Frozen Glory

• Main Author: McGhee, Robert
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 2006
• Subjects: Arctic; Chukchi; Chukotka; Northwest passage; Subarctic; Siberia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192807304.003.0012; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/51979719/isbn-9780912807304-book-part-12.pdf

Abstract Samuel Hearne’s Report on his astonishing journey across the Barren Grounds put an end to lingering hopes that a commercially viable Northwest Passage existed across the top of the American continent. The rumoured fabulous deposits of yellow metal in the distant northwest had turned out not to be gold, but scattered useless chunks of native copper. As in Siberia, any wealth that was to be obtained in the northern regions of North America would still come from the fur-bearing animals of the great snowforests that spanned the continent. Fur continued to drive the exploration of the Subarctic. In 1789, the same year that Russian merchants finally established a trade-fair in the lands of the fiercely independent Chukchi, the fur trader Alexander Mackenzie reached the coast of the western Canadian Arctic a few hundred kilometres to the east of Chukotka. Four years later, when he penetrated as far as Russian territory on the northern Pacific coast of Canada, the fur trade had spanned the world.