Thompson, one of the greatest of the Nor’Wester explorers, was no French Canadian. He was born in London in 1770, of a Welsh family whose original name was Ap Thomas. Arriving in Canada for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1784, Thompson transferred his allegiance to the North West Fur Company in 1797. During his tenure as chief topographer for the Nor’Westers, Thompson staked a claim to being one of the greatest-if not the greatest-of the discoverers of North America. He not only charted the course of the Columbia River system to the far Pacific, he also located the sources of the Mississippi River, as well as extensively exploring the Missouri River country. When the tireless Thompson finally retired in 1812, 28 years after he first enlisted in the service of Hudson’s Bay Company, he had logged an amazing 55,000 miles of travel by canoe and foot. Few men, in any age, can lay claim to such a herculean feat.

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While Thompson was wearing out his moccasins on countless miles of tundra and prairie, another Nor’Wester was pursuing a dream that had spurred on the likes of Christopher Columbus and Sir Francis Drake: a northwest passage across North America to the riches of the exotic Orient.

Born in Scotland, Alexander Mackenzie traveled to New York state with his father, who served in the Loyalist (proBritish) forces during the American Revolution. After the war, young Alexander and his father emigrated to Canada.Joining the North West Fur Company, Mackenzie became the proteacute geacute; of a shadowy transplanted American, Peter Pond. Pond, one of the earliest Nor’Wester explorers, taught young Mackenzie how to find his way through Canada’s trackless wilderness. There was just one disagreeable fact about Pond: his trading competitors kept turning up dead. After the second had died in suspicious circumstances, Pond felt it wise to return to the United States, perhaps before a hangman’s noose or backwood’s justice (shot out in the woods by an unknown assailant) prematurely ended his career.

With none of Pond’s vices, Mackenzie continued his patron’s career. On June 3, 1789, he set out on the trip that ultimately would lead him to the Arctic Sea. The weather was so miserable-it snowed in June-that the voyageurs and Indians accompanying Mackenzie begged him to turn back.It was not just the misery of their exertions that crushed the spirits of Mackenzie’s veterans. They were entering the frozen realm of the Eskimos, whose age-old vendetta against the Copper Indians Samuel Hearne had once seen acted out in blood. On the night of July 14, 1789, as a new age was beginning with the fall of the Bastille in Paris, the dispirited party camped on Garry Island, deep within Eskimo country. Mackenzie suddenly awoke at 4 a.m. to find his belongings wet from an incoming tide. He had found the Arctic Sea.

Four years later, in May 1793, Mackenzie began the journey that would immortalize his name: the search for an overland passage to the bright waters of the Pacific.Moving through what is now British Columbia, Mackenzie and his party ascended into the harsh beauty of the Canadian Rockies. They then canoed down the flood-swollen Parsnip River. Finally, having made it down the Fraser River and its tributary, the West Road River, the haggard voyagers reached the rain forests of the Pacific Coast. Aided by the friendly coastal Bella Coola tribe, which even lent them a new canoe, Mackenzie and company made the final dash for the Pacific down Dean Channel. On July 22, Mackenzie made dream into reality: he gazed on the shores of the Pacific.

Although menaced by hostile Indians, he took time with typical Scottish tenacity to record the momentous occasion. On a rock, he painted with vermillion and bear grease, a mixture of Indian war paint, an inscription that the Canadian government still preserves to this day: ALEX MACKENZIE FROM CANADA BY LAND 22d JULY 1793.

As stirring as the sagas of Thompson and Mackenzie were, their dramatic ventures had a single, bottom-line objective: to hew out of the wilderness an ever-greater empire of beaver for the North West Fur Company. Accordingly, the Nor’Westers pursued their campaign of exploration with a vengeance, while such posts as Fort Chipewyan on the Peace River and Fort William on Lake Superior began to close like a steel beaver trap on the Hudson’s Bay Company. It is no wonder that the coat of arms of the North West Fur Company bore one bold word in English: ‘Perseverance.’

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