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Discovery by Alexander Mackenzie.

1792-1793.
‘OR more than a century the Hudson’s Bay Company,

a commercial corporation with which the reader

will in due time become better acquainted, had
been claiming the monopoly of the fur trade over the
vast basin of Hudson Bay and its tributaries, while their
claim over the western territories adjoining what was then
Canada had come to be disputed by several merchants of
Montreal, on the plea that the said territories originally
belonged to French Canada and that the English com-
pany’s pretension to trade thereon was condemned by the
very letter of its own charter. This, they argued, expressly
specified that the lands handed over to the new corpora-
tion were those which were not actually “ possessed by the
subjects of any other Christian Prince or State” at the
time of its formation. As individual efforts could not have
much effect on the powerful company, the chief fur-dealers
of Montreal, among whom Joseph Frobisher and Simon
McTavish were the most prominent personalities, united
their interests in 1783, and constituted themselves the
North-West Fur-Trading Company.

But the new concern had hardly been brought into
existence when, at the instigation of a troublesome char-
acter, an American named Peter Pond, a few fur-dealers
among whom was a young man known as Alexander

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