MACKENZIE AND HIS
VOYAGEURS

CHAPTER I

UNROLLING THE MAP OF NORTH-WESTERN AMERICA

1670 — 1789

THE new world offered an opportune field for the absorption
of the energies released by the Renascence. ‘The efforts of
the three leading nations of Europe to carve out empires in
the new domain, the factors that resulted in their successes
and failures, the advances made over the terrain, their
acquisition of territory, the clashes that occurred, and the
accelerated trend of population to the new land are the
elements of an epic of enthralling interest. Nothing in history
compares with the North American Saga. The migration
of millions from all the nations of the earth to the promised
land, the beginnings here of a civilisation transcending any-
thing yet thought of by man, the material advancement on a
scale that takes the breath—these are aspects of a drama that
will engage the attention of future historians.

Harking back along the trail, the student who is curious
about the origins of that structure which to-day amazes
him, comes at last to individuals who seem to have been
fated to go forward to discover and mark out the paths where
legions of the busy world were to follow.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie was one of these, and his
I