CHAPTER II
STEPPING WESTWARD

CANADA was already British in 1763, the year in which
Mackenzie was born. The Hudson’s Bay Company had
reached the end of its first century. he French traders
with few exceptions had vanished. In the same year Alexander
Henry, the elder, was captured at Michilimackinac by
Pontiac, when the redman made his last despairing effort
to oust the encroaching European. George the Third had
been three years upon the throne, the Treaty of Versailles,
which fixed the Mississippi as the dividing-line between
British and Spanish America, had been signed, and the
United States was still thirteen years away from its first
birthday.

No British trader had yet penetrated farther west than
Lake Superior, and little or nothing was known of the
continent north of the Pascoya or Saskatchewan River, and
west of the immediate sea-board of Hudson Bay. Neither
Hearne nor Cocking had yet gone forth beyond the imme-
diate precincts of the bay. Anthony Hendry, Vérendrye’s
sons, and the founders of La Jonquiere had been to the
eastern edge of the foothills of the Rockies, but the whole
of the Pacific shore-line and the Arctic coast from Cape
Mendocino in California clear around into Hudson Bay
was absolutely unknown, with the exception of a dozen or
so landfalls of Bering and Chirikov along the Alaskan coast.
No Spanish settlements existed on the Pacific north of

Mexico. San Diego and Monterey, the first of these, were
18