blackfoot-valley

Athabaska in what is now northernmost Alberta. Two years later, he led a party to the Great Slave Lake and, finding its outlet, descended the great river that was later to be named for him, pursuing his dream of finding a practi- cal route to the Pacific to develop the company’s fur trade with Asia. But to MacKenzie’s chagrin, he found that the river reached salt water at the “Frozen Ocean,” not the Pacific. Undaunted, in the spring of 1793 MacKenzie resumed his quest from Fort Fork on the Peace River, then the company’s westernmost post. Besides himself, his party consisted of fellow Scotsman Alexander Mackay, twelve French-Canadian voyageurs and two Indians. After ascending the Peace River, they portaged across the Continental Divide at a place where it is only three thousand feet high. His party then descended the river later named Fraser, which MacKenzie understandably but mistakenly believed to be the northern tributary of the rumored “River of the West” (the Columbia). He was frustrated to reach unnavigable rapids that clearly made it impractical as a commercial route. At that point, the party set out overland to the west, ascending the valleys of a series of smaller rivers and crossing another divide “MacKenzie’s expedition, 1787” Artist unknown 56