C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

IntroductionXXVIIriver; at least, the published version of his map, ifnot the original, showed itflowing straight through the mountains (Isbister, after 332). In r842, three yearsafter his journey up the Rat, Bell was guided by Gwich'in over Peel River Portageto the Pacific Slope and the river that bears his name today. Why had he notcontinued up the Rat earlier? This is a mystery, further confused in 1842 by hismistake in thinking that, although he could see that it flowed westward, the BellRiver merely formed another fork of the Rat (the West Rat and East Rat remainedon maps for some years). He reached the Porcupine River in that year, and theYukon during a similar trip in 1844, thereby establishing a very profitableexpansion of the company's trade (Craig 42). But Bell did not realize thesignificance of his discovery. Vilhjalmur Stefansson considered such a failureremarkable. He wrote of Bell in the same breath as Columbus-two great seekersof the Northwest Passage-but he regretted Bell's failure to seize on thesignificance of the geography he had encountered: "Clearly it did not occur tohim, at least then, that the great Rocky Mountain chain here had been smoothedbeneath a surface of gently sloping grasslands, to rise craggily again farther northand west." In Stefansson's view, it also did not dawn on Isbister in his publishedaccount that the men had crossed a "portage far the best that anywhere connectsthe Mississippi-Mackenzie central basin of the continent with Pacific waters"(Northwest r84, 176).When, in r847, Alexander Hunter Murray took over the area from Bell, hebypassed the Rat, sledging across Peel River Portage to La Pierre House, whichhad been established in either 1843-44 (Coutts 154) or 1846 (Coates 58).Murray's wife, Anne, three men, and another woman stayed at the post while hereturned to Fort McPherson, rejoining them with a larger pedestrian party on 14June (Murray 28). He then continued down the Bell, Porcupine, and Yukonrivers. At the confluence of the latter two, he began building Fort Yukon.Despite this achievement, which constituted an act of commercial aggression oninternationally acknowledged Russian territory, Murray will be remembered aswell for not discovering the water connection between the upper Bell and Ratrivers.Finally, in 187~, James McDougall, Murray's successor, explored the pass thatconnects the Mackenzie and Yukon watersheds; he reported it as commerciallyviable and relatively straightforward (qtd in Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Northwest223-25): in short, possibly preferable in summer to the long and initially