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Updated: June 26, 2025
The trout in Lake Athabaska seem to have been enormous, weighing from 35 to 40 pounds, while pike were of about the same weight. The Amerindian tribes and the early European explorers lived mainly on fish, which was a palatable and easily obtained food. Yet it must be admitted that they had a splendid array of large and small game from which to take their toll.
In 1792, when the Russians were pressing down from their Alaskan posts, when the Spaniards, claiming the Pacific for their own, were exploring the mouth of the Fraser, when Captain Robert Gray of Boston was sailing up the mighty Columbia, and Captain Vancouver was charting the northern coasts for the British Government, a young North-West Company factor, Alexander Mackenzie, in his lonely post on Lake Athabaska, was planning to cross the wilderness of mountains to the coast.
You remember how you'd drive into one of them, leap away, then tear into another. Like a wolf for all the world! You was always hard to get into a fight, but you know as well as I do, and I ain't salvin' you when I say it, that you're the most terrible, ferocious fighter, forgettin' everything but blood, that ever paddled a canoe on the Athabaska.
For the expedition inland Norton needed especially a man able to record with scientific accuracy the exact positions which he reached. Norton's choice fell upon Hearne. The young man was instructed to make his way to the Athabaska country and thence to find if he could the river of the north whence the copper came, and to trace the river to the sea.
Up in the Athabaska country, eating his heart out with chagrin because his associates in the North-West Company of Montreal had ignored his voyage of discovery down the Mackenzie river to the Arctic in 1789, the young trader Alexander Mackenzie heard these rumours of new wealth in furs on the Pacific. Who would be the first overland to that western sea?
On another occasion he went alone and afoot from House River up the Athabaska to Calling River, and across the Point to the Athabaska again, then up to the Landing-150 rough miles in four days.
The company issued urgent instructions to its traders in the Far West to keep pushing up the North and South Saskatchewan, up the Red Deer, up the Bow, up the Athabaska, up the Smoky, up the Pembina, and to press over the mountains wherever any river led oceanwards through the passes.
Fort McKay was the last point at which we saw the Chipewyan style of teepee, and the first where the Cree appeared. But its chief interest to us lay in the fact that it was the home of Jiarobia, a capable river-man who wished to go to Athabaska Landing.
Mackenzie thought and thought, and paced his quarters up at Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabaska, till his mind became so filled with the idea of an overland journey to the Pacific that he could not sleep or rest.
But a hundred years ago and more the dominant features in the fauna of the Middle West was the bison. Between the Athabaska and Saskatchewan Rivers on the north, the Rocky Mountains on the west, and Lake Superior on the east the bison passed backwards and forwards over the great plains and prairies in millions, when white explorers first penetrated these lands.
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