"
On the 24th of August, 1793, Mackenzie was back again at Fort
Chipewayan, after an absence of eleven months, having been the first
white man to cross the broad continent of North America from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, north of Mexico.
CHAPTER XII
Mackenzie's Successors
The Spaniards of California had been aware in the middle of the
eighteenth century that there was a big river entering the sea to the
north of the savage country known as Oregon. The estuary of this river
was reached in May, 1792, by an American sea captain of a whaling
ship--ROBERT GRAY, of Boston. He crossed the bar, and named the great
stream after his own ship, the _Columbia_. Five months afterwards
(October, 1792) Lieutenant BROUGHTON, of the Vancouver expedition,
entered the Columbia from the sea, explored it upstream for a hundred
miles, and formally took possession of it for the King of Great
Britain. The news of this discovery reached Alexander Mackenzie (no
doubt after his return from his overland journey to the Pacific
coast), and he at once jumped to the conclusion that the powerful
stream he had discovered in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, and had
partially followed on its way to the Pacific, must be the Columbia. As
a matter of fact it was the river afterwards called Fraser.
If you look at the map of British North America, and then at the map
of Russian Asia--Siberia--you will notice a marked difference in the
arrangement of the waterways.
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