On this day more than two centuries ago, on a Pacific inlet not far from today’s Bella Coola, British Columbia, members of the Heiltsuk tribe manned their war canoes to prevent a young Scotsman paddling to the open sea from proceeding any further.
Bowing to superior numbers, the young man put ashore and used vermilion dye to write a message on a boulder. You can still read it: “Alex MacKenzie/From Canada/ By Land/ 22 July 1793.”
Alexander MacKenzie was an explorer for the Northwest Company, major rival of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was looking for new sources of the beaver fur central to international trade. He also sought the fabled Northwest Passage – the westward route to Asia that had fascinated and frustrated European explorers since Columbus.
This wasn’t MacKenzie’s first attempt. In 1789, he had followed the voyageur route from Montreal to Fort Chipewayan on Lake Athabaska in what is today northern Alberta. From there he descended a huge river natives said would take him northwest. To his bitter disappointment, that river – which would ultimately bear his name - emptied into the Arctic Ocean, not the Pacific.
In 1792, MacKenzie tried again, leaving Fort Chipewayan with nine companions and a dog.
Following a complex route from the Peace River to the Fraser and over the Coast Range to the Bella Coola River, the group eventually reached the salt water of North Bentinck Arm, an inlet on the Pacific Ocean, where he inscribed his famous testament. Including the words “By Land” on the inscription signaled there was no Northwest Passage – no sea route to the Indies – here. But they also bore witness to MacKenzie’s true accomplishment: the first recorded transcontinental crossing of North America.
The natives let MacKenzie go, and in 1801 he published his journals, which found an avid reader in President Thomas Jefferson.
MacKenzie’s book made two things clear: that Britain sought to control the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest; and that a possible Northwest Passage might exist there. No white person knew what lay between the upper reaches of the Missouri River and the lower section of the Columbia.
Jefferson was an ardent champion of westward expansion. MacKenzie’s information gave urgency to his efforts to take advantage of Napoleon’s difficulties in Europe and negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.
But before the deal was even complete, in 1803, Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark expedition. It had three goals: explore the Louisiana Territory; penetrate the northwest beyond the Rocky Mountains and establish an American claim there; and seek a water route to the Pacific.
Lewis and Clark didn’t find a Northwest Passage either, but we should remember that one reason they went looking was a young Scotsman who, 220 years ago today, wrote on a rock that he’d reached the Pacific “from Canada. By land.”