#mackenzie river

Summer camping in the Arctic Circle

Northwest Territories

Are you a Due South fan? Do you wonder about all the references in Stan Rogers’ song “Northwest Passage”? Sure you do! So here are your annotated lyrics!

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage And make a Northwest Passage to the sea

In 1845, Captain John Franklin’s expedition set out from England to find the Northwest Passage: a sea route from Europe to Asia via the Arctic. His ships were trapped in ice and all aboard died.

You probably knew that, but did you know that the Beaufort Sea is the part of the Arctic Ocean that lies north of the Yukon and Alaska, at the western end of the Passage?

Westward from the Davis Strait 'tis there 'twas said to lie The sea route to the Orient for which so many died Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones

Davis Strait lies between Greenland and Baffin Island, south of Baffin Bay. Franklin sailed through it into Baffin Bay and then north of Baffin Island into the Passage.

The “cairn of stones” likely refers to the cairn on King William Island where Franklin’s crew placed the Victory Point note. The only written record of the lost expedition, it was depicted in The Terror TV show.

Three centuries thereafter, I take passage overland In the footsteps of brave Kelsey, where his Sea of Flowers began Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again This tardiest explorer, driving hard across the plain

Henry Kelsey was a 17th century fur trader working for the Hudson's Bay Company. He was likely the first European to visit the present day prairie provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

I have no idea where "Sea of Flowers" came from, but it's a lovely way to describe the prairies.

Canada’s Great Plains are incredibly flat. Cities really do appear to rise up and sink as you cross them, due to the curvature of the earth.

And through the night, behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west I think upon Mackenzie, David Thompson and the rest Who cracked the mountain ramparts and did show a path for me To race the roaring Fraser to the sea

Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson, and Simon Fraser were all explorers who travelled what is now Western Canada. They were all instrumental in finding routes through the mountains to the sea - routes we still drive today!

Mackenzie completed the first recorded transcontinental crossing north of Mexico in 1793, 12 years before Lewis & Clark. When he arrived in what is now Bella Coola, BC, he wrote an inscription on a rock that said he came "from Canada by land".

Thompson mapped almost 5 million square kilometres of western North America. He found routes through the Rocky Mountains and was the first European to travel the entire length of the Columbia River.

Fraser was in charge of the North West Company's fur trading operations west of the Rockies.

And they all had rivers named after them!

The Mackenzie River flows north from Great Slave Lake to the Beaufort Sea. The Mackenzie has the second largest drainage basin of any river in North America. You've probably never heard of it, but it flows right past Inuvik.

The Thompson River flows through the valleys and canyons of southern British Columbia to Lytton, where it meets with...

The Fraser River! The longest river in British Columbia meets the ocean just south of Vancouver, where it forms an enormous delta. Though it seems placid, if you travel upstream beyond the city you'll find a turbulent - well, roaring - canyon. If you drive the Trans-Canada Highway to Vancouver, you'll travel through the Fraser Canyon.

How then am I so different from the first men through this way? Like them, I left a settled life, I threw it all away To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men To find there but the road back home again

Mighty Mackenzie

“ESKIMOS ARE NOT PRIMITIVE PEOPLE,” Montreal Gazette. November 30, 1932. Page 5. ---- Richard Finnie Describes Delights of Arctic Scenery ---- Toronto, November 29. "Eskimos are not refrigerated, blubber-saturated savages, but happy, intelligent, and hospitable people, the finest, most generous and most likeable people of all uncultured races," according to Richard Finnie, of Ottawa, who accompanied L. T. Burwash on his Franklin expedition to King William Island.

"The Arctic climate," Mr. Finnie said in an address here last night, :is by no means unbearable. The summers are short, but warm and pleasant. The winters are cold, but I have suffered far more with cold in civilization, wearing its ridiculously inadequate clothing.

"The tourist has begun to discover the Mackenzie River," Mr. Finnie said. "There are 2,000 miles of magnificent waterway through absolutely unspoiled country, to be travelled in comfort by aeroplane, steamboat or canoe.

"The aeroplane has changed the whole situation in the Arctic. It is possible that across the fringe of the polar ocean, towns and cities may grow up in the course of the next four generation's, the nucleus of a new empire."

Mr. Finnie is official archivist and photographer of the Canadian Arctic under the Department or Interior, Ottawa, and is a son of O. S. Finnie, former director of the Canadian Northwest Territories branch.

Evening Star. Dec 13 1914