Tales of a fur trader

In the early days of July 1808, Montreal fur trader Simon Fraser caught his first glimpses of the Pacific Ocean. He had arrived at the mouth of the river that now bears his name some 36 days after leaving Fort George (modern-day Prince George) and almost three years after establishing B.C.’s first European settlement at McLeod Lake. The mission from his employers at the North West Company: to find a navigable route to the western sea so that they could expand their Pacific trade. While Fraser ultimately wasn’t successful – the river proved, at several points, unnavigable – he did succeed in building several trading posts along the way, and thus laid the cornerstones for the B.C. economy.

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Fraser’s journey, Victoria-based journalist Stephen Hume decided to follow in the trader’s footsteps, studying maps and diaries in archives across North America and interviewing the descendants of people who helped Fraser before jumping aboard his own canoe to retrace that seminal journey. The following is excerpted from the first chapter of Hume’s book, Simon Fraser: In Search of Modern British Columbia (Harbour Publishing, May 2008).

On a fall afternoon about 200 years ago, when the air was crisp with that sharp taste of snow that signals every winter’s march into central British Columbia, a sturdy, auburn-haired man stepped from a flimsy canoe onto a willow-clad tongue of land between two fast-running streams at the northwest end of what we now call McLeod Lake. His name was Simon Fraser. He was not yet 30. And pressed into the soft ground with his footprints, almost 900 kilometres north of Greater Vancouver’s glowing pillars of glass and steel, were the seeds of an enterprise that would grow into today’s great province. The narrow lake before him extended to the southeast, nestled into a trough where the Nechako Plateau butts up against the Misinchinka mountain range, a western outrider of the towering northern Rockies. Then as now – as the dwindling days of 1805 closed in on the lean winter months ahead – a dark forest crowded it, displaying an occasional flare of autumn foliage. Beyond the lake, the land rose to a distant range of hills. Behind Fraser, what we now call the Pack River twisted away into the trees, seeking its confluence to the northwest with the Parsnip, itself a muscular fork of the mighty Peace River

Even today there’s a stillness about the place that almost belies what sprang from the seeds Fraser planted here so long ago. The glossy lake that now carries my own reflection, the motionless trees and the enormous, crushing silence are dis­turbed only by the faint blat of a truck using its engine to brake on nearby Highway 97. There’s no hint of the megalopolis in the southwestern corner of the province that illuminates the night sky for hundreds of kilometres around, its neon canyons pulsing with electricity generated from these same fast-flowing rivers.

Back then Fraser stood at the farthest end of a tenuous transportation route. It reached back across a wild and dangerous continent. News of his arrival – travel­ling at the speed that river currents allowed, seldom faster than a man could walk – would take a full year to reach the company’s directors in distant Montreal. Their acknowledgment and further instructions would take another year to come back, then one more year for his reply and the latest financial accounting. A three-year turnaround seems almost unimaginable in our age of instant messaging.

While far off Europe seethed with a titanic conflict – Nelson would smash the French fleet at Trafalgar on October 21, and Napoleon would crush the allies’ army at Austerlitz on December 2 – Fraser was left to worry in blessed ignorance about his increasingly leaky canoes and whether he could secure enough fish and game from this unknown country to see his voyageurs, hired hands, guides and hunters through the hungry days that surely lay ahead.

It was late in the season, but we can be reasonably sure it wasn’t late in the day when Fraser made his decision to build a trading post here at McLeod Lake. After 13 years on the northern frontier, he was a seasoned wilderness traveller.

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