While Fraser was working down the wild canyons of the great river which now bears his name, other fur traders were looking towards the Pacific ocean. In 1810 John Jacob Astor, a New York merchant, who bought furs from the Nor'westers in Montreal for shipment to Germany, formed the Pacific Fur Company, and took into its service a number of the partners and servants of the North-West Company. Some of these men were dispatched round the Horn in the _Tonquin_ to the mouth of the Columbia; while another party went overland from Mackinaw and St Louis, following the trail of Lewis and Clark. One of the Nor'westers who entered Astor's service was Alexander Mackay, Mackenzie's companion on the journey to the coast; another was a brother of the Stuart who had accompanied Fraser through New Caledonia; and a third was a {100} brother of the M'Dougall who commanded Fort M'Leod, the first fort built by the Nor'westers in New Caledonia. In the light of subsequent developments, it is a matter for speculation whether these Nor'westers joined Astor purposely to overthrow his scheme in the interests of their old company; or were later bribed to desert him; or, as is most likely, simply grew dissatisfied with the inexperienced, blundering mismanagement of Astor's company, and reverted gladly to their old service. However that may have been, it is certain that the North-West Company did not fail to take notice of the plans that Astor had set afoot for the Pacific fur trade; for in a secret session of the partners, at Fort William on Lake Superior, '_it was decided in council that the Company should send to Columbia River, where the Americans had established Astoria, and that a party should proceed overland to the coast_.' It puzzled the Nor'westers to learn that the river Fraser had explored in 1808 was not the Columbia. Where, then, were the upper reaches of the great River of the West which Gray and Vancouver had reported? The company issued urgent instructions to its traders in the Far West to keep pushing up {101} the North and South Saskatchewan, up the Red Deer, up the Bow, up the Athabaska, up the Smoky, up the Pembina, and to press over the mountains wherever any river led oceanwards through the passes. This duty of finding new passable ways to the sea was especially incumbent on the company's surveyor and astronomer, David Thompson. He was formerly of the Hudson's Bay Company, but had come over to the Nor'westers, and in their service had surveyed from the Assiniboine to the Missouri and from Lake Superior to the Saskatchewan.