Alexander had been in the trade several years longer than Roderic and by hard work and good timing had already been named a partner of the North West Company, the most junior member of that exclusive fraternity. Meanwhile, Roderic was still laboring as a clerk, a bookkeeping apprentice, and was wondering if his chance would ever come. But Alexander needed Roderic, if he was going to seize the opportunity that lay before him that summer.
The fur trade was a global business, and multicultural, reliant on London countinghouses, led by Scots and Americans, utilizing French labor, trading with Indians in a vast wilderness, and shipping around the world. Which caused the bourgeois of the North West Company endless problems.
The mechanics of their trade were slow. Ships and canoes moved only a hundred miles a day. Payment from Europe could take years, and so their capital was perpetually at risk; one bad season would drown them in their debt. The most valuable beaver furs lay ever more to the north and west, so their clerks and voyageurs pushed farther inland every year. And to top it all off, recent reports said that sea otters—and, more important, Indians willing to trade their pelts—were crawling all over the Pacific coast, a place to which they had no access.
For all those reasons and more, at that rendezvous in the summer of 1788, the Northwest Passage was on the agenda. Alexander Mackenzie was the one who put it there, because with his cousin’s help he intended to persuade his partners to send him in search of it, a voyage that would make his fortune.
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From the moment Christopher Columbus realized that he had stumbled upon a new continent, rather than China, there was always a tension, among European explorers, between exploiting the riches of the New World and finding a route around it.
Yes, this new land was full of tobacco and furs and gold. But it was also in the way. European markets clamored for tea, spices, blue-and-white porcelain dinner settings, silk stockings. For every businessman who sought to strip the New World of resources, another just wanted to get on to the real market in China; in 1497, even as Spain colonized the West Indies, John Cabot, an Italian sailing under an English charter, tried to find a northwest passage around America. The continent had only been known to Europeans for five years, and they were already trying to bypass it. Cabot failed, bumping into Newfoundland instead.
In this golden age of discovery, nothing was actually discovered. White humans stepped no place in North America that other human feet had not already trodden. But these Europeans did leave a mark, because they did two things that no one else had. They mapped the lands, and they told the rest of the world about them.
To the south, few rivers promised passage through the continent. John Smith, after founding Jamestown in 1607, tried to find the Pacific by sailing up the Chickahominy and the Potomac, but these rivers quickly dried up at the Endless Mountains of the Appalachians. In 1609, Henry Hudson’s river option petered out, so he went to the north and gave his name to the frozen bay where he died in 1611, set adrift in a dingy by his mutinous and starving crew. Between Labrador and Greenland lie many gulfs, bays, and straits that tease passage to the Pacific, and all are now named for the naval officers—Frobisher, Davis, Baffin—who tried and failed to transit them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All were turned aside by pack ice. For practical purposes, the matter appeared to be settled. These most northerly reaches were perpetually encrusted in ice, and ever would be, so there could be no northwest passage above the Arctic Circle.
Therefore, between Florida and the northern cold, only one option remained: the St. Lawrence River. It was an obvious choice. The mouth of the waterway serves as a giant funnel, drawing in all ships over a four-hundred-mile swath; even in its relative narrows, the river forms a grand natural gateway, sheer cliffs on either side, a portal through which you could march all the world’s armies. Only the St. Lawrence breached the Endless Mountains, ran free from ice most of the year, and accessed the heart of the continent. Many leading cartographers believed it would prove to be one end of an interior northwest passage.
That such a northwest passage should exist at all was a conclusion of inescapable logic. Since Aristotle, geographers subscribed to a philosophy of a balanced earth, in both weight and function. That the same amount of land must appear in the northern hemisphere as the southern, that features present in one area would be mirrored in all others, was axiomatic. This theory had already produced results; the long-sought terra australis, a large continent in the south required to balance Europe and Asia in the north, was found by Dutch sailors in the South Pacific in the seventeenth century. So too, if a southern passage existed around South America at Tierra del Fuego, a corresponding waterway must exist in the north.
And the North West Company intended to find it, because in the fur trade the competing goals of continental exploitation and bisection were finally united in one inescapable business imperative.
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The North West Company wanted to ship furs directly to China, shortening a supply chain that crisscrossed the earth, first to London and then back around the southern tip of Cape Horn. And so bourgeois had long searched for a river that pierced the heart of the continent, the equivalent of a new Danube, Indus, or Volga. Claiming such a northwest passage would be a geographic coup and a profit bonanza.
And at the rendezvous of 1788, the North West Company partners heard, for the first time, that they were close to finding this river. The news originated with Peter Pond, an American from Connecticut and one of their most experienced traders and explorers. For a decade, Pond had worked farther north than any of them, made alliances with the Cree and Chipewyan to push into new territories, and always collected and cataloged geographic details everywhere he paddled. At Slave Lake, on the far edge of the North West Company trading empire, Red Knife Indians had reported to Pond the existence of a river of enormous size. It was larger than any river he knew, they said, and bore ever on into the setting sun.
The North West Company agents considered this news. And then they made a remarkable decision. They did not send Peter Pond to explore the river. They chose Alexander Mackenzie instead.
Mackenzie was only twenty-six years old. He was the youngest partner of the North West Company, and not by a small margin; most of the gentlemen were more than a dozen years his senior. Only four years before, Mackenzie had been overjoyed to simply be given “a small adventure of goods” to try his hand trading in Detroit. Now he was asking for the top assignment: to lead an expedition through the continent, a feat that had resisted the best attempts of famous explorers like Henry Hudson and Captain Cook. Both men were legend, vastly more educated, experienced, and respected than the unknown Mackenzie, and both died—Hudson abandoned, Cook in an attack by native Hawaiians—on their final voyages in search of the Northwest Passage.
This river that Mackenzie intended to follow cleaved lands unknown and largely unclaimed by Europeans, and official borders were not yet enforced in any meaningful way. The Treaty of Paris, ending the war between Great Britain and its thirteen colonies, had been signed only a few years before, but the British still held all the relevant inland garrisons. The Indian nations had been decimated by disease and displaced from their traditional homelands; like so many sitters on a long bench, each shoved west one space when the Europeans claimed the Atlantic coast. French-speaking Canadiens and their Indian mixed-blood families, as they were known, had settled broadly but were stateless. The Spanish owned Louisiana, the mostly uncharted territory that stretched hundreds of miles to the west of the rendezvous, but were nearly absent and let the place fend for itself. The few maps of the time showed a spidery network of rivers and lakes, interconnected and unbroken and framing vast tracts of nothingness, from New Orleans to Hudson’s Bay.
Which is to say, the North West Company operated in a land of opportunity, not nationality or borders or law. Mackenzie himself called it a place of nothing but “drinking, carousing, and quarrelling.” And these were
just the sporadic inhabited areas; who knew what lay beyond?
But Mackenzie was undeterred by these obstacles. When he “contemplated the practicability of penetrating across the continent of America,” he was “confident” in his “qualifications.” He had resources: the reports from Pond, plus, back in the Barren Lands of the north, a trusted guide and business partner in the trading chief of the Chipewyan, whom he would ask to accompany him. Never mind that the journey would transit terra nova for them all, the Chipewyan chief included.
Under the terms Alexander proposed, he would follow the “water communications reported to lead from Slave Lake,” while his cousin would run his trading post. “Roderic Mackenzie, if he will undertake it, will from his experience and local knowledge be in my opinion the fittest person you can find,” he told the North West Company bourgeois.
The instructions from his partners returned just as Alexander had hoped. As he wrote in his journal, with flair, he was to go “by Order of the N.W Company, in a Bark Canoe in search of a Passage by Water through the N. W. Continent of America.” His goal: “the Pacific Ocean in Summer 1789.”
It was a time of great flux. In the former thirteen colonies, the Constitution was still being ratified. George Washington had been proposed as king. And at the annual rendezvous, young Alexander Mackenzie was chosen to lead an expedition through the continent’s crown, the largest blank space left on the map of North America.
— 2 —
INTO THE NORTH, 2016
Alexander Mackenzie intended to find the Northwest Passage, and I would follow him.
Simple curiosity drove me forward. About the man himself, about this great river he descended. The Dene know it as the Deh Cho, but it’s now officially named the Mackenzie River. How could such a mammoth body of water, over a thousand miles long, be hiding in plain sight?
Every American knows Lewis and Clark, their Corps of Discovery and search for the Pacific. So why not their forerunners? In 1789, when Mackenzie and his voyageurs and indigenous guides launched with the intent to cross the continent via the Northwest Passage, Meriwether Lewis was still a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in Virginia, and Sacajawea might not have yet been born.
I asked myself, if I had devoured the histories of Arctic explorers like Amundsen and Franklin and Shackleton, how had I never read of this man Mackenzie? And if I could trace the Missouri and Colorado Rivers, if I knew how the Hudson and Lake Champlain got their names, how could I not do the same for this waterway, greater than them all? I had never even heard of it; Wikipedia had to clue me in.
In Mackenzie and this river, my natural writerly inquisitiveness combined with a paddler’s desire to explore new waters. To enter my own terra nova, one of the last places on earth unmapped by Google Street View, a place you have to see in person if you want to see it at all.
Mackenzie traversed those waters via canoe, and so I planned the same. My choice involved more than historic homage; it is the perfect slow vehicle to see the country. No noise, no pollution, no trace left of your passage, yet still able to travel far enough a day to give the sense one is making progress.
I had spent my share of time in flat-water canoes and kayaks, but my boating confidence was primarily drawn from my years guiding on the rivers of upstate and western New York: the Salmon, the Letchworth gorge, and the Cattaraugus, or Bad Smelling Banks in Seneca, named for the natural gas seeping out of the shale. Whitewater rafting had made me comfortable reading hydraulic cues, making quick decisions in rapidly moving water, and swimming to safety when required.
So I flattered myself as an experienced journeyman. New York State had certified me as a guide; I had to pass a test and everything. I told family that while I had never undertaken a trip of this size, I knew what I was getting into. That it differed from my experience only in degree, not in kind.
In reality, though, all I had done was convince myself that because I knew how to jog around the block, I could, given enough time, run a marathon. Or two months’ worth of marathons, back to back to back. My wife was not so easily fooled and told me, from the moment I broached the idea to canoe the Mackenzie, that I would not be doing it alone. In fact, I must take someone who, far better than I, knew what he was doing.
I admit, the idea of going so far up the map made me a little nervous, in a giddy fear-of-heights sort of way. As if I would be climbing up to the top of a very tall ladder, and I’d need to maintain my balance “up” there or I’d fall somehow. That I’d get caught, and some authority was going to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to go so high and for my own safety I had to get back down.
This latitude was new to me, north of 60 degrees, a chilly two-thirds of the way up from the equator. I had never been higher than Anchorage in Alaska, which hardly counted, I said to myself, because I flew there in a plane. In Europe, I had come close to that latitude, in Copenhagen, Edinburgh, and Göteborg, cities that feel more like extensions of continental culture than any northern frontier. And now I wanted to start at 60 degrees and travel from there, via canoe, another thousand miles north?
I laughed at myself; there were real and rational safety issues, I didn’t need to invent any. In traditional American mythology, we associate the West with opportunity, but the North is known for hardship. Their conjunction—in the Northwest Passage, North West Company, Northwest Territories—speaks to both ideas. You go north and west to test yourself, but in pursuit of an objective. The suffering is made up for by hard-won furs, diamonds, Yukon gold. Something tangible that makes the trip worth it.
The motto of the hommes du nord was “Fortitude in Distress.” But it could easily have been “Fortune from Distress.”
I had advantages Mackenzie did not, paper topological charts and GPS, but I was impressed how little the land revealed of itself during such cartographic reconnaissance. On a map, it looks as if all the freshwater in the world were up there, though geologists say it is actually only one-fifth of the planet’s supply. The satellite image is of a mirror shattered, a cup of water then poured over the surface, streams and pools in every crack. This is the effect of the indestructible Canadian Shield, the mound of ancient granite that stretches from Minnesota to New York’s Adirondacks, Newfoundland to Greenland, across much of Canada’s Arctic coast. Ponds and creeks stud the shield itself, and along its outer rim lie the largest lakes on earth: Huron, Michigan, Superior, Winnipeg, Athabasca, Great Slave, Great Bear, all in an arc. Their northern shores rock, their southern shores mud, like puddles on the edge of a parking lot where the asphalt meets the dirt.
Mackenzie was of an era when scientific knowledge could still be expanded through brute physical means, by exposing oneself to the rigors of travel and danger. He wanted to find a route to sell furs to the Orient. I wanted, well, something more existential. Pure urge, from the groin and gut and other anxious parts of the body. A need to flee, before death or quiet desperation or both. To light out for the territories with Huck. It’s glandular. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move,” wrote D. H. Lawrence. He went to Sardinia; I would go north.
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One muddy spring day, as I first began to plan my journey, I drove through the western Pennsylvania mountains to the home of Wick Walker, an unlikely friend. Wick lives on a horse farm outside Pittsburgh, in a nineteenth-century house with an adjoining ancient barn. Not much has changed in either structure since they were built, a little electricity here and there, very modest indoor plumbing. We all make choices of how much modern technology to accept into our lives; Wick, by choice, dials the clock back more than most. He cooks on a wood-fired stove and fed me eggs and English muffins off the griddle.
Wick is an expert on rivers and expeditions. He canoed at Dartmouth and placed eleventh in the men’s C-1 slalom at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. His good friend Jamie McEwan took bronze. Over the next few decades, Wick, Jamie, and Jamie’s brother Tom pioneered the use of modern plastic kayaks in whitewater. Together, they boast the first desc
ent of many rivers and waterfalls around the world, culminating in their 1998 attempt of Tibet’s Tsangpo gorge, at sixteen thousand feet the deepest canyon in the world.
I met Wick at a writing workshop; in a modestly embarrassing inversion, he the student and I the teacher. We stayed in touch, via our mutual interest in whitewater and the writing life. At my wife’s instruction to find someone competent and experienced, I thought of Wick first and had already asked him to come with me, because he had somehow never done the Mackenzie River. But Wick politely declined, citing his aching knees. Instead, he offered to let me pick his brain, gather advice for the trip.
That evening, we sat in his upstairs library and drank three-finger whiskeys until late at night. His house is full of books and papers, organized by geography and conflict, the shelves set against every vertical surface, including the stairwell. Wick is a member of the famed Explorers Club—other members include Edmund Hillary and Neil Armstrong—and thus many of the books are first-person narratives written by friends.
Wick is seventy now, speaks slowly in a gravel voice, and closes his eyes when making an important point. I asked for advice in planning my trip, and in answer he handed me the binder he used for his Tsangpo expedition. Everything was orderly and slipped into plastic document protectors: his budget, his grant applications with National Geographic, permits and correspondence with the Chinese government, photographs of his team.
“What about your paddle?” Wick asked.
“I was just going to rent one, I guess,” I said. “I hadn’t given it much thought.”
Wick gave me a disapproving look. “You’ll swing it twelve hours a day, every day. It has to be right. Call Jim Snyder, a friend of mine in West Virginia. Tell him I sent you, and pay him whatever he asks.”
I would contact Jim. He was so meticulous in his measurements, sizing the paddle to my needs and frame, that he had me draw an outline of each hand on a sheet of paper and mail it to him so he could tailor the T-grip to my fingers. The bespoke result was a work of art—curly maple shaft, blade an inlaid mix of black willow, red oak, and sassafras—that weighed less than a box of cereal.
Disappointment River Page 2