DISCOVERY BY ALEXANDER MACKENZIE

the course of a few days he met a woman from the coast
all bedecked in ornaments of various kinds.

After crossing two mountains the whole party came upon
an arm of the sea, now Bentinck Inlet, among troublesome
Indians, where the indefatigable explorer wrote on a rock,
“ Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-
second of July, one thousand seven hundred and _ninety-
faree- bins

In another month, August 24th, the intrepid voyagers
were safely back at Fort Chippewayan.*

I. While some authors are evidently unfair to S. Fraser, who was the first
British Columbian of note, others, like the writer of a sketch of the Hudson’s
Bay Company, in a booklet on the ‘‘ History of the SS. Beaver,” are hardly
just to the memory of Alexander Mackenzie when they state that ‘‘ Simon
Fraser . . . appears to have been the first white man to cross the Cana-
dian Rockies in charge of an expedition ” (p. 6). That same author is scarcely
more accurate when he writes, immediately after the above astonishing state.
ment, that Fraser discovered, in 1806-07, the river that bears his name. (See
Chapter V.) On the other hand, Dr. A. Rattray unduly antedates Mac-
kenzie’s discoveries in the west when he says that ‘‘the Rocky Mountains
formed an impassable barrier until Sir Alexander Mackenzie crossed them in
1790” ; and that author is furthermore inaccurate in stating that the Scotch
explorer traced ‘‘the Peace River and the head-waters of the Fraser River to
their source ” (‘‘ Vancouver Island and British Columbia,” p. 7), which he did
in neither case. Nay, most authors seem more or less at sea when it is a
question of early British Columbia chronology. One would hardly believe
that a writer with such a reputation for historical accuracy and critical acumen
as R. Greenhow enjoys, in spite of the too evident anti-British complexion of
his writings, could have stated in his ‘‘ History of Oregon and California”
(p. 264), that the I'raser was never traced to its mouth before 1812, instead of
1808, as we will see in the course of this work. The same author, referring
(z4¢@., p. 290) to the foundation of the ¢hivd N. W. Co. fort west of the
mountains, writes (accentuating the appositeness of his remark by the use of
italics): ‘‘ This was the first settlement or post of any kind made by British
subjects west of the Rocky Mountains!” (See footnotes to pp. 54 and 65 of
the present work.)