MACKENZIE, Sir ALEXANDER,
fur trader, explorer, and author; b. 1764 at Stornoway, on the Isle of
Lewis, Scotland, third of four children of Kenneth Mackenzie, of Melbost
farm (two miles east of Stornoway), and Isabella Maciver, whose family
was prominent in the town; m. 1812 Geddes Mackenzie, and they had three
children; d. 12 March 1820 at Mulinearn, near Dunkeld, Scotland.
In the 1770s a severe
depression developed on Lewis, and in 1774 Kenneth Mackenzie decided to
join his brother John in New York. His wife had died while Alexander was
still a child. Kenneth sailed for North America with his two sisters
and Alexander, leaving both his daughters behind. (Alexander’s older
brother Murdoch studied medicine; a terse family record states that he
then “followed the sea and was lost on the coast of Halifax.”) Only
months after the family’s arrival the American revolution broke out, and
Kenneth and John joined the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, raised
by Sir John Johnson*.
Commissioned lieutenant in 1776, Kenneth served until 1780, when he
died suddenly at Carleton Island (N.Y.). Young Alexander had been left
in the care of his aunts, who first took him to Johnstown, in the Mohawk
valley, where Sir John Johnson had large estates, and in 1778, when
conditions in the valley became difficult for loyalists, sent him to
Montreal, where he attended school.
His schooling was to be
brief. The fur trade promised adventure and a profitable future to a
sturdy, high-spirited youth, and in 1779 Mackenzie joined Finlay and
Gregory, a partnership formed by James Finlay and John Gregory that
had been trading in the west since 1773. The firm was reconstituted as
Gregory, MacLeod and Company in 1783, when Finlay, a well-known pioneer
among Montreal’s British fur traders, retired and was succeeded by
Normand MacLeod*.
By 1784, when he had been five years in the Montreal office, Mackenzie
was anxious to try his hand at trading. Gregory entrusted him with “a
small adventure of goods” which he took to Detroit (Mich.). It is
evident that he had very favourably impressed his employers, for some
months later MacLeod travelled to Detroit to offer Mackenzie a share in
the business. The offer was conditional upon his willingness to go to
Grand Portage (near Grand Portage, Minn.) in the spring of 1785 and
serve in a post in the far west, a proviso quite acceptable to
Mackenzie.
This expansion of the
firm was prompted by radical changes taking place in the fur trade.
Shortly after Canada was ceded to Great Britain in 1763, British traders
from Montreal, like the French before them, ventured into what is now
western Canada and began to extend their quest for furs farther and
farther west. James Finlay built a post in the Saskatchewan valley in
1767 or 1768, and in 1778 Peter Pond reached
the Athabasca River and discovered the richness of the fur resources in
the surrounding area. As it happened, this greater interest and
activity in the northwest developed at a time when the American
revolution was threatening to deprive Montreal of its important stake in
the trade in the area south of the Great Lakes. Detroit and
Michilimackinac (Mackinaw City, Mich.), through which much of it had
been channelled, would probably be in American territory, and it was
certain that an independent United States would soon reserve the country
south of the lakes for its own nationals. The Montreal traders who had
been active in that area turned therefore to the northwest as an
alternative source of furs.
Sharply increased
competition in the northwest was the natural result, and it quickly
became evident that this could be both costly and hazardous – costly
because traders would often be faced with the necessity of outbidding
one another, and hazardous because if furs could not be secured by fair
methods there was always the temptation, in an unpoliced wilderness, to
resort to foul means. Much of the trouble arose because the trade was
carried on by individuals or small partnerships. Wider agreements were
the obvious solution, and these soon began to come into being. Most
notable of them was the pooling of nine partnerships in 1779, a step
toward a longer-term agreement and the formal organization of the North
West Company in the winter of 1783–84. It was in response to this strong
competitor that Gregory, MacLeod expanded its own partnership from two
members to five the following winter; the company was joined by Peter Pangman and John Ross in addition to Mackenzie. The small supporting staff included Alexander’s cousin Roderick McKenzie*,
a few months out from Scotland, who served as an apprentice clerk. When
the partners met at Grand Portage in June 1785, Mackenzie himself was
assigned to the English (Churchill) River department, with headquarters
at Île-à-la-Crosse (Sask.). There he would be stationed until 1787.
The ambitions of the NWC
were to play an important part in Mackenzie’s later career. From the
very beginning it was anxious to expand the scope of its trading right
across the continent. As early as October 1784, in a memorial submitted
to Governor Frederick Haldimand of Quebec, the company declared its
intention “of exploring at their own Expence, between the latitudes of
55, and 65, all that tract of country extending west of the Hudson’s Bay
to the North Pacific Ocean.” Ignoring the monopoly rights of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, it went on to suggest “the propriety of granting
to the Company an exclusive right . . . of the Trade to the North-West
. . . for Ten-Years” in return for opening up new country. Nothing came
of this proposal, but the company seized every opportunity to increase
its knowledge of western geography. Its immediate source of information
was Peter Pond, who had been included in the 1783–84 partnership. By
1785, guided by his own travels and by his questioning of the Indians,
Pond had drafted a map that included the country north of Lake
Athabasca. Correct in essentials, it showed a river flowing north to
Great Slave Lake, from which a second river ran on to the Arctic Ocean.
Later, when he had had access to accounts of the third Pacific voyage of
James Cook*,
and had learned of the inlet in Alaska that Cook had mistaken for an
estuary and had named Cook’s River, Pond ignored his native informants,
indulged in wishful thinking, and jumped to the conclusion that this was
the mouth of the large river that flowed out of Great Slave Lake. In a
map drawn in 1787, small streams still lead towards the Arctic, but the
major river flows westwards, towards the Pacific. And in a second major
miscalculation, which was to be important to Mackenzie, Pond grossly
underestimated the distance from Athabasca to the Pacific. No accurate
calculations of longitude had yet been made in the area around Lake
Athabasca, and he placed the lake some 700 miles west of its true
position.
There was a streak of
violence and bad temper in Pond’s nature, which was to cut short his
career in the fur trade. He was already suspected of having been
responsible for the death in 1782 of a rival trader, Jean-Étienne Waddens*,
and in 1787 a scuffle resulted in the shooting death of John Ross, whom
Gregory, MacLeod had sent to compete with Pond in the Athabasca
country. Once again competition had erupted into violence. Some measure
to reduce dangerous rivalry was clearly desirable, and the immediate
result of Ross’s death was the amalgamation of Gregory, MacLeod and the
NWC. The enlarged partnership consisted of 20 shares, and Mackenzie
received one of the four assigned to the four surviving partners of
Gregory, MacLeod. Pond was not excluded, but it seems to have been
agreed that the season of 1787–88 would be the last he would spend in
the west. He returned to his post on the Athabasca River, arriving on
21 Oct. 1787, Mackenzie going with him in the dual capacity of second in
command and understudy. Although Mackenzie was convinced that Pond was a
murderer, the two men managed to agree fairly well. Pond was both an
accomplished trader and a born explorer, and Mackenzie was anxious to
learn all he could from him.
Pond left Athabasca for
good in the spring of 1788 and Mackenzie took charge of the department.
He was to succeed Pond as explorer as well as trader, and was soon
preparing to descend the large river (now the Mackenzie) that flows out
of Great Slave Lake. There is no reason to doubt that when he set out he
expected to find the course of the river much as Pond had mapped it in
1787. Pond, for his part, had never deviated from two of his basic but
badly mistaken assumptions. In November 1789, before details of
Mackenzie’s first expedition had reached the east, Pond had several
conversations in Quebec with Isaac Ogden*,
who described them in a letter to his father. “There can be no doubt,”
Ogden wrote, “but the source of Cook’s River is now fully discovered and
known.” And Pond’s conviction that the journey from Great Slave Lake to
the supposed mouth of Cook’s River would be a short one is reflected in
Ogden’s note that “Another man by the name of McKenzie was left by Pond
at [Great] Slave Lake with orders to go down the River, and from thence
to Unalaska, and so to Kamskatsha, and then to England through Russia,
&c.” That Mackenzie was in fact acting on specific instructions is
proven by his own account of the journey, which is entitled “Journal of a
Voyage performed by Order of the N.W. Company, in a Bark Canoe in
search of a Passage by Water through the N.W. Continent of America from
Athabasca to the Pacific Ocean in Summer 1789.” But there is no doubt
that Mackenzie welcomed the assignment; in the preface to the printed
account of his travels he described “the practicability of penetrating
across the continent of America” as “this favourite project of my own
ambition.”
Mackenzie’s headquarters
in Athabasca had been at what became known as the “old establishment,”
founded by Pond in 1778 some 40 miles up the Athabasca River. In 1788 he
sent his cousin Roderick, now serving with him, to build the first Fort
Chipewyan, on the south shore of Lake Athabasca, where he joined him
shortly before Christmas. It was from this new post that Mackenzie set
out on his first voyage of discovery on 3 June 1789. His party consisted
of four French Canadian voyageurs, a young German, whose presence is
unexplained, a Chipewyan Indian known as English Chief*,
and sundry native wives and retainers. Travel was slow and difficult in
the upper part of the Slave River, where rapids were frequent, and ice
delayed the party in Great Slave Lake, but once they entered the
Mackenzie River their progress was rapid. The full length of the river,
about 1,075 miles, was covered in only 14 days, at an average speed of
more than 75 miles per day. For nearly 300 miles the Mackenzie followed
the generally westward course that Pond had predicted, but at what is
now known as the Camsell Bend the river swung round to the north and
continued on, day after day, in that general direction. It became
apparent at last that it could not constitute a route to the Pacific. “I
am much at a loss here how to act,” Mackenzie wrote in his journal on
10 July, when only two days distant from the sea, “being certain that my
going further in this Direction will not answer the Purpose of which
the Voyage was intended, as it is evident these Waters must empty
themselves into the Northern Ocean . . . .” But he decided to push on
“to the discharge of those Waters, as it would satisfy Peoples Curiosity
tho’ not their Intentions.” Misty weather made it uncertain for a time
whether or not he had actually reached the Arctic Ocean or merely a
large lake, but there is no doubt that he reached the sea. He spent four
nights on Whale Island (Garry Island, N.W.T.), off the river’s mouth,
which he so named because of the number of white whales seen in its
vicinity, and he observed the rise and fall of the tide. The return
journey to Fort Chipewyan was begun on 16 July and the party reached the
fort on 12 September. They had completed the round trip, totalling over
3,000 miles, in 102 days.
Although he had been the
first to explore one of the world’s great rivers, and in later years
came to take pride in the fact, Mackenzie’s first reaction was one of
frustration. When he attended the annual rendezvous of the Nor’Westers
at Grand Portage in 1790 he remarked in a letter to Roderick: “My Expedition
is hardly spoken of but this is what I expected.” The reaction of the
partners is understandable; most of them were accustomed to making long
and arduous overland journeys, and Mackenzie’s explorations, having
failed to find a route to the Pacific, were of no immediate practical
use to the NWC. But it cannot be said that his worth was not
appreciated; a new North West agreement, which was to come into effect
in 1792, gave him two of the 20 shares in the company in place of the
one he had held since 1787. He is said to have dubbed the Mackenzie the
River Disappointment, but this is doubtful. The original of the letter
in which he is alleged to have used the name has disappeared, and it
occurs in only one of four surviving transcripts of this letter; in the
other three the river is referred to as the Grand River.
Mackenzie had great
physical strength, determination, and stamina; he tells us that he
possessed “a constitution and frame of body equal to the most arduous
undertakings.” As the speed at which he travelled indicates, he was a
hard driver of men. In Joseph Burr Tyrrell*’s
view he was “a man of masterful temperament, and those who accompanied
him, whether white men or natives, were merely so many instruments to be
used in the accomplishment of any purpose which he had in hand.” This
judgement is unduly harsh. When there was some doubt whether he would
reach the Arctic he noted in his journal: “My Men express much sorrow
that they are obliged to return without seeing the Sea, in which I
believe them sincere for we marched exceeding hard coming down the
River, and I never heard them grumble; but on the contrary in good
Spirits . . . and declare themselves now and at any time ready to go
with me wherever I choose to lead them.” This was no exaggeration, for
two of the four voyageurs who had travelled to the Arctic became members
of his second expedition. He had watched over the welfare or his men,
had made great efforts to protect them from dangers along the way, and
had brought all of them home safely.
Mackenzie had a second
expedition in mind before the first had ended. He had encountered
relatively few Indians and no Inuit, but when returning up the river he
had tried to question any natives he met in the hope that they could
give him information about rivers west of the mountains, which
presumably would lead to the Pacific. Mackenzie had become aware of
certain deficiencies in his knowledge and equipment that he was anxious
to make good before he explored further. His observations of latitude,
usually south of the true position by from 7 to 15 minutes, served well
enough, but he had no instruments that would enable him to ascertain
longitude. This shortcoming was emphasized, perhaps in a somewhat
arrogant and embarrassing way, by Philip Turnor*,
a qualified surveyor in the service of the HBC, whom he happened to
meet at Cumberland House (Sask.) in June 1790. Turnor noted at the time:
“Mr McKensie says he has been at the Sea, but thinks it the Hyperborean
Sea but he does not seem acquainted with Observations which makes me
think he is not well convinced where he has been.” Mackenzie was in fact
perfectly aware of where he had been, but the encounter with Turnor
doubtless strengthened his determination to pay a private visit to
London in the winter of 1791–92, where he could receive instruction and
acquire equipment. He was nevertheless somewhat scantily outfitted when
he set out on his second expedition in the autumn of 1792, as he seems
to have had only a compass, a sextant, a chronometer, and a large
telescope. In spite of the relative lack of equipment, the accuracy with
which Mackenzie plotted his position from time to time was remarkable.
Fortunately he was now aware of the great distance that would have to be
covered to reach the Pacific, for Pond’s mistake in placing Lake
Athabasca had been detected: the true longitude of Fort Chipewyan,
ascertained by Turnor, could now be compared with Cook’s earlier
readings on the coast.
On his second venture,
Mackenzie had decided to ascend the Peace River to its source in the
mountains, and then cross the divide in the expectation that he would
find some river on the western slope that would lead him to the Pacific.
On 10 Oct. 1792 he left Fort Chipewyan and started up the Peace with
the intention of building an advance base where he could spend the
winter. This was Fort Fork (Peace River Landing, Alta), near the
junction of the Peace and Smoky rivers. In the spring he had difficulty
in mustering a crew, but was able to leave at last on 9 May 1793. His
account of the departure from Fort Fork illustrates the astonishing
capacity of a fur trader’s birchbark canoe: “Her dimensions were
twenty-five feet long within, exclusive of the curves of stem and stern,
twenty six inches hold, and four feet nine inches beam. At the same
time she was so light, that two men could carry her on a good road three
or four miles without resting. In this slender vessel, we shipped
provisions, goods for presents, arms, ammunition, and baggage, to the
weight of three thousand pounds, and an equipage of ten people.” As
second in command Mackenzie had chosen Alexander MacKay;
two Indians, intended to act as interpreters and hunters, and six
voyageurs completed the party. He was unfortunate in a number of the
crewmen he had had to accept. Only a few days after the start some of
them were so appalled by the portages encountered at the Peace River
canyon that they urged Mackenzie to abandon the whole enterprise.
Despite this and many later complaints he was able to keep the party
moving and to maintain discipline and some semblance of morale.
By the end of May he had
reached the point at which the Parsnip and Finlay rivers unite to form
the Peace. He chose to ascend the Parsnip, following the advice of an
old Indian who told him that a carrying place at its headwaters would
lead over a height of land to a large river flowing to the west. This
statement proved correct, but travel in the small streams and lakes that
linked the larger rivers on either side of the mountains turned out to
be laborious, notably in James Creek, to which Mackenzie gave the more
appropriate name of Bad River. At last on 18 June he descended the
McGregor River and reached the Fraser; being unaware of its existence,
he jumped to the conclusion that he must have reached the upper waters
of the Columbia. Four days later he had travelled down it as far as the
future site of Fort Alexandria (Alexandria, B.C.), which was named after
him. There he was able to hold discussion with the Indians, who
strongly advised him to proceed no farther. They informed him that parts
of the river were virtually impassable, and that its mouth was still
far to the south. In their view much the best way to reach the ocean was
by a considerably shorter route overland. He should go back up the
Fraser to the vicinity of its large tributary, the West Road River, and
follow its valley westward.
It was not in
Mackenzie’s nature to turn back in the face of difficulties, and he
feared that such a change of plan might be construed as a retreat and
damage the morale of his party. “In a voyage of this kind,” he noted in
his journal, “a retrograde motion could not fail to cool the ardour,
slacken the zeal, and weaken the confidence of those, who have no
greater inducement in the undertaking, than to follow the conductor of
it.” Such, he added, were the considerations by which his mind was
“distressed and distracted.” He decided nevertheless that the advice of
the Indians should be followed, and the trip back to the West Road began
on the next day, the 23rd.
By 4 July the canoe and
surplus supplies had been cached near the junction of the Fraser and
West Road rivers, and the heavily laden party began the trek to the
coast. Mackenzie’s own load consisted of pemmican and other provisions
weighing about 70 pounds, besides arms, ammunition, and his telescope.
He travelled west in or near the valley of the West Road River,
following well-beaten Indian trails most of the time. Later he ascended
Ulgako Creek, a tributary of the West Road, and after leaving it
continued on westward to the Tanya Lakes. Here Indian reports indicated
that he could either go north to the Dean River or turn south to the
Bella Coola. He chose the latter, and on his way south crossed Mackenzie
Pass, at 6,000 feet the highest point reached in any of his travels. On
17 July he descended into the deep gorge of the Bella Coola and was
greeted by Bella Coola Indians at a small settlement that he named
Friendly Village. Two days later, having travelled down the turbulent
river, he came upon six curious Indian houses built on stilts, about 25
feet high. “From these houses,” Mackenzie wrote, “I could perceive the
termination of the river, and its discharge into a narrow arm of the
sea.” In this singularly undramatic fashion he chronicled the conclusion
of the first journey across North America north of Mexico.
Although small alarums
had occurred, thus far Mackenzie had succeeded in maintaining good
relations with the Indians he had met. By contrast, the Bella Bellas at
the mouth of the Bella Coola were anything but friendly, and open
clashes were narrowly averted. As a result, little exploring was done
after he reached tide-water, but he did secure a canoe and paddle down
North Bentinck Arm, into which the Bella Coola flows, and then he
proceeded to Dean Channel. There Mackenzie encountered more Bella Bella
Indians, who viewed him “with an air of indifference and disdain. One of
them in particular made me understand, with an air of insolence, that a
large canoe had lately been in this bay, with people in her like me,
and that one of them, whom he called Macubah, had fired on him and his friends, and that Bensins had struck him on the back, with the flat part of his sword.” Macubah would seem to refer to George Vancouver*, and it has been suggested that Bensins was Archibald Menzies*,
the botanist who accompanied the expedition; but he was not with
Vancouver when he explored Dean Channel on 2 June. None of the journals
of the expedition mentions any difficulties with the Indians. What would
have been a historic meeting between Mackenzie and Vancouver was missed
by a little more than six weeks.
That night, the 21st,
the party slept on a large rock in Dean Channel, and the next morning
Mackenzie “mixed up some vermilion in melted grease” and wrote on its
southeast face the famous inscription: “Alexander Mackenzie, from
Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred
and ninety-three.” The rock has been identified and the words
reinscribed upon it in permanent form.
Mackenzie began the
return journey on 23 July and was back at Fort Chipewyan on 24 August.
Once again his speed of travel was phenomenal. Frank C. Swannell, an
experienced wilderness explorer, estimates that, when allowance is made
for the various delays encountered, Mackenzie’s average day’s travel on
the westbound trip, by land and water, was about 20 miles. “The real
test of his ability to travel is the return trip over a known route and
less heavily burdened, he having left caches behind to secure his
return. On foot, from Friendly Village, on the Bella Coola, to the
Fraser, he averaged 25 miles a day. The 860 miles by water was made in
twenty-four days, including the portages, an average of 36 miles a day.”
The total distance covered, outward and homeward, was somewhat more
than 2,300 miles. Once again Mackenzie brought his crew home safe and
uninjured, and in spite of difficulties with the natives during the
second journey, on neither of his great expeditions had he fired a shot
in anger.
In one respect
Mackenzie’s expedition to the Pacific bore an unfortunate similarity to
his journey to the Arctic: the route he had pioneered was of no
immediate use to the NWC. He had added a huge tract of new country to
the map of the world, but the routes that would be followed in later
years by fur brigades would be discovered by Simon Fraser* and David Thompson*.
In semi-solitude at Fort
Chipewyan during the winter of 1793–94, restless and highly strung,
Mackenzie seems to have come close to a breakdown. In the previous
autumn he had intended to make a fair copy of his journal, but, he later
informed his cousin Roderick, “the greatest part of my time was taken
up in vain Speculations. I got into such a habit of thinking that I was
often lost in thoughts nor could I ever write to the purpose.” By
January 1794 he had determined to leave the west. “I am fully bent on
going down. I am more anxious now than ever. For I think it unpardonable
in any man to remain in this country who can afford to leave it.”
But he had no intention
of leaving the fur trade. On the contrary, his visit to the Pacific had
roused a desire to see the trade organized on far wider and more
efficient principles. On his way to Montreal in September 1794, he
called on John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, and
outlined the project to him. He proposed that the NWC should participate
in a cooperative effort that would involve the HBC and the East India
Company. The former would be asked to make available its supply route
via Hudson Bay, which could deliver goods cheaply to the heart of the
continent; the latter would be expected to modify its monopoly rights in
the China trade to permit the marketing of furs shipped from the
Pacific coast. The idea was not entirely new; in 1789 Alexander
Dalrymple, hydrographer of the East India Company, had published his Plan for promoting the fur-trade, and securing it to this country, by uniting the operations of the East-India and Hudson’s-Bay companys.
Dalrymple shared Mackenzie’s interest in both the Pacific coast and the
river that flowed out of Great Slave Lake and, partly as a result of
his urging, expeditions to explore both were planned by the British
government to begin in 1790. Threatened war with Spain delayed the
expedition by sea, which sailed eventually in 1791 under Vancouver.
Command of the land expedition was to have been given to Captain John
Frederick Holland*,
who arrived at Quebec in the fall of 1790 only to hear that Mackenzie
had anticipated him and had already explored the Mackenzie River.
As long as he was active
in the fur trade Mackenzie was to continue to advocate some cooperative
plan such as he had outlined to Simcoe, but he was diverted from it for
a time by the offer of a partnership in McTavish, Frobisher and
Company. A decade earlier, Simon McTavish had
perceived that a managing agency in Montreal to purchase supplies and
market furs would be essential to the success of the NWC, and he had so
contrived matters that his firm not only performed these functions but
also controlled a majority of the NWC shares. Mackenzie’s partnership
became effective in 1795 and each spring he travelled to Grand Portage
to attend the annual rendezvous with the wintering partners. By degrees,
however, his restless nature began to assert itself. On many points of
internal policy he found himself more in sympathy with the wintering
partners than with his fellow agents. His interest in a broader trading
strategy revived, and this led to differences with McTavish; trade
handled through Hudson Bay or the Pacific coast would not benefit
Montreal, where McTavish’s interests were centred. By 1799 Mackenzie was
again in a highly nervous condition, and about the time his partnership
expired on 30 Nov. 1799 he left abruptly for England.
He had long been anxious to publish an account of his travels, and this became his primary objective in London. His Voyages from Montreal . . . to the Frozen and Pacific oceans
was published in December 1801 and attracted wide attention. The
journals of the voyages are preceded by a valuable general history of
the fur trade; this may have been written in great part by Roderick
McKenzie, who had been collecting materials on fur-trade history. The
journals themselves were edited for publication by William Combe, a
prolific writer who had previously revised the text of the Voyages of John Meares, published in 1790. On 10 Feb. 1802 Mackenzie was knighted, possibly at the instigation of Edward Augustus,
Duke of Kent and Strathearn. The single extant letter from the duke to
Mackenzie, dated 1 Nov. 1819, indicates that they were on terms of
friendship.
In the last few pages of his Voyages
Mackenzie had again outlined his proposal for cooperation between the
NWC, the HBC, and the East India Company. In January 1802 he presented
the plan to Lord Hobart, the Colonial secretary. It now included the
Pacific coast fisheries, and Mackenzie was thinking of a central
establishment at Nootka Sound (B.C.) and two outposts, one to the north
and the other to the south. Meanwhile, a complication had arisen. In
1798, before Mackenzie had left Canada, the New North West Company,
later known as the XY Company, had formed around the powerful trading
partnership of Forsyth, Richardson and Company, and it soon offered the
old concern spirited competition. Mackenzie had acquired shares in it as
early as 1800, and by 1802 it was sometimes known as Sir Alexander
Mackenzie and Company. Hobart suggested that the first step toward a
wider trading arrangement should be a union of the two companies based
on Montreal. Mackenzie returned to Montreal in 1802 to bring this about,
but antagonism between Simon McTavish and himself was too great to make
union possible. A coalition suddenly became practicable in 1804 when
McTavish died. Mackenzie had long been a close friend of McTavish’s
nephew and successor, William McGillivray*;
for several years in Montreal, when both were bachelors, they shared
quarters, and their convivial life was the talk of the town. But
although he had many friends and was socially popular, in the trade
Mackenzie had evidently come to be considered a trouble-maker, and he
was excluded from the new united concern.
At a loose end,
Mackenzie was persuaded to enter politics. On 16 June 1804 he was
elected to represent the county of Huntingdon in the House of Assembly
of Lower Canada. Although he continued to be a member until 1808, he
attended only the first session; by January 1805, as he confessed to his
cousin Roderick, he was already “heartily tired of Legislation.” He
wished sincerely “that those who thought themselves my friends in being
the means of getting me to so honorable a situation had been otherwise
employed.” He seems not to have taken his responsibilities as a member
very seriously, since he went to London in the autumn of 1805 and made
only brief visits to Canada thereafter, the last in 1810.
The description of the
Red River country in Mackenzie’s Voyages is said to have been the first
to arouse the interest of Lord Selkirk [Douglas]
in the region, and this circumstance may have led to their meeting. In
1808 both men, anxious to influence the HBC but for quite different
reasons, began buying the company’s stock. Mackenzie was hoping to exert
pressure to secure the use of the Hudson Bay supply route for the
Montreal traders; Selkirk was interested in a land grant in the Red
River country on which to found a colony. At first relations were
cordial, for Mackenzie, it seems, was under the impression that the
grant Selkirk was seeking would be modest and would not interfere with
the fur trade. When the huge dimensions of the scheme became apparent he
and representatives of the NWC did their utmost to prevent the grant’s
being made, but it was approved by the HBC’s General Court at the end of
May 1811. Three months later Mackenzie learned of the failure of
another of his efforts to secure official backing for his plan to
reorganize the fur trade: a memorandum he had submitted to Viscount
Castlereagh, then Colonial secretary, in March 1808 was at last
considered by the Privy Council committee for trade in August 1811, and
the board declined to take any action.
By this time Mackenzie
had decided to retire to Scotland. On 12 April 1812 in a letter to
Roderick McKenzie he announced his marriage to Geddes Mackenzie, one of
the twin daughters of George Mackenzie, a Scot who had prospered in
London and had died in 1809. The bride was 14 years of age; Mackenzie
was 48. Geddes and her sister had inherited the estate of Avoch, and
about the time of his marriage Mackenzie purchased it for £20,000. He
and Lady Mackenzie usually spent the season in London and lived the rest
of the year at Avoch, where Mackenzie took an interest in local
activities and improvements. A daughter was born in 1816, and two sons
followed in 1818 and 1819. By the time the sons were born Mackenzie’s
health was failing; Bright’s disease appears to have been the most
likely cause. In January 1820 he went to Edinburgh to seek medical
advice; in March, on the return journey to Avoch, he died unexpectedly
in a wayside inn near Dunkeld.
Mackenzie’s fame is
based solidly upon his two remarkable expeditions, both of which
penetrated far into huge areas hitherto unexplored. He was only 29 when
he returned from the Pacific in 1793, and the relative ineffectiveness
of his activities thereafter made his later career somewhat of an
anticlimax. The union of the New North West Company with the NWC in 1804
excluded him from the fur trade in Canada, and Selkirk defeated his
attempt to gain control of the HBC in 1811. Only after his death did the
newly reconstituted HBC adopt many aspects of his scheme for a
continent-wide fur trade.
[Mackenzie’s home at Avoch was burned in 1833 and his papers were lost
in the fire. He had presented a fair copy of his original journal of the
expedition to the Arctic to the Marquess of Buckingham; this is now in
BL, Stowe mss 793, ff.1–81. The journal
of the second expedition exists only in the version edited by William
Combe in the published accounts of Mackenzie’s voyages. The most
important surviving item in Mackenzie’s own handwriting is a letterbook
copy of 11 letters written from New York in 1798 (PAM, HBCA, F.3/1).
Roderick McKenzie received a considerable number of letters from his
cousin, but he appears to have destroyed the originals and they now
exist only in transcripts (PAC, MG 19, C1), the accuracy of which is
frequently doubtful. Copies of other letters are scattered through the
collections relating to the fur trade in PAC, MG 19, and AUM, P 58, G1.
Fortunately the
fine portrait of Mackenzie by Sir Thomas Lawrence was saved from the
fire at Avoch; it is now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. A
second portrait is known to have been painted by James Sharples in New
York in 1798; presumably it was lost in the fire.
Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal, on the river St. Laurence,
through the continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific
oceans; in the years, 1789 and 1793; with a preliminary account of the
rise, progress, and present state of the fur trade of that country,
[ed. William Combe], was published in London in 1801; a two-volume
second edition was published in 1802. Editions were published in New
York and Philadelphia the same year; a French translation and two
editions in German also appeared in 1802. An abridged translation in
Russian was published in 1808. Of the many later complete and partial
editions the most useful follow. Exploring the northwest territory: Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s journal of a voyage by bark canoe from Lake Athabasca to the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1789,
ed. T. H. McDonald (Norman, Okla., 1966). This was the first
publication of Mackenzie’s own text of the journal of his first voyage. First man west: Alexander Mackenzie’s journal of his voyage to the Pacific coast of Canada in 1793, ed. Walter Sheppe (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1962). The journals and letters of Sir Alexander Mackenzie,
ed. and intro. W. K. Lamb (Cambridge, Eng., 1970). This work, no.41 in
the Hakluyt Society’s extra series, includes Mackenzie’s text of the
journal of the first expedition, the journal of the second expedition as
published in 1801, and all known letters and fragments of letters. It
has an extensive bibliography. Volume 1 of Les bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest
(Masson) contains “‘Reminiscences’ by the Honorable Roderic McKenzie
being chiefly a synopsis of letters from Sir Alexander Mackenzie.”
Biographies include the following: Roy Daniells, Alexander Mackenzie and the north west (London, 1969); J. K. Smith, Alexander Mackenzie, explorer: the hero who failed (Toronto and New York, [1973]), a highly critical appraisal; M. S. Wade, Mackenzie of Canada: the life and adventures of Alexander Mackenzie, discoverer (Edinburgh and London, 1927); and [H.] H. Wrong, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, explorer and fur trader (Toronto, 1927).
Other useful works are: Basil Stuart-Stubbs, Maps relating to Alexander Mackenzie: a keepsake for the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Société bibliographique du Canada ([Vancouver], 1968); R. P. Bishop, Mackenzie’s Rock: with a map showing the course followed by the explorer from Bella Coola, B.C., to the rock, and illustrated with views along the route (Ottawa, [1924]); M. W. Campbell, NWC (1957); Morton, Hist. of Canadian west; Rich, Hist. of HBC; H. R. Wagner, Peter Pond, fur trader and explorer ([New Haven, Conn.], 1955); T. Bredin, “Mackenzie, Slave Lake and Whale Island,” Beaver, outfit 294 (summer 1963): 54–55; R. H. Fleming, “McTavish, Frobisher and Company of Montreal,” CHR, 10 (1929): 136–52, and “The origin of ‘Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Company,’” CHR, 9 (1928): 137–55; R. G. Glover, “Hudson’s Bay to the Orient,” Beaver, outfit 281 (December 1950): 47–51; E. A. Mitchell, “New evidence on the Mackenzie–McTavish break,” CHR, 41 (1960): 41–47; Franz Montgomery, “Alexander Mackenzie’s literary assistant,” CHR, 18 (1937): 301–4; J. K. Stager, “Alexander Mackenzie’s exploration of the Grand River,” Geographical Bull. (Ottawa), 7 (1965): 213–41; and F. C. Swannell, “Alexander Mackenzie as surveyor,” Beaver, outfit 290 (winter 1959): 20–25, and “On Mackenzie’s trail,” Beaver, outfit 289 (summer 1958): 9–14. w.k.l.]
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