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: An excellent first edition example of Colton's rare map documenting Canada, or more specifically, British, Russian, and Danish holdings in North America. Covers the continent from modern day Alaska (Russian America) to Greenland (Danish America), and from the U.S border north to the Arctic. Includes Iceland. Hand colored in pink, green, yellow and blue pastels. Surrounded by Colton's typical spiral motif border. Dated and copyrighted to J. H. Colton, 1855. Published as page no. 3 in volume 1 of the first edition of George Washington Colton's 1855 Atlas of the World .
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: A period map showing the extent of British knowledge of present-day Canada around the time of McLean's retirement
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