the merger. But in 1823, Black was appointed as a clerk and then Chief Trader to the post at Fort St. John. Explorations In the summer of 1824, at the behest of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, Black was assigned to set out with a crew of ten from Rocky Mountain Portage (now Hudson's Hope) "to the Sources of Finlay's Branch [the Finlay River] and Northwest Ward." The purpose of the expedition was to assess the region's suitability for extension of the fur trade, and to check the advance of the Russian fur trade from the west. The river had been partially explored by John Finlay, a colleague of Alexander Mackenzie, in 1797. In 1793, Mackenzie had ascended the Peace River to the point where it is formed by the Finlay flowing from the north, and the Parsnip River from the south. Mackenzie had taken the Parsnip, and from there completed a complicated route to the Pacific Ocean. It is thought that Finlay may have decided to probe the northern branch of the Peace in order to determine if it afforded a better route to the Pacific than the one taken by Mackenzie. Nonetheless, it would appear from the information Black had that Finlay had only made it as far as the Ingenika River, about 130 km north of the Finlay River's confluence with the Parsnip (where the Peace begins). The journey up the Finlay River's 450 km length and up its tributaries, the Toodoggone River and the Firesteel River, took Black and his men to what is considered the ultimate source of the Mackenzie River at Thutade Lake (at the head of the Firesteel). Proceeding sometimes on foot, sometimes by raft, Black and a smaller crew explored the region of the Spatsizi Plateau, there finding one of the sources of the Stikine River and so reaching the boundary between the Arctic and Pacific drainages. Journeying north-eastward, Black crossed another divide — this time between the Stikine and Liard Rivers — and rafted some way down the Kechika by way of its tributary, the Turnagain River, before returning again down the Finlay. Black's vivid journal account of the expedition conveys the extreme hardships faced by the crew, and what Black believed was the general privation of the country — both as a source of food and of furs. Two of his men deserted in the course