page_title: John McLean (explorer)
section_title: With the Hudson's Bay Company
hierarchical_section_title: John McLean (explorer) / Life / With the Hudson's Bay Company
caption_attribution_description: English: Scene showing a large Hudson's Bay Company freight canoe passing a waterfall, presumably on the French River. The passengers in the canoe may be the artist and her husband, Edward Hopkins, secretary to the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Français&#160;: Voyageurs passant devant une chute en canot, de Frances Anne Hopkins, 1869. Les voyageurs canadiens, empruntant aux Autochtones leur savoir et leurs techniques, ont pénétré à l’intérieur du continent, et ont souvent entrepris de longs voyages en navigation fluviale, à la recherche de fourrure. Scène représentant un gros canot à marchandises de la Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson passant devant une chute, probablement sur la rivière des Français. Les passagers à bord du canot sont peut-être l'artiste et son mari, Edward Hopkins, secrétaire du gouverneur de la Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson.
context_page_description: John McLean was a Scotsman who emigrated to British North America, where he became a fur-trapper, trader, explorer, grocer, banker, newspaperman, clerk, and author. He travelled by foot and canoe from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, becoming one of the chief traders of the Hudson's Bay Company. He is remembered as the first person of European descent to discover Churchill Falls on Canada's Churchill River and sometimes mistakenly credited as the first to cross the Labrador Peninsula. Long overlooked, his first-person accounts of early 19th-century fur trading in Canada are now valued by historians. Under the pen name Viator, his letters to newspapers around Canada also helped shift public opinion away from yielding the western territories to the United States during the Alabama Claims dispute over damages for British involvement in the American Civil War.
caption: F.A. Hopkins's portrayal of an HBC freight canoe (1869)
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