I began writing this blog post about a year ago but never published it. Luckily, as you will see, there was a great update to the story since I began writing. I am publishing this now to Christen the new blog.

Do you know who the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico was? It’s Alexander Mackenzie, the one who inscribed his famous “From Canada by Land” into a rock on the Pacific Coast in British Columbia in 1793 (a decade before the American explorers Lewis and Clark would go on their westward expedition if continental bragging rights are something you care about), right? Google the question for yourself and you’ll find very few websites that make such a claim, though. The Canadian Encyclopedia doesn’t make this claim on either their page about Mackenzie or his explorations. Wikipedia won’t say so. Encyclopedia.com doesn’t say as such. Neither does the Ainslie Manson book Alexander MacKenzie: From Canada by Land.

No, these sources will not tell you that Alexander Mackenzie was the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico. What do they tell us about the intrepid Mackenzie? They tell us that he was the first European to cross North America by land north of Mexico.

Well, that’s much less of an impressive feat if you ask me. Why should we hold him in such high esteem? Are Europeans so great that we should give a damn that one of them was able to mimic the feat of another from who was not so fortunate as to be born in Europe? Why do I know almost nothing of the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico? Who is this fearless explorer who went where no man has gone before? Google it yourself.

Can you find an answer? Unfortunately, you will not be able to. The reason, I presume, is that Mackenzie was indeed the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico but to say so is just not done in polite society. But maybe I am wrong.

Perhaps, you think, that there is nothing wrong with what we are being told. After all, isn’t it true that Mackenzie was the first European to cross North America by land north of Mexico? Indeed, it is true. But, I ask you, who is Neil Armstrong? Would you tell me that he was the first American on the moon? Or might you say, as History, Wikipedia, Britannica, and NASA do, that he was the first man on the moon? Obviously, you would say the latter.

But maybe we’re just practicing intellectual humility. We can’t know that Mackenzie was the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico. After all, didn’t Indigenous people occupy North America for some nineteen thousand years before any Europeans began their colonization of the continent? I agree, we cannot know it to be the case. But if we should practice this sort of intellectual humility and limit our claim by saying only that Mackenzie was the first European to cross north America by land north of Mexico, then I think that we must limit our claim even further in the spirit of intellectual humility. Who is to say that this Mackenzie was the first European to make such a journey? We know very little of the L’Anse aux Meadows, the site of Viking settlement in Newfoundland. Maybe a Viking or two wandered westward and made their way to the Pacific ocean. Or, could there not have been an unrecorded transatlantic crossing which brought forth a brave European who made the land voyage to the Pacific (or even less conceivable but still possible and transpacific voyage which led to a west-to-east land crossing of the continent)? In practicing our intellectual humility, should we not deny Mackenzie his claim to European primacy in crossing North America by land north of Mexico?

We do not take our intellectual humility in this way though. There is no evidence of such a land crossing by a European before Mackenzie. But, as far as I am aware, there is also no evidence of a land crossing by a non-European. If there were, then we would be able to track down the true first land crossing of North America north of Mexico, but no where that I have searched has produced any such result.

I began writing this blog post over a year ago but never found the right time to publish it. But then the most wonderful thing happened. I was reading one of the featured articles in the April-May 2022 edition of Canada’s History Magazine (through a subscription gifted to me by my dear sister), in which we get a detailed account of Mackenzie’s land journey by the historian, Barry Gough. As wonderful as a such a feature was, I found an even more wonderful surprise inside. There on the glossy coated paper were the words, “Make no mistake: Thanks to Indigenous advice, Mackenzie was the first person in recorded history to cross the continent north of Mexico.” I was flabbergasted. This was the first place I had ever seen it in print. I had to get to the bottom of this. Why was the great Barry Gough (who I had only just realized was clearly an undiscovered genius of his time) so sure of this claim. I took a look around the internet to find that Barry Gough was professor emeritus at none other than my Alma Mater, Wilfrid Laurier University. Though his email was not publicly available, I did a little reverse engineering by looking at other faculty names and email addresses. I sent off an email asking why he said person instead of European and prayed for a response.

To my delight, my code-breaking was perfect and Dr. Barry Gough not only received my email but delivered an enthusiastic response:

Dear Andrew
Thank you for your email, and I appreciate your question, for it is most important.

Some years ago, at a conference on George Vancouver at SFU, I spoke on Mackenzie. It was the essential theme that I developed for First Across the Continent. I have no reason to change my view. However, an Anthropology prof. from SFU told me on that occasion that he had talked with some local First Nations on the matter and was told by them that two Europeans (the prof used the term white men) had come to Pacific tidewater before Mackenzie (by land, I presume). The prof’s name may have been Bill Hober or similar (I am sorry I cannot give you exact information on this.).  I was surprised at the remark and dubious about the claim. It is not that I distrust the Indigenous account only that it cannot be verified.
Does this help? I hope so.

I was so pleased to be able to keep the Mackenzie odyssey alive in Canadian historical literature. It seems as if the eighteenth century is disappearing quickly in the rearview mirror, especially in academic circles.

What a response! Could a young mind so interested in knowing who was the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico ask for anything better? The intrigue, the controversy, the follow-up literature! It was all so wonderful. I followed up by responding that I was surprised to hear that the issue was not that Mackenzie was up against some other non-European for the title, but there was a possibility of a different European being the one to have made the first voyage. His second response even more tantalizing:

Thank you, Andrew
Remember this is all hearsay, though tantalizingly possible! One reason I doubt it is that Peter Pond never mentioned the prospect, and he was searching for a route to Cook Inlet just before Mackenzie did his voyage to the Arctic. I have written about aspects of this in The Elusive Mr Pond.
All good wishes, Barry Gough

What a response again! I even get told what Dr. Gough believes is the primary evidence that his interlocutor was incorrect. It was time for me to take a look into Dr. Gough’s evidence for Mackenzie being the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico. I ordered a copy of First Across the Continent and I got reading.

The book was great, of the three tellings of the journey I’ve read this was the best (though I’ve not yet read Mackenzie’s own From Montreal). But from the beginning it was not at all clear that the central thesis of the book was that Mackenzie was the first person to travel across North America by land north of Mexico. Instead, the central thesis seemed to be that Mackenzie’s journeys to the Arctic and Pacific oceans were primarily commercial ventures instead of ones driven by a sense of adventure. But nonetheless I pressed on.

And then it hit me. Right there, dab smack in the middle of page 209 (of 211, mind you). I could not believe my eyes. What was I reading?! Had the great Barry Gough also fallen from grace? For on those pages I read the words, “Twelve years before, Mackenzie had stolen the prize of being the first European to cross the continent.”

Where had my journey led me? Like Mackenzie making it to the Arctic ocean in 1789 though the journey was great, the destination was a disappointment. Who was the first person to cross North America by land north of Mexico? I might never know. Why did Barry Gough feel so confident in his answer within the pages of Canada’s History magazine as well as in emails to me but not in his book? I wish I knew. None the less, I hope that Mackenzie himself is somewhere looking over me, happy to see that I have a sense of adventure which rivals his own.