[Illustration:  Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River.]

Mackenzie spent the long winter at Fort Chipewyan; but just as soon as the rivers cleared of ice, he took passage in the east-bound canoes and hurried down to the Grand Portage or Fort William on Lake Superior, the headquarters of the Northwest Company, where he reported his discovery of Mackenzie River.  His report was received with utter indifference.  The company had other matters to think about.  It was girding itself for the life-and-death struggle with its rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company.  “My expedition was hardly spoken of, but that is what I expected,” he writes to his cousin.  But chagrin did not deter purpose.  He asked the directors’ permission to explore that other broad stream—­Peace River—­rolling down from the mountains.  His request was granted.  Winter saw him on furlough in England, studying astronomy and surveying for the next expedition.  Here he heard much of the Western Sea—­the Pacific—­that fired his eagerness.  The voyages of Cook and Hanna and Meares were on everybody’s lips.  Spain and England and Russia were each pushing for first possession of the northwest coast.  Mackenzie hurried back to his Company’s fort on the banks of Peace River, where he spent a restless winter waiting for navigation to open.  Doubts of his own ambitions began to trouble him.  What if Peace River did not lead to the west coast at all?  What if he were behind some other discoverer sent out by the Spaniards or the Russians?  “I have been so vexed of late that I cannot sit down to anything steadily,” he confesses in a letter to his cousin.  Such a tissue-paper wall separates the aims of the real hero from those of the fool, that almost every ambitious man must pass through these periods of self-doubt before reaching the goal of his hopes.  But despondency did not benumb Mackenzie into apathy, as it has weaker men.

By April he had shipped the year’s furs from the forks of Peace River to Chipewyan.  By May his season’s work was done.  He was ready to go up Peace River.  A birch canoe thirty feet long, lined with lightest of cedar, was built.  In this were stored pemmican and powder.  Alexander Mackay, a clerk of the company, was chosen as first assistant.  Six Canadian voyageurs—­two of whom had accompanied Mackenzie to the Arctic—­and two Indian hunters made up the party of ten who stepped into the canoes at seven in the evening of May 9, 1793.

Peace River tore down from the mountains flooded with spring thaw.  The crew soon realized that paddles must be bent against the current of a veritable mill-race; but it was safer going against, than with, such a current, for unknown dangers could be seen from below instead of above, where suction would whirl a canoe on the rocks.  Keen air foretold the nearing mountains.  In less than a week snow-capped peaks had crowded the canoe in a narrow canon below a tumbling cascade where the river was one wild sheet of tossing