Mackenzie, Sir Alexander

Mackenzie, Sir Alexander (c. 1764-1820), Canadian explorer and fur trader, born in Stornoway, Lewis and Harris, Scotland. He emigrated (1774) with his family to New York and in 1779 moved to Montreal, where he joined the fur-trading firm later known as the North West Company. In 1789 he set out from Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca for his first journey of exploration in north-west Canada. The purpose of the journey was to find a route, as much as possible by waterways, to the Pacific. Having heard of a great river that flowed westwards from the Great Slave Lake, he located its beginning and navigated down it. It soon turned northwards, however, instead of cutting through the Rockies as Mackenzie had hoped, and eventually widened into a delta on the Arctic Ocean; the river is now known as the Mackenzie. Four years later, on a second expedition, he ascended the Peace River, crossed the Rocky Mountains, followed the Fraser River and several tributaries, and then struck overland to the Pacific Ocean, which he reached on July 22, 1793, just missing George Vancouver, who was coincidentally mapping the Strait of Georgia at the time. Mackenzie's party thus became the first to cross the North American continent north of Mexico on an overland journey. He published his journals of the expeditions in 1801. He was knighted a year later. As a prominent director of the North West Company, he was influential in pushing forward its expansion into the Pacific Northwest, where it was engaged in fierce competition with the Hudson's Bay Company. Later, when the conflict became damaging for both companies, he pioneered the movement that resulted in their eventual amalgamation in 1821, after his death in Logierait, Scotland.