Dictionary of Literary Biography on Alexander Mackenzie
In 1802 the Edinburgh Review called attention to Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and 1793 (1801) in a way that anticipates and defines the response of most readers. The reviewer points out how "the idea of traversing a vast and unknown continent ... gives an agreeable expansion to our conceptions; and the imagination is insensibly engaged and inflamed." The statement reaches beyond Mackenzie to most worthwhile exploration literature.
Alexander Mackenzie, born in Stornoway, Scotland, in 1763, the only son and oldest child of Kenneth and Isabella Mackenzie, immigrated with his family to America. As his father was a Royalist, Alexander was sent to Montreal, where after a brief schooling he entered the fur trade in 1779 as a countinghouse clerk. After five years he went west as a trader. In 1787 his concern was absorbed into the North West Company, with Mackenzie becoming a bourgeois (partner). He was sent to Fort Chipewyan in the Athabasca district (now in Alberta) to join and then replace the irascible American Peter Pond, who had been involved in the deaths of two other traders. From Pond, whom the Nor'Westers squeezed out, Mackenzie undoubtedly got his ideas of the possibility of a route that led to either the Pacific or the Arctic and could open a fur trade in China.
In 1789, with his young cousin Roderic Mackenzie looking after trade and logistics in Athabasca, Mackenzie made his first great exploration--to the Arctic by the river later named for him. He is dubiously said to have called it "the River Disappointment" because it reached the sea too far north to open a route to the Pacific; he certainly called it "the Grand River."
In 1793, with Roderic again minding his base, Mackenzie carried out his even more venturesome and arduous journey to the Pacific. Not far from what is now Bella Coola, British Columbia, he wrote his most famous and typically laconic words: "I now mixed up some vermillion in melted grease, and inscribed, in large characters, on the South-East face of the rock on which we had slept last night, this brief memorial--'Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three'" (The Journals and Letters of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, 1970). He had completed the first crossing of North America in its continental width.
Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and 1793 brought fame for him and for his explorations. Two months later he was knighted. Mackenzie himself asked only "the approbation due to simplicity and to truth" (The Journals and Letters of Sir Alexander Mackenzie), a request generally allowed by posterity. Only occasionally does he indulge in rhetoric or fancy writing, although this may in part come from his editor, William Combe, the author of Doctor Syntax. The real force of Mackenzie's writing comes from his energetic practicality. Indeed, Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and 1793 has an epic quality, but with the absence of epic similes. Mackenzie himself had the bravery, persistence, keenness of observation, inventiveness, wariness, and diplomacy of Odysseus; in addition, he was honest; he also avoided violence, never firing a hostile shot in all his journeys among Indians.
Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and 1793 is essentially his own, a slight reworking of the journals of his two explorations. However, his failure to admit the contribution of others to both his explorations and his book reveals an egotistic lack of feeling in a generally admirable man. Pond gets no credit for his ideas; nor Roderic for his support or for writing the long introduction on the history of the fur trade; nor David Thompson for drawing the maps or for contributing the many geographical locations in the introduction.
Marshall Bernadotte had Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and 1793 specially translated for Napoleon, who was interested in finding a back route for a diversionary expedition against Canada. Thomas Jefferson bought a copy. No doubt it spurred him on to establish the Lewis and Clark expedition, which Mackenzie later reported on (1809).
After leaving the West in 1794, Mackenzie continued until the end of his life to be involved in struggles for control of the fur trade, first for the North West Company, then for the Hudson's Bay Company. He married Geddes Mackenzie in 1812. Still a relatively wealthy man, he died in Scotland on 12 March 1820.
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