Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field

Continental Crossings

Continental Crossings ALAN TAYLOR During the summer of 1793 Alexander Mackenzie led a small expedition of Indians and French Canadians westward up the rocky and rapid Peace River into the Canadian Rockies. Born in Scotland, Mackenzie had emigrated as a boy with his family to the Mohawk Valley in New York in 1774. Remaining loyal to the Union of the Empire, the Mackenzies rejected the Revolution by fleeing northward to British-held Canada. At the age of fifteen, Alexander joined one of the Montreal firms engaged in the fur trade with Indians beyond the Great Lakes. During the 1780s he developed an expertise in the waterways, forests, and natives of the Athabasca region deep in the continent’s northern interior. In 1789 he first sought a route to the Pacific, but instead reached the Arctic. Learning from his mistakes, Mackenzie tried again in 1793.1 Mackenzie knew his desired destination through the writings of British mariners who, beginning with Captain James Cook in 1778, had probed the Northwest coast, opening a profitable trade with the native peoples, exchanging manufactured metal goods for sea otter pelts. Proceeding on to China with those pelts, the mariners purchased porcelain, tea, spices, and silks for conveyance and sale in Europe—completing circumnavigations that lasted over two years. In 1793, Mackenzie sought an overland route across Canada to gain a share in that profitable trade for Montreal’s Alan Taylor is Professor of History at the University of California at Davis and a contributing editor to The New Republic. He is the author of Liberty Men and Great Proprietors (1990), William Cooper’s Town (1995), American Colonies (2001), Writing Early American History (2005), and The Divided Ground: The Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (forthcoming in 2006). 1. Barry Gough, First Across the Continent: Sir Alexander Mackenzie (Norman, 1997), 67–98; W. Kaye Lamp, ‘‘Sir Alexander Mackenzie,’’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 5:537–38. CONTINENTAL CROSSINGS • 33 Northwest Company. Rather than haul sea otter pelts eastward via Montreal to London, the Montreal men hoped to send British manufactures westward over land to the continent’s west coast to procure sea otter pelts and build ships to traverse the Pacific to China.2 The overland passage proved arduous and confusing as the mountains became higher, wider, and more complex than anticipated—leading Mackenzie’s party into steep cul-de-sacs. Ultimately Mackenzie found his way with the help of British manufactured goods, which had reached the Sekani peoples of the mountains. Just a month before a British maritime expedition led by Captain George Vancouver, a protégé of Cook, had visited the Northwest coast. While trading with the natives, one of Vancouver ’s men, Thomas Manby, astutely observed, As neither Land [n]or Water, stops the car[r]ier of commerce, I dare say, many of our articles have by this time, nearly approached, the opposite side of the Continent, as a continual chain of barter, exists between Tribe and Tribe, through this amazing track of Country, which in time, will no doubt, find their way, to our factories in Canada, or the back settlements of Hudson’s bay. Indeed, Indians had long traversed the mountains that were so mysterious , complicated, and daunting to Mackenzie. Upon spying the metal goods among the Sekani, Mackenzie explained that he set out to ‘‘pursue that chain of connexion by which these people obtain their ironwork.’’ Once Mackenzie reached the Nuxalk people on the Bella Coola River, those trade goods proliferated, confirming his proximity to the coast— which the party reached on July 19. The emerging Pacific world of trade that was Mackenzie’s goal also generated the tangible clues that drew his party to its destination. The eastward and overland passage of those clues revealed a long-standing web of intertribal connections otherwise opaque to the explorer.3 In 1793, three centuries after Columbus, most of North America remained Indian country, as European colonization had become consolidated only in Mexico and along the Atlantic Seaboard and in pockets 2. Gough, First Across the Continent, 105–06; James P. Ronda, Astoria & Empire (Lincoln, 1990), 15–18. 3. Thomas Manby quoted in Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York, 2001), 251; Gough, First Across the Continent, 105–23, 128 (Mackenzie quotation). 34 • ALAN TAYLOR along the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, and Rio Grande valleys. And yet, as...