3 The North West Company's Last Post

"Keep going down past the cemetery and you'll cross a couple more benches," Stump told me. "When you can see our church on the other side [of the river] you'll be in the right place. It's one of the oldest churches in the Cariboo. We still use it some times."

Before I left, she passed on a message to the big shots in Victoria, where politicians talk "heartland" but calculate "downtown." They should keep their promise to pave the road that was made when it was decided to close the Marguerite ferry for cost saving reasons, she said.

"Our reserve is divided by the river. Closing the ferry makes a real hardship. If we have a sickness or an emergency we have to drive to Quesnel or Williams Lake to cross the river," she said, eyes flashing.

"They said they would pave the road when they took away our ferry. They were supposed to finish it last year but it's still not finished. There was a washout on the other side of the river and they used our paving money to fix that."

I took my leave and made my way down the rutted track then out into the scorching flats where I paused to examine some old log buildings, their plank floors falling in and the rafters exposed. The walls were insulated with ancient Rogers sugar boxes, yellowing newspapers and the pages of crumbling magazines, all packed behind painted canvas that substituted for drywall or paneling.

A fragment of print on the floor informed me that "many women like their homes to be of one color tone throughout" and touted a wonderful new invention - linoleum. I doubt the writer had this place in mind, where the flooring was two by 12 planking. Penciled on a patch of cardboard in an elegant hand was a commemorative note, obviously written after the building had fallen into disuse: "Death of D.J. Partie, April 28th, 1957." Who was D.J. and who remembers now?

On a bench with a view over the river, I came to the cemetery. Ancient picket fences set off some grave sites, markers with illegible inscriptions marked others, and many were simply grassy, unmarked mounds. Here and there, the raw immediacy of new graves punctuated the final resting place of people like Old Alexander, born 1878 and buried more than half a century ago.

Then, across the final vast silted flat, I came to the historic place on the river where Mackenzie turned back and the determined Fraser kept going despite warnings of the perils ahead.

All that remains of Fort Alexandria today is the landing, a few bits of decaying split rail fence, some hewn, age-blackened timbers tumbled in a grove of poplars at the back end of a clearing and a piece of rusting equipment whose purpose I couldn't discern.

Heat shimmers rippled over the hay fields, the tiny silken parachutes of seeding dandelions sailed on the breeze and the wide, muddy river sparkled in the sun. I took a moment to lean on one of the fences, its decaying wood mottled with lichens, to survey the rolling bench lands that Fraser found "charming."

"This country, which is interspersed with meadows and hills, dales & high rocks, has upon the whole a romantic but pleasant appearance," says the journal entry of May 30.

Indeed, if Fort St. James was jokingly known as "Siberia" to fur traders posted there, Fort Alexandria was, according to historian Margaret Ormsby, "the paradise of New Caledonia. The post was situated in lightly wooded, rolling country where there was shooting and fishing and where good crops of grain and vegetables could be grown if the frosts did not come too early."

Somewhere near here Fraser stopped to cache dried fish, took some fresh fish from a native Indian cache, left payment and took note that he was indeed in different country, now, for his journal says that he "observed some vestiges of horses at this place."

Exact locations remain almost impossible to determine. The site to which Stump has directed me certainly looked welcoming. Fort Alexandria itself was not established until 1821, 13 years after Fraser passed. It would later become the flashpoint in a grisly exchange of hostilities between Carrier and Chilcotin peoples, but in 1808 the region seemed relatively tranquil.

On the west side of the river a bit farther south, Fraser wrote, the expedition "landed at a large house. Our Indians then called out to the strangers on the opposite shore, informing them that we were white people going to the sea."

This stretch of river is where, for the first time, Fraser observed horsemen, with couriers galloping ahead to inform the next village that strangers were coming by water, so I bid farewell to the sleepers in the vanished fort's graveyard, gave a thought to D.J., half a century dead now, left Mary Stump to her community's mourning and pushed south for Soda Creek.

On Monday, May 30, 1808, after what appears to have been a relatively uneventful day on a swiftly flowing but not overly rough section of river, Fraser recounts his first encounter with people he called "the Atnah nation" - readers who trivialize the insistence by native Indians that they comprise nations and deserve consideration as such should take note, that's how they were defined two centuries ago.

Fraser's Atnah were almost certainly the Secwepemc, once commonly referred to by non-natives as Shuswap, and he was passing through the western tongue of broad tribal territories that extended from just north of Soda Creek to Pavilion, just north of Lillooet, and eastward beyond Revelstoke to the Rockies.

This western wedge of territory, which extended across the Fraser, was important because it gave the Secwepemc access to fishing sites where they could harvest salmon, although they relied to a much greater extent than other peoples on hunting big game.

Somewhere between Tingley Creek and Beaverdam Creek - W. Kaye Lamb thinks in the vicinity of Macalister since the journal says the next day's run to Soda Creek was about 19 kilometres -  Fraser landed to parley with people who began arriving on horseback.

"They seemed peaceably inclined, and appeared happy to see us, and observed that having heard by their neighbours that white people were to visit their country this season, they had remained near the route on purpose to receive us," Fraser's journal says.

Despite the language barrier - communications had to be passed through two different interpreters - it proved a fortuitous meeting, although it was almost ruined when the fur traders' exhibition of firearms went awry. The traders' small brass swivel gun, old and obviously suffering metal fatigue, blew up when a demonstration shot was fired, wounding Gagnier, the party's gunner.

Fraser tried to look on the bright side. It was fortunate, he noted, that the cannon, being "cracked in many places of old," failed in the way it did, with only a moderate charge, because "was it to break amongst a large band of Indians the consequences might be fatal.

"This accident alarmed the Indians, but having convinced them that the injury was of no great consequence, they were reconciled," Fraser reported. It was a good thing, too, because the Secwepemc had vital intelligence for him on two counts.

First they warned the explorer that "the river below was but a succession of falls and cascades, which we should find impossible to pass, not only thro the badness of the channel, but also thro the badness of the surrounding country, which was rugged and mountainous. Their opinion, therefore, was that we should discontinue our voyage and remain with them."

Fraser told them that he was determined to continue. He then got the second bit of crucial intelligence: "They, then, informed us that at the next camp, the Great Chief of the Atnaugh had a slave who had been to the sea."

On May 31, accompanied by an interpreter, Fraser set out at 5:30 a.m. for Xats'ull, the Great Chief's camp near Soda Creek, and after a late lunch of apples and cheese beside the roaring river, with swallows darting and the blue shadows beginning to lengthen as the sun slid toward the Coast Range, so did I.

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