John McLean

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.