184 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



In sketching very briefly the development of these thoroughfares 

 of the fur trade, one finds two more or less definite and distinct starting- 

 points. In the north, the men of the Hudson's Bay Company pushed 

 their way inland from Hudson bay to Lake Winnipeg. From the 

 St. Lawrence, the fur-traders of New France, and their legitimate 

 successors of the North West Company, ascended the Great Lakes 

 to the Kaministikwia or the Grand Portage, and from there they, too, 

 made their way to Lake Winnipeg. From Lake Winnipeg, for a time 

 independently, and later as factors and traders in the one surviving 

 company, they worked their way west and north over far-flung 

 thoroughfares, to the remote shores of the Pacific and the Arctic. 



Of the earlier attempts of the pathfinders of the Hudson's Bay 

 Company to penetrate the vast wilderness that lay to the west of Hud- 

 son bay, one, that of Samuel Hearne, had its starting point at Prince 

 of Wales Fort, at the mouth of the Churchill river; another, that of 

 Henry Kellsey, at Fort Nelson, at the mouth of Nelson river. Hearne's 

 expedition, important though it was from a geographical point of view, 

 need not be considered here as it opened up no route in to the interior. 

 Kellsey 's much earlier expedition, up the Nelson river and beyond, 

 was equally unfruitful. There is evidence that both the Churchill 

 and the Nelson were used to some slight extent by the fur-traders, 

 and to a much greater extent by Indians bringing down their furs 

 to the forts on the bay, but neither was ever developed into a trade 

 route to the interior. The recognized road to the west was by way 

 of the Hayes river, and the gateway was York Factory near the mouth 

 of that river. 



From York Factory set out two of the explorers of the Hudson's 

 Bay Company who were instrumental in blazing a trail from the bay 

 to the heart of the great plains — Anthony Hendry in 1754 and Matthew 

 Cocking in 1772. 1 As far -as Knee lake they followed what was 

 afterward known as the Hayes route, but from Knee lake they 

 turned over to the Nelson, through a country that remained unsur- 

 veyed almost to the present day. The rivers and lakes they traversed 

 between Knee lake and Cross lake on the Nelson are not shown on 

 any of the government maps. The first authentic account of the 

 Hayes route proper, from York Factory to Play green lake and Lake 

 Winnipeg, is contained in the journals of David Thompson, for some 

 years an officer of the Hudson's Bay Company, and afterward astrono- 

 mer of the North West Company. In 1787 Thompson went inland 

 from York Factory to the Saskatchewan, by way of the Hayes 

 Route and Lake Winnipeg. His description of the route will be 



1 For their journals, see Trans. Royal Society of Canada, 1907, and 1908. 



