1789 Mackenzie River expedition to the Arctic Ocean On behalf of the North West Company, Mackenzie journeyed to
Lake Athabasca where, in 1788, he was one of the founders of
Fort Chipewyan. He had been sent to replace
Peter Pond, a partner in the North West Company. From Pond, he learned that the
First Nations people understood that the local rivers flowed to the north-west. Thinking that it would lead to
Cook Inlet in
Alaska, he set out by canoe on the river known to the local
Dene First Nations people as the
Dehcho (later named for the explorer as Mackenzie River), on 3 July 1789. On 14 July he reached the Arctic Ocean, rather than the Pacific. Later, in a letter to his cousin
Roderick, he called the waterway "the River Disappointment," since the river did not prove to be the
Northwest Passage for which he had hoped. This story is probably apocryphal, as Mackenzie's own and contemporary records refer to it simply as the "Grand River." The river later came to be known as the
Mackenzie River in his honour.
1792–93 Peace River expedition to the Pacific Ocean to the Pacific Ocean coast; located at In 1791, Mackenzie returned to
Great Britain to study the new advance in the measurement of
longitude. In the aftermath of the
Nootka Crisis with Spain, he returned to Canada in 1792, and set out to find a route to the Pacific. Accompanied by two native guides (one named Cancre), his cousin,
Alexander MacKay, six Canadian
voyageurs (Joseph Landry, Charles Ducette,
François Beaulieu, Baptiste Bisson, Francois Courtois, Jacques Beauchamp), and a dog simply referred to as "our dog", Mackenzie left
Fort Chipewyan on 10 October 1792. The party travelled via the
Pine River to the
Peace River. Mackenzie left Fort Fork on 9 May 1793, following the route of the Peace River. He was instead directed to follow a
grease trail by ascending the
West Road River, crossing over the
Coast Mountains and descending the
Bella Coola River to the sea. He followed this advice and reached the Pacific coast on 20 July 1793, at
Bella Coola, British Columbia, on
North Bentinck Arm, an
inlet of the Pacific Ocean. Having done this, Mackenzie had completed the first recorded transcontinental crossing of North America north of Mexico, 12 years before Americans
Lewis and Clark. He had unknowingly missed meeting
George Vancouver at Bella Coola by 48 days. He had wanted to continue westward out of a desire to reach the open ocean, but was stopped by the hostility of the
Heiltsuk people. Hemmed in by Heiltsuk war canoes, he wrote a message on a rock near the water's edge of
Dean Channel, using a reddish paint made of vermilion and bear grease, and turned back east. The painting read: "“Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three”" (at the time
Canada was a name for the
former French territory in what is now southern Quebec and Ontario). The words, partly abbreviated, were later inscribed permanently by (Captain) R.P. Bishop and his surveyors in 1923. The site is now
Sir Alexander Mackenzie Provincial Park and is designated First Crossing of North America
National Historic Site. In 2016, Mackenzie was named a
National Historic Person. He returned the way he had come, arriving at Fort Chipewyan on Aug. 24. He spent the winter there working in the fur trade. In 1799 he left the Company and travelled to London to lobby on behalf of the Canadian fur trade. In 1800 he returned to Canada and aided in the formation of the New North West Company (also known as the XY Company). In his journal Mackenzie made the first record of the
Carrier language, an Athabaskan laguage. ==Later life and family==