions to the larger pages of history.” The earliest major fur-trading firm in North America was Hudson Bay Company, founded by Crown-supported British interests in 1670, whose origi- nal territory surrounded the sparsely populated southern part of Hudson Bay well north of the French lands of the St. Lawrence Valley and the Great Lakes. Its fur operation soon extended west and began to overlap those of the French trappers who were also moving westward. Multiple French fur firms were based in the much more settled St. Lawrence region, and although their operations were individually less extensive geographically, in the aggregate they covered as much territory and sometimes more than the British firm. By the end of the seven years war, in 1763, (known to the Americans as the French and Indian war) the vast French possessions east of the Mississippi, including Quebec, were ceded to the British. The French-founded firms how- ever, continued to be active, sometimes in collaboration with British interests. A little over a century after Hudson Bay Company’s founding, French Cana- dians along with Englishmen and Scots, created the North West Company, which by the 1780s became an energetic rival to Hudson Bay Company. By 1784 the “Nor’Westers” were following the rivers westward from Lake Supe- rior. The young Scotsman Alexander MacKenzie, working for the North West Company was sent in 1787 to Fort Chipewyan, a remote trading post on Lake 55