11 The Journey's End

"The night was dark and the current strong; we pressed on," he wrote, but the immediacy of the threat did not diminish a sense that the company's great venture had proved a failure.

"Here I must again acknowledge my great disappointment in not seeing the main ocean, having gone so near it as to be almost within view," he wrote.

"For we wished very much to settle the situation by an observation for the longitude. The latitude is 49 degrees nearly, while that of the entrance of the Columbia is 46 degrees, 20 minutes. This River, therefore, is not the Columbia. If I had been convinced of this fact where I left my canoes, I would certainly have returned from thence."

The next morning, Fraser put in at another village where he saw canoes scattered along the beach. He thought he might obtain some and surrendered to the pursuing chief the one that he had forcibly "borrowed" two days earlier. However, while he, John Stuart and Jules Quesnel were being entertained by the local chief, his men interrupted. They went outside to find the whole village assembled around their baggage, armed to the teeth and showing hostile intentions.

"It was then, that our situation might really be considered as critical. Placed upon a small sandy Island, few in number, without canoes, without provisions, and surrounded by upwards of 700 barbarians," he wrote. "However, our resolution did not forsake us.

"We now applied for canoes in every direction, but could not procure any either for love or money, so that we had to regret the inadvertency committed on our arrival by parting with the one we had before.

"There being no alternative we had again recourse to the chief, notwithstanding our experience of his illiberality. He asked his price - I consented - he augmented his demand - I again yielded - he still continued to increase his imposition. Feeling highly provoked at the impertinence of his conduct, I exclaimed violently. He then ordered the canoe to be brought."

It leaked, but it was a canoe.

When Fraser and his men sought to leave, however, the villagers began to seize their equipment and baggage and he ordered his party into a "posture of defence," most likely deployed to deliver a musket volley.

Once embarked, having had only a few hours sleep in the previous two days, they paddled again until late into the night, making camp on a small island they could easily defend. As the men slept, Fraser and Stuart alternated on sentry duty.

The next day, as they continued upriver, the growing threat became sufficiently intense that Fraser had his men fire musket shots across the bows of the canoes harassing them, at which point their pursuers withdrew.

On July 6, when the party arrived at another village, some inhabitants launched canoes while others lined the shore "and all were advancing upon us." While pushing them off with their musket muzzles, Fraser's canoe was itself shoved into the current, carried back down a rapid and beached at the foot of a steep bank.

Stuart went ashore to establish a defensive formation and the show of force succeeded. Once again, the would-be assailants withdrew upriver.

But now the young expedition commander faced the greatest challenge of all. His team, exhausted, hungry and afraid of their pursuers, was falling apart. When he asked the men ashore to get back in the canoe, several refused the order. They said they were going to cross the mountains on foot to the friendly villages around present day Lytton.

Fraser went ashore to talk them out of a decision he considered desperate and foolhardy. They told him their plan was fixed and that "they saw no other way by which they might [save]  themselves from immediate destruction, for continuing by water, said they, surrounded by hostile nations, who watched every opportunity to attack and torment them, created in their minds a state of suspicion, which was worse than death."

Joined by Stuart and Quesnel, Fraser remonstrated, threatened and cajoled. Finally, after much debate, he persuaded his men to swear an oath that the crew would never separate during the voyage or forsake a crewmate in distress.

"By this time it was near sun set. We, however, decamped full of spirits, singing and making a great noise. The Indians, who were waiting ahead, observing us so cheerful, felt disheartened, kept their distance, and some of them thought proper to paddle downstream," he wrote.

As they progressed upriver, they noticed an increasing propensity for pilferage when they stopped at villages. A kettle, Fraser's own tobacco pipe, small items from their baggage began to disappear.

Then they encountered two friendly Hacamaugh chiefs on the river. They were so surprised and pleased that they loaned Fraser's party their two canoes and set off on foot to alert those upstream.

Once again, handing their guns and equipment off, they were guided past the seething waters of Hell's Gate and the Black Canyon on a latticework of spindly ladders, suspension bridges and swaying scaffolds.

They reached the forks of the Thompson River on July 14 to find new people in the village they didn't recognize but who were called Swhanemugh.

 The inhabitants appeared to be afflicted with some unidentified disease. Furthermore, Fraser observed, there was famine in the camp and some had been reduced to killing and eating their horses, possibly because instead of dispersing to their hunting territories, all 1,200 people had been waiting for him to return.

When parents brought three our four emaciated children - Fraser indicated the symptoms were from some serious disorder, not hunger - for help, he made a tincture of Laudanum, a popular opiate of the day, dipped his finger in it and stroked it on their foreheads.

 Soon he'd had to do the same for four score.

The party left immediately afterward and pushed upstream, passing through the rapids and over the portages that had wrecked their canoes and blistered their feet on the way down, with the same consequences.

At Leon Creek, they found their canoes and the cached provisions and equipment intact.

"For this good fortune we felt grateful to the Indians who continually attended to their security during our absence," Fraser wrote.

Only July 27, he once again found a cache of provisions intact and after distributing supplies to his men, gave the rest to the Atnah man who had been guarding it on their behalf.

"He immediately divided the same among his friends who were greatly in want," Fraser noted. "Having been in a state of starvation for some time previous to our arrival, they deserve much credit for having abstained from the cache."

The next day, the expedition passed out of the worst part of the canyons with clear paddling for the rest of the journey. About to depart from Atnah country, Fraser presented the chief who had been of such great assistance with a gun, ammunition and other necessaries while to his brother he presented a dagger.

With the worst of the journey behind him, Fraser turned his observations to the landscape, to fish traps and technology, to the presence of a white sea shell which he said seemed to be the principal medium of exchange - "This is to them what money is to us."

And on Aug. 6, making his return journey one day shorter than the voyage downstream, his canoes beached at Fort George where he found the junior clerk, Hugh Faries, and two men keeping the watch for their return.

For Fraser, of course, the traveling was not done. By Sept. 21, he was in Fort Chipewyan for the annual rendezvous at which trade outfits were distributed to the various posts around the Athabasca district.

Daniel Williams Harmon, the new clerk who had been born not far from Fraser's birthplace, noted in his journal for that day:

"People from almost every corner of this extensive Department have been flocking in - one of whom is a Mr. Simon Fraser from New Caledonia (on the West side of the Rocky Mountain) who accompanied by Messrs. John Stuart and J.M. Quesnel and a Dozen of the Canadians as well as two of the Natives, is just returned from a voyage to the Pacific Ocean," Harmon wrote, aware that he was in the presence of history being made. "He says they met with some ill treatment from the Indians who live along the Sea-coast, but were hospitably received by all those they saw further up the Country."

Just before Christmas, Harmon reports Fraser passing through Dunvegan on his way back to winter quarters and on May 16, 1809, his journal mentions him again, this time with four canoes bound for Rainy Lake, presumably to report on his mission at Fort William.

After founding New Caledonia, Fraser spent some years in the Mackenzie district to the north of Fort Chipewyan, then became embroiled in the increasingly violent struggle between the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company for control of the fur frontier.

In 1815, after Miles Macdonell, governor of Lord Selkirk's new Red River Colony, sought to restrict access to the pemmican supplies upon which remote trading posts depended, he was "arrested" by the North West Company and Fraser was one of the officers who transported him to Fort William, at present day Thunder Bay.

Two years later, after the new Red River governor, Robert Semple, and 19 men were slain in what became known as the Seven Oaks Massacre, Fraser was one of the North West Company officers arrested and charged with treason and conspiracy. He was acquitted in 1818 and no evidence was introduced that showed he had anything to do with the events.

However, Fraser retired from the fur trade after the trial and settled on at St. Andrew's West, just outside Cornwall, Ont., and on June 7, 1820, he married Catherine Macdonell, the well-connected daughter of a local military man.

During the rebellion of 1837-1838, loyal as his father had been, he served as a captain in the local militia and suffered a serious injury during a night march which would plague him until his death 24 years later.

From his birth on May 20, 1776, to his death even as the political events which would lead to Confederation gathered momentum, his long and eventful life had spanned the reshaping of the continent. His work for the North West Company in establishing the fur trade west of the Rockies had helped secure what's now British Columbia for Canada.

In his own way, Fraser and his fur trade companions - Little Fellow, James McDougall, David Thompson, The Chief and his brother, John Stuart, Jean Baptiste Boucher, Jules Quesnel, Kwah and the voyageurs both named and unnamed - were among the real Fathers of Confederation.

And while there's room for endless debate about which Europeans founded what would become Canada's westernmost province, only one man left his name on the river that would eventually be recognized as the "Soul of British Columbia" - Simon Fraser.

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