10 Mackenzie’s Voyages

French trader, Etienne Campion, to make up for his own
lack of experience. Henry was captured when that post was
taken by Pontiac in 1763, but eventually escaped. In 1765
he obtained a grant of the monopoly of the trade around
Lake Superior with Jean Baptiste Cadotte, who had built
a fort on the south side of Sault Ste. Marie.

The first British traders went west from Michilimackinac
in 1765 and 1766 and were plundered by the Indians at
Rainy Lake on both occasions. The next season, however,
two adventurers, whose identity seems shrouded in mystery,
went up Lake Winnipeg. In the account of Matthew
Cocking’s reconnaissance on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay
Company in 1772, James Finlay is reported to have been
on the Saskatchewan in 1767, but Mackenzie says that
Thomas Curry was the pioneer on this river, and Burpee
suggests that the two were together, and may have been the
identical adventurers who were plundered the two preceding
years. At any rate these two share between them the honour
of being the first British traders to operate west of Lake
Superior. .

Joseph Frobisher established Cumberland House on the
lower Saskatchewan in 1772, and proceeded thence by a
series of waterways to the Churchill River, the Missinipi or
English River as the traders called it, where he intercepted
the Chipewyans at Frog Portage and obtained from them
a very large and valuable cargo of furs which had been in-
tended for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at York House.
Matthew Cocking came over from Hudson Bay post-haste
the same year to find out precisely what the presumptuous
Montreal “pedlars’”’ were doing on the Company’s “‘pre-
serves.” Two years later Samuel Hearne was sent inland by
the ancient and honourable company to build a fort at the
most strategic point and selected the site of Cumberland