CHAPTER IV

LA GRANDE RIVIERE EN BAS

‘Tue Grand River flowing out of Great Slave Lake to some
unknown bourne had been up to this day when Mackenzie
and his party entered it a more or less mythical stream,
spoken of by Indians and depicted on Pond’s maps, but
really a plaything of the imagination, whose course was made
to span a country of indefinite extent, and unite, in the minds
of enthusiasts like Pond and Ogden, Great Slave Lake with
such distant points as the “River of the West,’? Cook’s
River on the Pacific, and the Icy Sea in the North,

What Mackenzie’s theories were with regard to the course
of this river are not precisely known. Had he been convinced
that, like the Coppermine, it emptied into Polar seas, it is
doubtful whether he would have pursued his explorations
northward with so much persistence. Hearne’s journeyings
were familiar to him. He was aware that, while adding to
geographical knowledge, Hearne’s discoveries had not added
to the great company’s coffers in the way of trade. The far
North did not particularly attract the trader. The North-
West Company had mapped out an ambitious plan to survey
the immense territory between the fifty-fifth and sixty-
fifth parallels extending from Hudson Bay to the Pacific.
It was consequently within these latitudes that new water-
ways would prove alluring. The fur-traders knew the
position of Cook’s River, or Cook’s Entry, in Alaska; and
on maps of North America current in Mackenzie’s time,
a large river flowing into the Pacific in about the same

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