Beating a passage to the pacific: more than ten years prior to the celebrated expedition of Lewis and Clark, a little-known Scotsman completed the first coast-to-coast trek across the continent.

• Author: Werner, Louis

By May of tiffs year, when bicentennial festivities are in full swing, few Americans will not know the names Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, leaders of the 1804 expedition sent by President Thomas Jefferson to search the continent for a northwest passage to the Pacific. But Canadians, with good reason, will be politely chuckling at their southern neighbors' ignorance of another name, one they feel more surely deserves the fame and honor now accruing to Lewis and Clark.

Alexander Mackenzie, a Scotsman-turned-Canadian hero who died nonetheless a proud Scot, was in fact the first European to cross the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of Mexico. He did this in 1798, more than a decade before the two explorers being feted this year in the United States: Mackenzie's extraordinary feat and journal of his voyage, published in 1801 under the title Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Laurence Through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793 directly inspired Jefferson's westward dream and his commission of the Corps of Discovery.

Mackenzie's modern biographers are certain of his achievement, giving their books such titles as First Man West, First Crossing, and First Across the Contingent. But just, as American historians of Lewis and Clark have romanticized Clark's African slave York, who was neither freed nor paid after the expedition, and their Shoshone translator Sacajawea, bought by and married to a polygamous French voyageur before her final whereabouts were totally lost track of, Mackenzie's story, too, has generated its share of trivialization. Many young Canadian readers gain their first knowledge of it by reading about the expedition's dog, unnamed in the journal, in the children's book A Dug Came, Too.

Even the esteemed historian Stephen Ambrose's prize-winning account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Undaunted Courage, hedges its unavoidable tribute to the man who beat, his heroic duo to their goal. "It is easy to point to mistakes and shortcomings in the Mackenzie expedition," he wrote. "He collected few specimens, made few descriptions, and in general did not advance knowledge of the plant, animal, mineral, or Indian life of the country."

Ironically, Mackenzie's journal, describing a transcontinental route starting near the sixtieth parallel in country far rougher than Lewis and Clark's smooth sailing on the Missouri River, was plagiarized in 1809 in a forged account of the American expedition--with the name of Lewis's colleague misspelled as Clarke!--and reprinted many times before Lewis's official report finally appeared, in truncated form, in the year 1814.

Mackenzie figures into another episode of Cite bumpy publication history of their more famous journals. Because Lewis was slow to publish art authorized record, many of his men tried to get their personal diaries into print first in order to reap financial reward. Lewis tamped down potential demand for these rival accounts by saying that they were not "official." One publisher fired back, however, by claiming that Lewis's version was not worth waiting for in any case, as he was neither first to make the trip nor first to publish an account of it--Mackenzie was!

Historians are fairly certain that Lewis and Clark themselves carried Mackenzie's journal with them as a reference. Just before their departure, President Jefferson bought the U.S. edition, published in Cite more portable quarto format than the British edition in larger folio size he already possessed, as a gift for Lewis. Historian Ambrose has Jefferson and Lewis pouring over this book throughout the fall of 1802, calling it Lewis's "crash course" in North America's northwestern geography.

By almost any standard, Mackenzie's feat outshown that of Lewis and Clark. He traveled most of the way by tippy birch-bark canoe, they by solid keelboat. When both parties were eventually forced to abandon their watercraft, Mackenzie set out on foot and the Americans on horse back. He went in the company of only nine men, they departed with a group four times larger. He had the financial and logistical backlog only of a...