40 Sir ALEXANDER MACKENZIE

imagination in depicting territories which he
had never visited. The great river of the
Athabaska district is known by three names:
from the Rocky Mountains to near Lake
Athabaska (it does not actually pass through
the lake) it is called the Peace; from Lake
Athabaska to Great Slave Lake it is called
the Slave; and thence to its mouth in the
Arctic Ocean it is called the Mackenzie. Pond
seems to have known its course from some
distance up the Peace down as far as Great
Slave Lake; for the rest he relied on his own
conjectures and on Indian reports. His
theory (or one of his theories) was that Great
Slave Lake drained into the Pacific; he even
described to an acquaintance in Quebec the
nature of the river in detail: “From out of
the Great Slave Lake runs a very large river,
which runs almost south-west, and has the
largest falls on it in the known world; it is at
least two miles wide where the falls are, and
an amazing body of water.” He (or rather
his acquaintance, for the quotation is from a
letter reporting a conversation with Pond in
1789) goes on to say that this river flows round