Twelve years before Lewis and Clark, a Scottish fur trader walked out of the forest onto the Pacific shore of Canada with nine men, wrote his name on a rock in bear grease and vermilion, and had got there, and back, on a diet of pemmican and whatever the men could shoot, with nobody dead. Alexander Mackenzie was twenty-nine, a partner of the North West Company at a post on the Peace River, and he had already made one attempt and ended up at the Arctic Ocean by mistake down the river that now bears his name. In May 1793 he tried again for the Pacific: himself, his cousin, six French-Canadian voyageurs and two Indian hunters in one birchbark canoe twenty-five feet long, with three thousand pounds of gear in it, pointing upstream into the Rocky Mountains along a route no European had taken. The food was the fur trade's food. Pemmican: buffalo meat dried, pounded to powder, mixed half and half with rendered buffalo fat and packed into hide bags of ninety pounds, which kept for years and fed a man on a pound and a half a day. That and what the hunters brought in: elk, beaver, bear, mountain goat, salmon when they reached the rivers that ran west. No bread, no vegetable, nothing that grew. The voyageurs paddled fourteen hours a day on it, carried the canoe and the loads over portages on their backs, and sang. The river tore the canoe open on the rocks and they rebuilt it. The mountains closed in and they went over on foot, through country where the local nations had never seen a white face, guided from village to village by men who had heard of the stinking lake to the west. On the twenty-second of July 1793 they came down the Bella Coola valley to the salt water, and Mackenzie mixed vermilion with melted grease and wrote on a rock: Alex Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. Then they turned round and walked back, and were at the fort by the end of August, every man alive. He was knighted for it, wrote the book that Jefferson read before he sent Lewis and Clark, and retired to Scotland. The first crossing of North America was done by ten men in a canoe on dried meat and fat. The expedition that followed had thirty-three, a keelboat and a President behind it, and it was the buffalo fat that got them through too.