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...