hers, the forts which were destined to become the present cities of
Winnipeg, Brandon, and Edmonton. The annals of North-West Canada
during the next thirty-three years are made up of the {73} recital of
the commercial rivalry, and at times the actual conflict under arms, of
the two great trading companies.

It was in the service of the North-West Company that Alexander
Mackenzie made his famous journey. He had arrived in Canada in 1779.
After five years spent in the counting-house of a trading company at
Montreal, he had been assigned for a year to a post at Detroit, and in
1785 had been elevated to the dignity of a bourgeois or partner in the
North-West Company. In this capacity Alexander Mackenzie was sent out
to the Athabaska district to take control, in that vast and scarcely
known region, of the posts of the traders now united into the
North-West Company.

A glance at the map of Canada will show the commanding geographical
position occupied by Lake Athabaska, in a country where the waterways
formed the only means of communication. It receives from the south and
west the great streams of the Athabaska and the Peace, which thus
connect it with the prairies of the Saskatchewan valley and with the
Rocky Mountains. Eastward a chain of lakes and rivers connects it and
the forest country which lies about it with the barren grounds and the
forts on Hudson Bay, while to the north, {74} issuing from Lake
Athabaska, a great and unknown river led into the forests, moving
towards an unknown sea.

It was Mackenzie's first intention to make Lake Athabaska the frontier
of the operations of his company. Acting under his instructions, his
cousin Roderick Mackenzie, who served with him, selected a fine site on
a cape on the south side of the lake and erected the post that was
named Fort Chipewyan. Beautifully situated, with good timber and
splendid fisheries and easy communication in all directions, the fort
rapidly became the central point of trade and travel in the far
north-west. But it was hardly founded before Mackenzie had already
conceived a wider scheme. Chipewyan should be the emporium but not the
outpost of the fur trade; using it as a base, he would descend the
great unknown waterway which led north, and thus bring into the sphere
of the company's operations the whole region between Lake Athabaska and
the northern sea. Alexander Mackenzie's object was, in name at least,
commercial--the extension of the trade o