I saw an interview with Stan Rogers discussing the lyrics to Northwest Passage. It's quoted on Wikipedia on the page for the song.

The narrator states that he is taking "passage overland in the footsteps of brave Kelso" three centuries after. This refers to Henry Kelsey, an English explorer and trader apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1684, who was commissioned to explore the prairies in response to the competition posed by French Traders.[3] Rogers confessed in an interview in 1982 that during the writing of the song, he had not been sure of Kelsey's name, and had guessed it was Kelso when recording the song.[3] The lines "To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea" and "seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered broken bones/and a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones" commemorate the Franklin expedition.[4]