fur trade commerce as of 1754. Of the westernmost of the French forts, Carleton wrote, "A fort was erected one hundred leagues beyond Paskoyat, but I have not information enough to put either the fort or the full extent of the river on the map..." The reports and maps of the Hudson's Bay Company surveyors who explored along the Saskatchewan River in the latter half of the 18th Century—Anthony Henday in 1755, Matthew Cocking in 1772, Peter Fidler in 1792—never mentioned any French forts west of Fort de la Corne. The map created by the North West Company's Peter Pond in 1785 marked a spot below the forks of the Saskatchewan with the note "This is the highest point the French Traders possessed". British free trader Thomas Curry, determined to find the extent of the territory explored by the French, ventured from Michilimackinac to Fort Bourbon in 1767 and returned the following spring with four canoes full of the finest pelts. James Finlay followed Curry's example and according to Alexander Mackenzie travelled as far as "Nipawee, the last of the French settlements on the bank of the Saskatchiwine river". Location hypotheses Saint-Pierre's reference to "the Rock mountains" and a distance of 300 French leagues up the river from Fort Paskoya (near the modern town of The Pas) led subsequent historians to hypothesize that Niverville's men had travelled as far west as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, which would have made them the first Europeans to have reached what is now Alberta and to have seen the Canadian Rockies (preceding Henday by three years). Over a century later, taking Saint-Pierre's written account to be accurate, historian Benjamin Sulte wrote that Fort Calgary was situated on the site of the former Fort La Jonquière. NWMP Inspector Éphrem Brisebois alleged that he found the remains of an old fort, which he presumed was La Jonquière, when the detachment arrived there in 1875. On the other hand geologist Joseph Tyrrell speculated in his 1886 report on the natural history of Alberta to Alfred R. C. Selwyn, director of the Geological Survey of Canada, that it was more likely that Niverville's men would have ascended the North Saskatchewan instead of the south because the Cree that inhabited the territory along the northern branch had been known to the French prior and were on friendly terms, whereas the Blackfoot to the south "were always understood