2: Thundering Rapids at Fort George Canyon

Seven years ago, on Sept. 17, he thought he heard somebody yelling. It was the lone survivor of a boat wreck in the canyon.

"A jet boat with some hunters on board tried to turn around in the narrows and they flipped her," Stoner said. "Two guys drowned. For a long time you could see the bottom [of the jet boat] going up and down in an eddy. I don't know if they ever got it out.

"Here's the strange thing, though. The two guys who drowned were wearing life jackets. They drifted down and were pulled out at Cottonwood Canyon near Quesnel. But the guy who survived, he was wearing wool and no life jacket. He got sucked down to the bottom but he kept his head and he pulled himself along the rocks and then up onto the island. I guess you could say he walked out."

From Canyon View Ranch, Stoner directed me south to Stone Creek, where Fraser's expedition is thought to have stopped for breakfast while John Stuart took a reading from the sun's lower left edge, referred to as a meridian altitude, in an attempt to establish their latitude.

Retired engineer Nick Doe analyzed the six navigational measurements that survive in Fraser's journal - the original field notes containing greater navigational detail appear to have been lost - and adjusted them to contemporary readings in a fascinating paper in the Spring 2000 edition of B.C. Historical News.

Navigation circa 2007

So I used Doe's readings, my handheld global positioning system computer and recent topographical maps to try and locate with greater precision the places mentioned in more general terms in Fraser's journals, which appear to have summarized in more readable form the technical details in the original field record.

At Stone Creek, for example, Doe says that Stuart's reading of 115 degrees, nine minutes and 45 seconds actually corresponds to a contemporary map reading of 53 degrees, 38.5 minutes, give or take a margin of error created by the hand-me-down 18th century navigational equipment available to Fraser.

My GPS unit, on the other hand, cross-references location by triangulating from three geostationary satellites and almost instantly analyzes position to within 10 metres, rather more precise than anything available in 1808, particularly when used in conjunction with a compass and a detailed topographical map.

At Stone Creek RV Park & Camp Ground - 15 river's-edge campsites, one guest cabin, hot showers, deck and barbecue - I found Gerry Seeman, five years retired after 36 years toiling at Kitimat. He seemed unsurprised that Simon Fraser might have stopped at his establishment or nearby for a leisurely two-hour brunch almost 200 years earlier.

Seeman is the kind of guy who glues elk antlers onto a deer skull and watches deadpan while his customers do a double-take; the kind of guy who insists that bemused visitors in motor homes bell their cats because the robin fledglings are just leaving the nest.

"Look," he said in excitement, first pointing to the yellow flash of a tanager in a spruce, then to the birds darting overhead. "See all the swallows. I put out boxes for them. I have six or seven nesting. They really keep the bugs down."

From the grassy opening on the riverbank, I struck off in search of the GPS reading that should indicate where Stuart took his sighting. But after struggling through tangled deadfalls and thorn bushes covering a steep 70-degree slope that fell directly into the river, I was convinced that wherever the landing actually occurred, it wasn't at precisely 53 degrees, 38.5 minutes North.

There was a tiny shelf at the river's edge, barely the width of a canoe's beam. It offered protection to landward from the steep bank but had other shortcomings. First, the tiny bench, beneath a thick stand of spruce, wasn't easily visible from the river. Second, it was on the outer side of a sharp bend and the current swept past at an alarming pace - not the easiest spot to land four heavily-laden canoes.  

However, looking downstream, there was a clear view of the open ground, gently curving sandy beaches and a big, slow back eddy at the mouth of Stone Creek into which paddlers could swing out of the main current and land with ease.

Seeman nodded.

"It's an ancient Indian fishing site that's still in use," he said. I went over to check it out.   

Stone Creek curves into the Fraser River behind a sandy spit and the back eddy would carry canoes right into flat, sheltered water where the adjacent clearing is pockmarked with fire pits left by people who had the same idea, before and since.

The GPS reading here, though, was well within the plus or minus 2.4-km margin of error allowed by Doe's calculations. Given the difficulty of other possible landing sites inside that range, Stone Creek got my vote.

Later that day, Fraser's party sped past the mouth of the Blackwater River - Alexander Mackenzie's West Road River and the point at which he turned overland toward the Pacific in 1793 - stopping briefly at two houses of a Ndazkoh, or South River Carrier, chief where they courteously "left marks to let the natives know that we had passed."

Here lies Fraser's son

By 6 p.m., Fraser was making his first camp and while putting arms in order and issuing all hands with ammunition was the first priority in unknown country, the last journal entry for May 28, 1808, suggests that after a long, hard day of paddling, perhaps dinner was at the front of everyone's mind: "We gathered some wild onions for sauce."

With similar thoughts in mind, I pushed on for Quesnel, where Fraser camped the following night of May 29 after a harrowing day caching bales of dried salmon for his return journey, unloading canoes to run them down Cottonwood Canyon where "the river passes violently between high rocks" and enduring a night of thunder, lightning and heavy rains.

At the tourist centre, Julie Clark directed me to a public footpath leading to the confluence of the Quesnel and Fraser rivers and I strolled down through a grove of trees, each one graced by a plaque commemorating a pioneer.

Some athletic moms were briskly walking their babies, two first nations men were listening intently to an animated narrative from a young woman, three elderly Sikhs sat in a row talking to one another. It was a calm, urban, blissfully Canadian multicultural scene that would have astounded the 24 explorers who camped in 1808 when on the other side of the continent, Canada was a colonial postage stamp   already apprehensive about the growing tensions between Britain and the United States that would eventually lead to invasion and the War of 1812.

Before settling in for an evening putting notes in order and re-reading Fraser's journals, however, I took a quick side trip to Barkerville, Richfield and Cameronton.

Although the Gold Rush towns wouldn't be established until more than 50 years after Fraser passed the mouth of the Quesnel River, Cameronton has a sad connection with the explorer.

The explorer's fourth son, John Alexander Fraser, is buried in the Cameronton cemetery.

John had mortgaged the family farm he had inherited from his father at St. Andrew's West in Ontario when Simon died in 1862. He invested the funds in mining ventures in the Cariboo. They didn't pay out, his creditors foreclosed on the mortgage, he lost the family farm, a romance foundered and then - almost 57 years after his father reached Quesnel - despondent and despairing, he committed suicide the day before one of the claims in which he was a partner struck it rich.

It was cold and there was still snow in shaded hollows when I found the plain wooden headboard among the graves of the forgotten and misbegotten who were left behind when the Gold Rush ebbed away.

I shrugged deeper into my jacket and listened to the wind in the tree tops. In a sense, the loss of the family homestead in Upper Canada that dated back to the American Revolution and the young man's death in 1865, three years after his father's death in 1862, provided a poignant afterword to Simon's long and eventful story.

But my story didn't end in the Cariboo and I turned back to the river, almost 100 kilometres to the west of Cameronton, where the next phase of my search for Simon Fraser promised to take me far from the beaten path, indeed.

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