“ Mackenzie’s Rock” 177

history of North-Western America is rescued from the
twilight of tradition and assigned its proper place in that
colourful pageant which links the marching present with the
immemorial past.

The fact that Mackenzie was the first European to cross
the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific will be more
generally recognised. Lewis and Clarke are still given
credit for this feat by historians who apparently ignore the
facts. Before the cession of Louisiana to the United States,
the prompt and sagacious President Jefferson, with the
approval of Congress, commissioned Captains Meriwether
Lewis and William Clarke to seek and trace to its termina-
tion in the Pacific some stream, “whether the Columbia,
the Oregon, the Colorado, or any other which might offer
the most direct and practicable water-communication across
the continent, for the purposes of commerce.” ‘These
instructions were issued in 1803. A few days after their
delivery to Captain Lewis, the commander of the expedition,
the news of the cession of Louisiana reached the United
States, and he immediately set off for the west. On
15 November, 1805, they landed at Cape Disappointment
or Hancock’s Point, on the northern side of the entrance of
the Columbia into the Pacific, after a journey of more than
four thousand miles from their place of departure.!

Lewis and Clarke were thus twelve years later than
Mackenzie in reaching the Pacific. The Spaniards, it is
true, crossed within their territory in the south. History
credits Cabeza Vaca, and two other Spaniards and a negro,
with having travelled in the course of nine years, 1527-36,
from ‘Tampa in Florida to Culiacan near the Gulf of Cali-
fornia. The wanderings of these adventurers, however,
demonstrated nothing more than the fact that the intervening

1Greenhow’s North-West Coast of North America, p. 152.