FIRST FOUNDATIONS

wider than our author thinks. By actual measurement it
is in places over six miles broad.

Thus was the second fort established west of the
mountains.*

It was intended as a rendezvous for the natives of the
whole lake, the exact number of whom could hardly be
realized in the haste of the first visit. Both McDougall
and Fraser, seeing only one fraction of the entire popula-
tion, do not seem to have been much impressed by its
importance; but it is safe to say that they scarcely met
one-quarter of the Indians claiming the lake or its imme-
diate vicinity as their habitat. Yet the former states that
he saw some fifty natives hovering about the lower end of
the lake. If we take these to be hunters and heads of
families, as McDougall no doubt meant it, and if we give

himself writes to his partners in August, 1806: ‘‘ We have established the
post [not the posts] beyond the mountains, and will establish another in the
most conventional (szc) place we can find before the fall,” meaning Fort
Fraser. It is probable, however, that both Masson and Bryce refer only to
that place which was to be known later as Fort St. James. In that case, both
of them are wrong, the former as to distances (Fort St. James being fully ninety
miles from the mouth of Stuart River), and the latter as to the site of the place
(said fort being not on Stuart River, but on Stuart Lake), On the other hand,
Masson can hardly be accurate in writing that Fraser ‘* passed the summer ”
at the lake called after him, since he had not yet so much as seen it on the
3rd of September.

1. To show how history is written in some quarters, here is a sentence
from Macfie’s ‘* Vancouver Island and British Columbia,” p. 203: ‘‘ In 1806,
the first fur-trading post ever established in British Columbia was erected a
short distance from the great bend of Fraser River by the officer of the
Hudson’s Bay Company after whom that stream was named.” The italics are
ours, and represent as many egregious blunders.

Even Alex. Begg, who is generally accurate in his ‘‘ History of the North-
West,” evidently labors under the impression that no trading post was erected
‘“across the Rocky Mountains until about the year 1810” (Vol. I., p. 117), a
statement which, owing to its obliging qualificative, is elastic enough to
disarm the critic. The fact that, in the exceedingly valuable Chronological
Table appended to the third volume of his work (also p. 141, Vol. I. of he

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