Mackenzie, Alexander, Sir, 1764-1820 : Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820) was born in 1764 at Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. He was the younger son of Kenneth Mackenzie (d. 1780) of Melbost farm and his wife, Isabella, née Maciver. With his father and two aunts, Alexander Mackenzie emigrated to New York in 1774 and, in 1778, was sent to school in Montreal to avoid the dangers of the War of the American Revolution. In 1779, he became a clerk in the firm of Finlay and Gregory (later, Gregory, McLeod and Co.), which in 1787 was absorbed by a larger partnership that was reorganized as the North West Company five years later.
Mackenzie became a partner in the company and in 1788 was put in charge of Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca. rom this post he made the 1789 expedition to the Arctic Ocean that gave his name to the Mackenzie River and became the prelude to his great journey to the Pacific in 1793. In 1799, Mackenzie returned to England, where he published his Voyages from Montreal, on the river St. Laurence, through the continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific oceans; in the years 1789 and 1793; with a preliminary account of the rise, progress, and present state of the fur trade of that country (London, 1801). He was knighted in 1802 and returned to Canada in the same year and became the leading partner in the XY Company.
When the XY Company amalgamated with the North West Company in 1804, Mackenzie was "excluded from any interference" in it and formed his own company to look after his interests within it. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada for the county of Huntingdon in 1805, but returned to Scotland permanently in 1808. In 1812, he married Geddes, daughter and co-heiress of George Mackenzie (d. 1809), a merchant of Tower Hill, London, whose estate of Avoch in Ross-shire he purchased in the same year. Returning with his wife and children to Avoch from Edinburgh, where he had gone for medical advice, Mackenzie died unexpectedly in a wayside inn near Dunkeld on 12 March 1820.
