of the North West Company, though without incorporation, this organization soon became a mighty power, most able and efficient in its working. Its chief managers, resident in Montreal and Quebec, were men of the highest consideration and influence. They felt their dignity, and inaugurated operations which inspirited social life around them with vivacious and romantic incidents well set off by scenes and actors.

In the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the affairs of the Hudson Bay Company, in 1857, - to be subsequently referred to, the Right Hon. Edward Ellice, who was a member of the committee, also took the stand as a witness. He testified that he first went to Canada in 1803, and that then everybody of consequence was engaged in the fur trade, which, he said, was all the trade there was. As we shall see, he was the son of a great capitalist in Canada, and became a member of the North West Company, as he was also of a company which divided off from it, and finally of the Hudson Bay Company, when all rivalries had been conciliated. This witness had a rich experience in various animosities and rivalries, and showed his acuteness in his reserve as well as in his testimony. The North West Company having a vast warehouse at Montreal from which it sent out goods by the Ottawa and the northern route, had also a great depot at Fort William, on the west of Lake Superior. It had a class of its partners "on shares," who, under the name of "winterers," went off by the streams and lakes to reside deep in the interior among the natives, to instigate business, and to gather in the results of hunting and trapping. These were adventurous men, and soon became skilled in all woodcraft. A class of youths, chiefly Scotch, robust and hardy, were articled as apprentice-clerks for seven years, receiving their subsistence and one hundred pounds. The prospective reward of their toil and fidelity was to become partners and shareholders, men of consequence among peers. So they worked with a will. There was a high zest of life for them in adventure, self-reliance, converse with novel scenes and picturesque companionship. Indian maidens cast in their lot with these "winterers" and the clerks, and the situation with its influences very naturally in most cases resulted in attaching them permanently to a mode of life ventured upon only as an incident. It was of the offspring of these and others, principally Canadians, French fathers and Indian mothers, that there came into the wilderness such a numerous progeny of half-breeds and persons of variously mixed blood, -the stock of these two classes, — the coureurs de bois and the voyageurs. For reasons which will suggest themselves, these half-breeds of French parentage far outnumbered those of English and Scotch parentage, and from their mixed inherited and transmitted qualities, their abandon, vivacity, recklessness, and ready affiliation with Indian ways, they were held to be superior for the service required. The North West Company had at one time nearly two thousand of this unique class of employés, going and coming, toiling after a rollicking fashion in its service, paddling and rowing the canoe or the boat, threading the reedy marshes, running the cascades, crossing the portage with their bur

dens, trailing along the cataracts, bearing all the stern severities of winter in the woods, guiding the dog-sledges, camping in snowdrifts, ready on their return for wild carousals and dances, parting with the year's gains for finery and frolic, and then getting an easy shrift from their priests. The sagacity and pluck, the wide field-roving, and the gainful enterprise of the North West Company, though it was only tolerated in its existence and operations, threatened at one time wholly to crush the comparatively stagnant operations of the chartered Bay Company. Indeed, so profitable, for one period at least, was the field of this free associated enterprise that another volunteer company, which took the name of the "X Y Company," appeared on the scene. This was not in all respects in hostile rivalry to the North West Company, as some partners belonged to both of them, though each was complemented by those who were determined to share the spoils either as individuals or in partnership.

It was easy to see, however, what would very soon be the inevitable consequences of this method of action in the fierce rivalry and the exhaustive activity of vigorous parties in the fur trade, enforced by all the resources of combined capital. The buffalo, which was the main dependence for food at the posts and on the tramp, was wholly driven from vast expanses on the plains. The fur-bearing animals were threatened with extermination, and the natives were dangerously demoralized. The North West Company and the X Y Company found it wise for them to form a coalition, peaceable for themselves, but ominous for the Bay Company.

It was at an interval in this long warfare when the strife was fiercest that there came in an episode of historical interest which must briefly engage attention.

[From a drawing in Alex. J. Russell's Red River Country (Montreal, 1870). The fort is at the extreme right. Cf. drawing in Chas. Marshall's Canadian Dominion (London, 1871). - ED.]

Near the beginning of this century the British government had to deal with the problem of providing for large numbers of poor Highlanders, evicted from their rude cottages and lands that the lordly nobles might turn the territory into deer forests. A party of these evicted tenants from Kildonan, in Sutherlandshire, were induced by the Earl of Selkirk to seek a new home in the centre of the American wilderness, in the chartered territory of the Hudson Bay Company. By purchase or by proxy, the earl, himself a large proprietor, had obtained control of the administration of the company in London when its stock was greatly depressed, and received from it in 1811, probably with but nominal compensation, a grant of 116,000 square miles for a settlement. Its central point was at the confluence of

the Red and the Assiniboin rivers. A party of the Highlanders, scantily furnished for the rough experiences before them, arrived at York Factory, on the bay, in the autumn, and there they were compelled to winter. Not till the following autumn, 1812, did they reach their destination at Fort. Garry. Their route by water and portages had been through four hundred miles of river, with rocky ascents of seven hundred feet and an open lake voyage of three hundred miles. Desolate and piteous were their experiences for many years. In fact, they had actually started on their desperate effort to return to Scotland, when they were met by their patron the earl, in 1816, with a fresh body of settlers and supplies. They had been wellnigh reduced to starvation by the failure of their first crops, by devastating

[Reproduction of a cut in Dent's Last Forty Years, following a drawing by the Earl of Dufferin. There are other views in Alexander Ross's Red River; in S. H. Scudder's Winnipeg Country, or Roughing it, with an eclipse Party by A. Rochester Fellow (Boston, 1886); in Stuart Cumberland's Queen's Highway from Ocean to Ocean (London, 1887); in Jas. C. Hamilton's Prairie Province (Toronto, 1876). - ED.]

floods, and by devouring grasshoppers. It seemed as if the accumulations of misfortune had been visited more overwhelmingly and in all forms of ill upon them than upon any other severely tried company of wilderness exiles.

* [Extracted from the map in A. Amos's Report of the Trials relative to the Destruction of the Earl of Selkirk's Settlement (London, 1820). KEY: A, the place where Gov. Semple and his party were massacred, 19th June, 1816. B to C, settlers' lots, established 1814; laid waste by the North West Company, 1815 and 1816; and reëstablished 1817. C to D, lots laid waste in 1815 and not reëstablished. E to F, where the Germans and Swiss of the Regiment de Meuron settled in 1817. G, site of chapel and other buildings, built in 1818 by Catholic missionaries from Quebec. Cf. plan of the Selkirk settlement in H. Y. Hind's Canadian Red River Exploring Exped. of 1857 (London, 1860), p. 172. - ED.]

But the worst of all their woes, one of which they had no warning, was that they found themselves on a scene which was the centre of a state of

NOTE.-[A small map contained in the large map in Alexander M'Donell's Narrative of Transactions in

the Red River Country (London, 1819). Fort Gibraltar was a post of the North West Company; Fort Douglas belonged to Selkirk and the Hudson Bay Company. — ED.]