File 80 - Letter to John Mackenzie

Willard Ferdinand Wentzel was born around 1780 in Norway and died in 1832 in Ste. Agathe, Manitoba. He was the son of Adam Wentzel, a Norwegian merchant in Montreal, and Endymia Grout. He had at least one daughter with Agathe Letendre Montagnaise. In 1799, he was employed as a clerk by the North West Company, serving on the Mackenzie River and Great Bear Lake before taking charge of the North West Company post in Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake. On reaching Fort Providence in July 1820, Wentzel was appointed as an assistant for leader John Franklin, in the British Naval Exploring Expedition (first Arctic Land Expedition). He undertook to accompany the expedition to the Arctic coast, recruiting Indigenous inhabitants as guides and hunters. Setting out from Fort Providence in August 1820, the expedition reached Winter Lake where they built their winter base, Fort Enterprise. Leaving the fort in June 1821, they travelled to the mouth of the Coppermine River, where Wentzel and his party turned back, carrying dispatches and equipment for transmission to England. After the expedition, Wentzel served in the amalgamated Hudson's Bay Company in Fort Simpson between 1822 and 1824, at Fort Chipewyan between 1824 and 1825 and finally in Mingan on the Lower St. Lawrence River between 1827 and 1829 before retiring.