Owing to the agglutinative character of the aboriginal languages, numbering over four hundred, some philologists are inclined to attribute them all to a common origin, the Basque tongue being one of the two or three in Europe which have a like peculiarity.  In the languages of the American Indians one syllable is piled upon another, each with a distinct root-significance, so that a single word will often contain the meaning of an ordinary English sentence.  This polysynthetic character undoubtedly does point to a common origin, just as the Indo-European tongues trace back to Sanskrit.  But whether this is indicative of the ancient unity of the American races, whose languages differed in so many other respects, and whose characteristics were so divergent, is another question.

One interesting impression, begot of our environment, was that we were now emphatically in what might be called “Mackenzie’s country.”  In his “General History of the Fur-Trade,” published in London in 1801, Sir Alexander tells us that, after spending five years in Mr. Gregory’s office in Montreal, he went to Detroit to trade, and afterwards, in 1785, to the Grand Portage (Fort William).

The first traders, he tells us, had penetrated to the Athabasca, via Methy Portage, as early as 1791, and in 1783-4 the merchants of Lower Canada united under the name of The North-West Company, the two Frobishers—­Joseph Frobisher had traded on the Churchill River as early as 1775 and Simon McTavish being managers.  The Company, he says, “was consolidated in July, 1787,” and became very powerful in more ways than one, employing, at the time he wrote, over 1,400 men, including 1,120 canoemen.  “It took four years from the time the good, were ordered until the furs were sold;” but, of course, the profits, compared with the capital invested, were very great, until the strife deepened between the Montrealers. and the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose first inland post was only established at Sturgeon River, Cumberland Lake, in 1774, by the adventurous, if not over-valiant, Samuel Hearne.  The rivalries of these two companies nearly ruined both, until they got rid of them by uniting in 1821, when the Nor’-Westers became as vigorous defenders of King Charles’s Charter as they had before been its defiers and defamers.

Fort Chipewyan was established, Mackenzie says, by Mr. Pond, in 1788, the year after his own arrival at the Athabasca, where, by the way, in the fall of 1787, he describes Mr. Pond’s garden at his post on that river as being “as fine a kitchen garden as he ever saw in Canada.”  Fort Chipewyan, however, though not established by Mackenzie, was his headquarters for eight years.  From here he set out in June, 1789, on his canoe voyage to the Arctic Ocean, and from here in October, 1792, he started on his voyage up the Peace River on his way to the Pacific coast, which he reached the following year.