12 Mackenzie’s Voyages

catch of furs. They were met at Ile a la Crosse and the
traders returned down the river with them to the new fort.

This meeting with the Chipewyans was important for
several reasons. The Montreal traders by intercepting them
here stirred up the Hudson’s Bay Company to decided
action. The natives came from a country that had not yet
been entered by any white man, and they brought important
information, probably the first authentic word of a possible
route to the Pacific. From them Henry learned that a great
river, the Unjigah or Peace, came from the western moun-
tains, which were not far from a salt sea beyond them; and
that Slave River flowed into Slave Lake, but the outlet of
the latter was not known. These two rivers and the lake
were then known by the Indian equivalents of their
present names.

Frobisher and Henry were the first to ascend the Churchill
to Ile a la Crosse, and the first of the Canadian traders to
hear of the Peace River route to the Pacific. The Chipewy-
ans who hunted in the Peace, Slave and Athabasca countries
and carried their peltries all the way to Hudson Bay were
evidently worth cultivating, consequently we find Thomas
Frobisher ascending the Churchill to establish a post at
Ile a la Crosse, while Joseph Frobisher and Alexander
Henry went east to Montreal.

Peter Pond now enters the story and continues the process
of unrolling the map farther west and northward. He had
preceded Alexander Henry into the West, coming in, it
is stated, in 1768, and was, therefore, close on the heels of
Thomas Curry and James Finlay. He was regarded by all
his confréres as a trader of ability. He was, moreover, imbued
with the explorer’s enthusiasm, and in the course of his
stormy career did more than any one individual of that
period, with the exception of Alexander Mackenzie, in the