Note 82 — {145} CHAP. VI.

In 1778 Peter Pond, a fur trader from Montreal, had built a trading post on the east bank of Athabasca River, about thirty miles up-stream from Athabasca Lake, and in 1786, after the formation of the North-West Company, Laurent Leroux and Cuthbert Grant, two of the employees of this Company, had descended Slave River to Great Slave Lake and had established a trading post on its southern shore. The Copper Indians traded at the latter post, while the Northern or Chipewyan Indians resorted to the more southern and older post on the Athabasca River. Among the members of this latter tribe, who had been accustomed to make long pilgrimages to Churchill in order to procure implements and utensils of various kinds in exchange for furs, but who afterwards found that they could buy such goods as they needed more advantageously from the traders on the Athabasca River, very much nearer home, was a man known to those traders as "English Chief." This Indian accompanied Sir Alexander Mackenzie, one of the partners of the North-West Company, and one of those who would have been spoken of by Hearne as Canadians, on his journey from Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Ocean in 1789.

This note also throws an interesting light on the date on which the journal was written, for the first outbreak of small-pox, which swept off the Indians of Western Canada, occurred in 1781, and therefore the journal itself was written before that date, while Hearne was living as Governor at Fort Prince of Wales. The note would appear to have been written about 1787, after the destruction of Fort Prince of Wales, and while Hearne was living at Fort Churchill, five miles south of the old fort, and before he finally returned to England.