The John McLean Route
The tiny lettering on the crowded map noted the John McLean Route. “Who is John McLean?” I thought. A dotted line on the map that’s easy to miss... Congested with details and color, somewhat cartoonish, my eyes strain to discover other information. “Do I need glasses?”
Scanning south from McLean’s Route, I notice features south of the 49th parallel, like “Lewis and Clark” and “Ticonderoga”. But my gaze returned to his route in the northeast part of the map like a rubber band contracting back after being pulled.
John McLean’s Route crosses portions of present-day Quebec and Labrador
McLean was born in 1799 in Scotland. At 22, he went to Lower Canada as part of the Northwest Company.
When he stepped onto the streets of Montreal in 1821, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Great Britain. Correspondingly, the Old World’s surging demand for natural resources was satisfied by the New World’s fur and leather.
In the early 1820s, the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) had been active in northern Canada for 150 years. Before HBC existed, the Lake Superior area served (roughly) as the northern border of most continental traders. Inevitably, the Hudson Bay, with boat-accessible shores into the heart of the North American continent, sparked the imaginations of two intrepid French explorers.
Some Background on HBC…
Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers convinced British leadership to sponsor a feasibility expedition to the Bay to determine if it could be a suitable extraction point for the region’s fur. Upon their return to England with abundant high-quality pelts, the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay (more commonly known as the Hudson Bay Company) formed in 1670. The HBC received backing from a vast royal charter specifying all lands encompassed by the rivers flowing into Hudson Bay were now fair game for their exclusive trapping and colonization.
John McLean worked briefly for the Northwest Company; in 1821, the Northwest Company merged with HBC to solidify the famed fur trading monopoly. After 16 years in the Ottawa River and Western Pacific coast areas, McLean was overlooked for promotion to Chief Fur Trader and sent to oversee the Ungava District from Fort Chimo (present-day Kuujjuaq).
He intended to find a route between Fort Chimo and Fort Smith (aka “Northwest River” on the maps) and believed that the establishment of this economic connection would guarantee his previously denied promotion. Navigating the area took a true explorer’s spirit. What was it like to be in Ungava year-round, searching for undiscovered routes to the Labrador Sea?
This landscape contained some people, but not many; trappers had ventured here, and indigenous people inhabited the area. But by European standards, it was wild.
In 1838, Mclean established an overland route between Fort Chimo and Fort Smith; it spanned 533 miles and required 47 days of travel.
My rough approximation of McLean’s route. Click this link to open a navigable map to pan/zoom the area.
Evidence exists that McLean also connected the dots for a canoe route between the Naskaupi River and the George River (essentially a water route between Forts Chimo and Smith), which probably led to McLean’s discovery of a route around Churchill Falls. HBC capitalized on this to access the region's interior from the Labrador Sea.
The terrain this far north (Kuujjuaq is at 58 degrees latitude) is barren, mostly open, with clusters of black spruce and dwarf birch. I haven’t been to Ungava Bay (which today is part of the Nunavik region of Quebec), but I try to imagine the scene in the time of John McLean.
Fort Chimo (Kuujjuaq) on the left shore of the Koksoak River, Ungava Bay, 1909
Exposure to constant, unbroken wind would get old quickly. Want to set out on a quick paddle up the Koksoak River to peek at the shores of Ungava Bay to escape cabin fever? Make sure to first look over the birch bark canoe, patch all ruptures with your storage of spruce pitch, and bring plenty more pitch for the paddle, just in case.
Hudson Bay Company “Beaver” Style Canoe
Thanks to John McLean, the tentacles of HBC’s resource extraction expanded further into the continent. Yet, the Ungava area proved less profitable than expected, and he stayed in Fort Chimo for only a few more years. Every other year, a brig resupplied the fort, but that was the extent of the communication between McLean and his employer while he resided there. He left Ungava in 1842.
The inspiration for my research into John McLean’s Route is the map below:
Historic HBC-created Map (1950). Source: McMaster University Digital Archives
In case you missed these, check out my recent publications:
Creating a Hand Hewn Dough Bowl (Northern Woodlands Magazine)
Can you hear me now? Technology’s toll on the call of the wild (Boston Globe)
Hunting Wilderness (Vermont Sports Magazine)