This was the country the trapper first entered on his way to the Wilderness we are specially considering; here where the _Voyageur_ received some of the experience that made him so valuable in this kind of work, the _Voyageur_ whom Harmon elaborately describes[58] as lively, fickle, cheerful in privation, talkative, thoughtless, unrevengeful, not brave, deceitful, smooth, polite, dishonest, unveracious, generous, ungrateful, obedient, and unfaithful. Yet he was a man who served the time admirably, who braved many dangers, whose labours helped more than those of any other single element to open the pathways of the Wilderness. By 1778 the British had founded a trading-post within forty miles of Lake Athabasca, and ten years after one on the shore of Lake Athabasca itself. This was named Fort Chepewyan, and historically is of great prominence, as it was the headquarters of Alexander Mackenzie for eight years, and was his starting-point on both the expeditions which are recorded among the remarkable exploits of the modern world.[59] The North-west Company was making systematic war upon the Hudson Bay Company, and in order to gain advantage for his association Mackenzie undertook the two expeditions, which practically solved the geographical problems of the North-west and determined the impossibility of the existence of any north-west passage. In 1789 he descended, as far as its discharge into the Arctic Ocean, the river that now bears his name, but he was not the first to reach the Arctic overland, for Samuel Hearne, of the Hudson Bay Company, eighteen years before, had touched the shore some miles east of the Mackenzie, having first discovered Great Slave Lake. These journeys proved beyond question that the Straits of Anian, which had prominently figured on maps up to this time, were a myth. Cook, who had been along the north-west coast, had expressed strong doubts of the existence of any waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific. Mackenzie's other journey was of equal, if not greater, importance. It was in 1793 that the start was made, and he followed up Peace River till, by means of the chasm it cleaves in the great chain to free its waters for their descent to the Mackenzie, he passed entirely through the Rocky Mountains, and with admirable determination and perseverance reached the shore of the Pacific just north of Queen Charlotte Sound, completing the first traverse on record of the North American continent above Mexico. One river, that he followed down for some distance, which was called by the natives Tacoutche Tesse, he thought was the head of the Columbia, which had obtained this name the year before. The Tacoutche Tesse, however, was not the Columbia, as was some years later discovered, but the river now called Fraser.