numerous to be told, MacKenzie was back at his fur post on Peace River. As his discoveries on this trip blazed the way to new hunting ground for his company, they brought both honor and wealth to MacKenzie. He was knighted by the English King for his explorations, and he retired to an estate in Scotland, where he died about 1820. Meanwhile, Napoleon has sold Louisiana to the United States. The American explorers, Lewis and Clark, have crossed from the Missouri to the Columbia; and now John Jacob Astor, the great fur merchant of New York, in 1811 sends his fur traders overland to build a fort at the mouth of Columbia River. The Northwest Company in frantic haste dispatches explorers to follow up MacKenzie's work and take possession of the Pacific fur trade before Astor's men can reach the field. It becomes a race for the Pacific. [Illustration: SIMON FRASER] Simon Fraser is sent in 1806 to build posts west of the Rockies in New Caledonia, and to follow that unknown river which MacKenzie mistook for the Columbia, on down to the sea. Two years he passed building the posts, that exist to this {331} day as Fraser planned them: Fort MacLeod at the head of Parsnip River, on a little lake set like an emerald among the mountains; Fort St. James on Stuart Lake, a reach of sheeny green waters like the Trossachs, dotted with islands and ensconced in mountains; Fraser Fort on another lake southward; Fort St. George on the main Fraser River. Then, in May of 1808, with four canoes Fraser descends the river named after him, accompanied by Stuart and Quesnel and nineteen voyageurs. This was the river where the rapids had turned MacKenzie back, canyon after canyon tumultuous with the black whirlpools and roaring like a tempest. Before essaying the worst runs of the cascades Fraser ordered a canoe lightened at the prow and manned by the five best voyageurs. It shot down the current like a stone from a catapult. "She flew from one danger to another," relates Fraser, who was watching the canoe from the bank, "till the current drove her on a rock. The men disembarked, and we had to plunge our daggers into the bank to keep from sliding into the river as we went down to their aid, our lives hanging on a thread." Like MacKenzie, Fraser was compelled to abandon canoes. Each with a pack of eighty pounds, the voyageurs set out on foot down that steep gorge where the traveler to-day can see the trail along the side of the precipice like basket work between Lilloet and Thompson River. In Fraser's day was no {332} trail, only here and there bridges of trembling twig ladders across chasms; and over these swinging footholds the marchers had to carry their packs, the river rolling below, deep and ominous and treacherous. At Spuzzum the river turned from the south straight west. Fraser knew it was not the Columbia. His men named it after himself. Forty days was Fraser going from St. George to tide water. Early in