North-Western America SS

The continent of North America at the time of the
conquest of Canada when the British fur-traders began to
take an interest in the country beyond the Great Lakes was
known within boundaries roughly indicated by a line drawn
from the Bay of San Francisco to the Gulf of Mexico,
thence up the Mississippi and along the Great Lakes to the
Atlantic. North and west of that line there existed certain
more or less known areas and positions which enabled the
cartographers to fill in the general outlines and features of
the continent in those quarters. |

The Alaskan coast had been roughly blocked out from
Cape Addington off Prince of Wales Island in latitude 55° 30’
to the Commander Islands on the Kamschatkan coast by
Vitus Bering and his lieutenant Chirikov, 1725-40. But
from Drake’s Bay in California to 55° 30’ north, the coast-
line was not known, nor had any river in that extent flowing
into the Pacific been discovered. The whole Arctic coast

round from Bering Strait to Baffin Land was a blank. Hud-

son Bay had been mapped, and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s
people knew the districts around their forts, and had some
more or less vague notions of the interior obtained from the
tribes that visited them. The company had sent out its own
explorers at different times, urged on by a public opinion
which at that early date questioned the validity of their
claims to a large proportion of the North American continent. —

Kellsey ! was the first of these, but the tale that he brought
back in 1692 of his wanderings in the western interior has
never been regarded seriously. In the next century Anthony
Hendry, in the interests of his employers, travelled by way
of Hayes River and the Saskatchewan as far as the Red Deer
River, where he wintered in 1754-5 among the dreaded
Blackfeet, but his superiors declined to believe his account

1 See note at end of chapter.