Besides Mackenzie’s, another name, renowned in the tragic annals of science, is inseparably connected with this region, viz., that of Franklin, who has already been incidentally referred to.  Others recur to one, but these two great names are engrained, so to speak, in the North, and cannot be lightly passed over in any descriptive work.  The two explorers were friends, or, at any rate, acquaintances; and, before leaving England, Franklin had a long conversation in London with Mackenzie, who died shortly afterwards.  The record of his “Journey to the Shores of the Polar Ocean,” accompanied by Doctor Richardson and Midshipmen Back and Hood, in the years 1819-20-21 and ’22, practically began at York Factory in August of the former year.  The rival companies were still at war, and in making the portage at the Grand Rapids of the Saskatchewan, with a party of Hudson’s Bay Company traders, “they advanced,” he says, “armed, and with great caution.”  When he returned on the 14th July, 1822, to York, the warring companies had united, and he and his friends were met there by Governor Simpson, Mr. McTavish, and all the united partners, after a voyage by water and land of over 5,500 miles.  Franklin spent part of the winter at Cumberland post, which had been founded to counteract the rivalry of Montreal.  “Before that time,” he says, “the natives took their furs to Hudson’s Bay, or sold to the French Canadian traders, who,” he adds, “visited this part of the country as early as 1697.”  If so, the credit for the discovery of the Saskatchewan has been wrongly given to the Chevalier, as he was called, a son of Varenne, Sieur de la Varendrye.

Franklin left Cumberland in January, 1820, by dog train for Chipewyan, via Fort Carlton and Green Lake.  Fort Carlton was the great food supply post, then and long afterwards, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, buffalo and wapiti being very abundant.  The North-West Company’s fort, called La Montee, was three miles beyond Carlton, and harbored seventy French Canadians and sixty women and children, who consumed seven hundred pounds of meat daily, the ration being eight pounds.  This post was at that time in charge of Mr. Hallett, a forebear, if I mistake not, of my old friend, William Hallett, leader of the English Plain Hunt, and a distinguished loyalist in the rebellion of 1869.

Franklin and Back left Fort Carlton on the 8th February, and reached Green Lake on the 17th.  The North-West Company’s post at the lake was managed by Dugald Cameron, and that of the Hudson’s Bay Company by a Mr. MacFarlane, and, having been equipped at both posts with carioles, sledges and provisions, they left “under a fusillade from the half-breed women.”  From the end of the lake they followed for a short distance a small river, then “crossed the woods to Beaver River, and proceeding along it, passed the mouths of two rivers, the latter of which, they were told, was a channel by which the Indians go to Lesser Slave Lake.”  On the 11th of