ay comprehend the motives and reasons which prompted the
journeys which are about to be described.

Jonathan Carver, of Boston, U.S.A., was perhaps the pioneer of all
the British traders into the far west of Canada, beyond Lake Superior,
after Canada had been handed over to the British.[1] In 1766-7 he
reached the Mississippi at its junction with the St. Peter or
Minnesota River, and journeyed up it to the land of the Dakota. Thomas
Currie, of Montreal, in 1770 travelled as far as Cedar Lake,[2] where
there had been established the French post of Fort Bourbon. He was
succeeded the next year by James Finlay, who extended his explorations
to the Saskatchewan, whither he was followed by Alexander Henry the
Elder in 1775.

[Footnote 1: Carver was not so remarkable for his actual journeys as
for his confident predictions of a feasible transcontinental route
being found to the Pacific coast.]

[Footnote 2: The white-barked conifer, which gives its name to this
lake, is _Thuja occidentalis_. There are no real "cedars" in America.]

Alexander Henry (styled The Elder to distinguish him from his famous
nephew of the same name) was a native of New Jersey (U.S.A.), where he
was born in 1739. His parents were well-to-do people of the middle
class who are believed to have emigrated at the beginning of the
eighteenth century from the West of England, and to have been related
to Matthew Henry, the Bible commentator. Their son, Alexander,
received a good education, and after some commercial apprenticeship at
Albany (New York) came to Quebec when Canada was occupied by the
British in 1760; at which period he was about twenty-one years old. He
was in such a hurry to try a trading adventure in the country of the
great lakes that he ventured into central Canada before it was
sufficiently calmed down and reconciled to British rule. The
hostility, curiously enough, manifested itself much more among the
Amerindians than the settlers of French blood. These white men had not
been so well treated by the arrogant French officers and officials as
much to mind the change to the greater freedom of British government.
But the Indian chiefs and people loved the French, largely owing to
the goodness and solicitude of the missionaries.

"The hostility of the Indians", wrote Henry in his journal, travelling
along the coast of Lake Huron, "was exclusively against the English.
Between them and my Canadian attendants, there appeared the most
cordial go