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In May of 1806, after sending the year's furs from Rocky Mountain Portage east to Fort Chipewyan, Simon Fraser set out to explore this inland empire concerning which M'Dougall had reported. John Stuart accompanied Fraser as lieutenant. They crossed from the head-waters of the Parsnip to the south fork of the Fraser, and on June 10 camped at the mouth of the Nechaco.
The point where they embarked, on the morning of June 18, was about thirty-five miles above the Nechaco, or north fork of the Fraser, just at the upper end of the great bend where the south fork, flowing to the north-west, sweeps round in a semicircle, joins its confluent, and pours southward to the sea. This trend of the river to the south was not what Mackenzie expected.
Instead of going down the main stream of the Fraser, M'Dougall ascended both the Nechaco and the Stuart; and if he did not actually behold the beautiful alpine tarns since known as Fraser Lake and Stuart Lake, he was at least the first white man to hear of them.
It will be remembered that M'Dougall had heard of another mountain tarn. This was forty miles south of Stuart Lake, at the headwaters of the Nechaco, the north fork of the Fraser.
Fraser went down the river and strengthened British possession by building a fourth fort Fort George at the mouth of the Nechaco. This was to be the starting-point of the expedition to the Pacific. Then, towards the end of May 1808, he set out down the great river with four canoes, nineteen voyageurs, and Stuart and Quesnel as first assistants.
Accompanied by John Stuart and Jules Quesnel, he left the Fraser River at its junction with the Nechaco on May 22, 1807, and, keeping as near as he could to the course of the river, found himself in the country of the Atna tribe, Amerindians of a diminutive size but active appearance, from whom he obtained an invaluable guide and faithful interpreter, Little Fellow, but for whose bravery, wise advice, and clever diplomacy the journey must have ended in disaster or disappointment a remark which might be made about nearly all the Amerindian guides of the pioneers.
He wanted to follow a stream leading west. Without noticing it, he had passed the north fork, the Nechaco, and was sweeping down the main stream of the Fraser, where towering mountains cut off the view ahead, and the powerful rush of the waters foreboded hard going, if not more rapids and cataracts. Mackenzie must have a new guide.
Stuart went overland south to spy out the southern lake; and his report was of such an entrancing region heavily forested, with an abundance of game and fish that Fraser glided down the Stuart river and poled up the Nechaco to the lake which Stuart had already named after his chief. Again a fort was erected and named Fort Fraser, making three forts in the interior of New Caledonia.
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