From the former farmhouse's upstairs windows-which are just high enough to provide a clear line of sight across an intervening ridge-it is possible to see Loch Torridon, its waters scuffed and ruffled by the wind. Beyond is Applecross, the district where Angus McDonald's father, a farmer by profession, went in October 1816 to register his son's birth. Beyond Applecross, like Torridon a mainland locality, is the Isle of Skye. Beyond Skye is the more distant, and only intermittently visible, Isle of Lewis. Beyond Lewis is the open Atlantic. And beyond the Atlantic, some thousands of miles to the west, is North America.

That continent, at the time of Angus McDonald's birth, was one with which Highlanders-who had loomed large among transatlantic emigrants since the 1760s-were increasingly familiar. It is little surprise, then, that the Craig household had links with North America. What is surprising, and what made the Craig family almost unique among early nineteenth-century whites, is that their American relatives included a man who had lived for a period in what is now Montana. This man, Finan McDonald, was possibly the brother, but more probably the cousin, of Angus's father, Donald MacDonald. In 1786, as a small boy accompanying emigrant parents, Finan had left Knoydart-another Highland area some forty miles south of Torridon-for what is now Glengarry County, Ontario. There the teenage Finan joined the formidable fur trading organization, the North West Company.

The North West Company was a creation of men whose background was similar to Finan's. Foremost among the company's founders was Simon MacTavish, who came originally from Stratherrick, a valley situated to the east or southeast of Knoydart and Torridon. MacTavish reached North America in the 1760s. Like many other Highland emigrants, he settled in New York's Mohawk valley. Like most Mohawk valley Highlanders, MacTavish chose the loyalist, as opposed to the patriot, side during the Revolutionary War. By the war's end, he had left the newly independent United States for Canada where, during the 1780s and 1790s, he masterminded the emergence of the North West Company and its fostering of fur trading talent, most of which consisted of Highlanders like himself.

Territorial expansionism was integral to North West Company strategy from the outset. The organization's great rivals, those Hudson's Bay Company men with whom MacTavish and his Nor'Westers were sometimes literally at war, had long relied on the Cree and other Indian peoples to bring furs from the North American interior to their base at York Factory on Hudson Bay. The Nor�Westers, in contrast, regarded their Montreal headquarters as the launching pad for trading expeditions that took them farther inland. Within a few years, thanks to a growing mastery of Indian technology in the shape of the birchbark canoe and to their skill in exploiting the Canadian river system, North West Company traders could be found everywhere from the Great Lakes to the Athabasca country. Nor was Athabasca, nearly 2,000 miles from Montreal, the limit of the Nor'Westers' reach. Well before the eighteenth century's end, one of the most enterprising of all Nor'Westers, Alexander Mackenzie, had made his way both to the Arctic Ocean and to the Pacific. More than a decade ahead of Lewis and Clark, therefore, and in only a fraction of the time taken by those explorers, Mackenzie, a Scottish Highlander, became the first white man to cross North America from coast to coast.

from the second chapter, "Angus McDonald: A Scottish Highlander among Indian Peoples," by James Hunter