ALEXANDER MACKENZIE
1764-1820 | Montreal / Lower Canada
THIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE Lewis and Clark crossed North America to the Pacific Ocean, Mackenzie did it with fewer resources, with less fanfare, and over a more difficult route.
This hardscrabble explorer learned adversity young: born on the wild and forlorn Isle of Lewis, off Scotland’s northwest coast, at age 10 he was sent to North America, and by 16 he was on his own in the rough and tumble world of the fur trade. Mackenzie proved a quick study; he would eventually learn to speak five languages, including two Indigenous languages that would serve him well. Resourceful, resolute and daring, at age 25 he set off in a birchbark canoe with the audacious goal of crossing North America.
En route, Mackenzie traversed thousands of kilometres of difficult and diverse terrain, from immense forests to snow-capped mountains, blackfly-infested swamps and windswept tundra. Ultimately, Mackenzie wound up not on the Pacific Ocean, as he had hoped, but instead on the Arctic Ocean, following the great river that now bears his name to its outlet.
Unlike many explorers, Mackenzie led by example, sharing in the hard labours of exploration — paddling canoes, portaging and taking on dangerous tasks such as scrambling ahead along cliffs or tracking his canoe with ropes up raging mountain torrents — winning admiration and respect in the process. Not content with what he had accomplished, Mackenzie spent four years improving his mapmaking abilities before setting off in 1793 with a small party into the unknown — again with the aim of crossing North America.
This time he succeeded, traversing the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific before retracing his route back (he remains the first known person to have done so). Perhaps most impressively, in an era when violence was the norm, in all his wanderings across tens of thousands of kilometres and through a bewildering diversity of landscapes and cultures, Mackenzie never once shed blood, and helped provide the foundations for a transcontinental nation.