chants, traders, and manufacturers of Great Britain, to expose to them the loss and injury suffered by the country by the management of a selfish and greedy monopoly. He refers to the skilful ingenuity of the company in repressing the investigation of its affairs and averting the annihilation of its charter, for which Arthur Dobbs and other gentlemen had petitioned the House of Commons in 1749. The writer entered the service of the company as a clerk, on a salary of fifteen pounds, in 1771, and continued in it for eleven years. When La Perouse captured the two principal forts in 1782, he was made a prisoner, and afterwards left the service of the company on a disagreement about salary. For the four following years he was engaged in the Canada fur trade under a rival company, the greater shrewdness and prosperity of which he emphasizes. The Bay Company, he says, might offer profitable employment to idle British laborers and seamen. It confines itself to a dismal coast, instead of penetrating a far more attractive interior. It employs only three vessels, whose whole burden is not six hundred tons, with seventy-five mariners. It has but two hundred and forty resident employees. It artfully represents the country as harsh and inhospitable. It has diminished the number of natives and debased them by intoxicating liquor. He admits that the first traders acted humanely under instructions from the company for the considerate treatment of the Indians, but since then the greed of trade has overcome all other motives.2 In 1749 the stock of the company, swollen from the original capital of £10.500, represented £103,950. Of the one hundred proprietors, seventeen were women, by inheritance.

Umfreville was present at the surrender of forts Churchill and York to La Perouse in 1782, and probably furnished to the London Morning Chronicle for April of the next year the account of the transactions which he copies in his volume. After the cession of Canada, its residents, becoming British subjects, asserted their rights of trade against the monopoly of the company, and an intense rivalry began. The Canadian partners had a thousand men in their employ, and sent annually forty large laden canoes into the Indian country, where the Bay Company might have anticipated them. It was not till more than a century after the date of its charter that the company struck into the interior. The Canadian traders were rough, unscrupulous, and demoralized. The servants of the company were far superior in character to the half-breed voyageurs.

This rival Northwest Company of Canada in its turn recognized the demand for exploration in sending Alexander Mackenzie on his two tours of observation, the experiences of which are recounted in his Voyage from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, 1789-1793 (London, 1801; Philadelphia, 1802; New York, 1814), a synopsis of which is given by Bancroft.

In the Narrative of a Voyage to Hudson's Bay in his Majesty's Ship Rosamond, etc., by Lieut. Edward Chappell, R. N. (London, 1817), we have the record of an officer on a British government ship which convoyed two vessels of the Hudson Bay Company to York factory, during the war, in 1814. He was young, but a quick and intelligent observer. In his journal he gives much curious information concerning the Eskimos. He describes the six coast and river forts of the company at the time, namely, Churchill, York, Severn, Moose, Albany, East Main, beside Richmond, a minor establishment. He comments sharply on the illiberal policy of the company in shrouding its affairs in darkness, and discouraging all enterprises of exploration and the fisheries. It holds in secrecy, he affirms, all the knowledge it obtains about the navigation of the northern seas, and has even supplied the Admiralty with an incorrect chart. The fort at Churchill, which had been partially reconstructed after its destruction by La Perouse in 1782, was again ruined by a conflagration in November, 1813. The occupants, at the peril of their lives, saved seventy-three chests of gunpowder. All else was destroyed, causing intense

1 [See references on this point in H. H. Ban- Company and the Northwest Company is made croft's Northwest Coast, i. 547.- ED.] in Ibid. i. ch. 17. — ED.]

2 [A comparison of the methods of treatment

of the natives as pursued by the Hudson Bay

3 Northwest Coast, i. ch. 21.
Edited by Edward Daniel Clarke.

suffering by exposure and famine to the houseless victims, the thermometer being seventyeight degrees below the freezing-point.1

In the hearing of evidence before the parliamentary committee in 1857, concerning charges alleged against the Hudson Bay Company, some of the witnesses testified that John Dunn had written his Oregon Territory and the British North American fur trade (London, 1844; Philadelphia, 1845) with a view to defending and eulogizing the company. His book, certainly, in its general tone and pleading, and its selection of points for emphatic statement, seems to justify that charge. He was articled as an apprentice in the service of the company, and placed for a year as assistant storekeeper in Fort Vancouver. He was then sent as travelling, trading, and exploring agent, and acted as interpreter, and having assisted in establishing several new posts, was put in charge of Fort George, near the mouth of the Columbia. Returning after eight years to England, he communicated to the Times and other journals, in 1843, papers bearing upon the Oregon question between the United States and Britain. He assumes that he presents impartially the respective claims, and the grounds of them, of the two countries. But he is bitterly contemptuous to the United States, charging it with cunning and duplicity, and representing its citizens, and even American missionaries, as laying artful plans to secure possession of territory really belonging to Britain. Incidentally, Mr. Dunn gives much. information concerning the operations of the Bay Company, and the condition of several Indian tribes.

The Life and Travels of Thomas Simpson, the Arctic Discoverer (London, 1845) was written by Alexander Simpson, as a tribute of affection for a brother, a man of a noble, lovable, and heroic character, who midway in a great career came to a melancholy death, in his thirty-second year. The book is written in a spirit of wounded feeling and sharp censoriousness. The brothers were both in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company. Sir George Simpson, the local governor, was an illegitimate son of their mother's brother. From this relative, their superior in office, the brothers do not appear to have received any kindly consideration in their treatment, still less any favor. They both regarded him as selfish, jealous, and capable of duplicity. Thomas Simpson made two hazardous tours of exploration, and thought that he had discovered the long-desired passage between the western and the eastern oceans. His account of his travels - the manuscript, as his brother charges, having been jealously concealed and tampered with was not published till 1843, three years after his death. The government had assigned to him a pension of £100. His brother sought, four years after Thomas's death, to secure this for the heirs. But though he solicited Sir Robert Peel, and engaged on his side the good offices of the explorer Barrows, he did not succeed in his effort. The reason for the denial was that Thomas Simpson was not in the employ of the government, but in that of the Hudson Bay Company. This company made no reply to the brother's request for aid.

In order to promote the petition of the Hudson Bay Company for the planting of a colony under its auspices and control in Vancouver's Island, R. M. Martin published his Hudson Bay Territories and Vancouver's Island, with an exposition of the chartered rights, conduct, and policy of the Honble Hudson's Bay Corporation (London, 1849), dedicating it to an advocate of the scheme, Earl Gray, the colonial secretary. Many of Martin's statements were at once challenged as incorrect, and written under a bias. He describes the territories under the control of the company, gives details of its constitution and working, stoutly maintains its good management and efficiency, and argues for its special fitness and qualifications to lead and manage the proposed colony. He also presents statements of the numbers, character, and treatment by the company of the aboriginal tribes. The volume contains a copy of the draft charter for the colony, which was essentially modified before its passage.

1 Thomas McKeevor's Voyage to Hudson's Bay during the summer of 1812 (London, 1819, -being a part of vol. ii. of New Voyages and Travels, London).

2 Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coasts of America, effected by the Officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1836–1839 (London, 1843).

The sentiment of opposition to this Vancouver scheme of the company was vigorously expressed in An Examination of the Charter and Proceedings of the Hudson's Bay Company, with reference to the Grant of Vancouver's Island. By James Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1849). The quotation from Tacitus on the title-page, of “Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant," indicates the severity of the author's judgment against the policy and influence of the monopolizing company. The work is dedicated to Mr. Gladstone. When the proposition for this additional charter was before Parliament, Mr. Gladstone opposed it in a very able speech, arraigning the course of the company. Mr. Fitzgerald writes earnestly and ably in the same spirit of opposition, with much severity of criticism, exposure, and censure of the company. He addresses himself in the main to controverting the book by Mr. R. M. Martin, which he regards as of a "palpably official character" in the interest of the company, wrought from documents furnished by it and obtained from the government. He argues against the validity of the charter, exposes the selfishness and greed of the company acting under it, as it had failed of its main pretences of exploring the country and improving the condition of the Indians, and traces the injurious influence and results of its spirit and operations upon the interests of the mother country, upon the native Indian population, and upon those who have attempted to plant colonies under it. The work is candid and well authenticated in its statements, and had a damaging effect upon the company.

John McLean, in his Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory (London, 1849), writes frankly and in guarded terms, and is one of that class who, in relating their own experience as servants of the Bay Company, pass a very severe judgment upon its policy and its treatment of those who are in its service in the most arduous though most humble posts of duty. The writer entered upon that service in 1820, just before the coalition with the Northwest Company, so that he had to contend in his place with opposition from it, as also afterwards with individual free-traders. He served at posts most widely separated in distance, as in New Caledonia and in Labrador, as well as in many intermediate ones. His journeys to and fro involved hair-breadth perils with sharp deprivations. The writer, by printing the full evidence of it, makes it plain that Governor Simpson, influenced by favoritism, broke faith with him when, by full service, he was entitled to promotion, and drove him to retire in disgust. Here is his frank statement :

"This last act of the governor made me completely disgusted with a service where such acts would be tolerated. In no colony subject to the British crown is there to be found an authority so despotic as is at this day exercised in the mercantile colony of Rupert's Land: an authority combining the despotism of military rule with the strict surveillance and mean parsimony of the avaricious trader. From Labrador to Nootka Sound, the unchecked, uncontrolled will of a single individual gives law to the land. As to the nominal council which is yearly convoked for form's sake, the few individuals who compose it know better than to offer advice where none would be accepted; they know full well that the governor has already determined on his own measures before one of them appears in his presence. Their assent is all that is expected of them, and that they never hesitate to give." (Vol. ii. 235.)

We find in John Ryerson's Hudson's Bay: or a Missionary Tour in the Territory of the Hudson's Bay Company (Toronto, 1855) a body of letters written by a Wesleyan missionary in his visits (1854-55) to some of the stations under the support of his religious organization. The writer has but little to say about any important results reached by religious efforts among the natives, but he finds satisfaction in some gleams of hope from the efforts of faithful laborers. He gives incidentally fragments of interesting information of the operations of the Bay Company, from whose officers and servants he

1 Cf. Journal of Peter Jacobs, Indian Wesleyan Missionary, from Rice Lake to the Hudson's Bay territory. Commencing May, 1852. With a brief

account of his life, and a short History of the Wesleyan Mission in that country (New York, 1857).

received courtesy and hospitality. His route was wholly by the watercourses. He sets down minute details of distances, portages, camping-places, and the incidents of travel, of life at the posts which he visited, and of the efforts of garden and field culture. He speaks kindly of the company, its methods and conduct.

The history of Lord Selkirk's settlement down to 1852 is covered in Alexander Ross's The Red River Settlement: its Rise, Progress, and present State. With some account of the Native Races and its general history to the present day (London, 1856). The writer was at an early age in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company at a post deep in the wilderness, and after many years of service took up his residence in the settlement where he has held prominent and honored positions, highly respected and confided in. Most intelligently and impartially does he trace the history and development of the colony from its troubled and distracted beginnings to the comparative prosperity which it reached. It had not, however, come to the end, either of its internal or its external conflicts, when he closed his work. With some few exceptional strictures, he in general terms approves the policy and conduct of the Bay Company. While expressing his belief that Mr. Isbister, in his sharp controversy with the company, was betrayed by the unfounded representations of his countrymen, he speaks in the highest terms of respect of that gentleman for his personal excellence and humanity. Very full, interesting, and trustworthy accounts are given in the volume of the good and the ill conditions mixed in the settlement; its resources and prospects; of its agricultural and social life; of the native tribes around it, and of the stirring hunting expeditions.1 Especially sagacious and practical are the views of the author about the contentions of religious sects and the necessity that civilization should precede "conversion."

Of Robert Michael Ballantyne's sprightly and entertaining Hudson's Bay: or everyday life in the Wilds of North America, during six years' residence in the Territories of the Hon. Hudson's Bay Company (London, 3d ed., 1857) there have been repeated editions. The writer describes himself to have been in his Highland home in 1841, when he was thrilled with joy on his appointment as an apprentice clerk in the service of the Hudson Bay Company. Robust and vigorous in constitution and animated in spirits, he entered with full zest into the conditions and duties of his office, with its tasks and hardships, and found full enjoyment in its rude relaxations. Making many long journeys by boats in the open season and with dog-sledges in the winter, he describes with minuteness of detail all the methods of travel, the smooth and the rough passages, the toil over the portages, the shooting of rapids, the trailing or dragging of boats up cascades by cheery voyageurs having but a slippery footing on precipitous banks; the coming in to the posts of the wild bands of boisterous Indians, their women, children, and dogs, with furs and hides, and the opening riot of intoxication, the method of trade, the giving forth of supplies, and the return of quiet; the gay scenes of half-breed life, the dance and the wedding. On his homeward way the writer went by Lake Superior and the old Canadian posts to Quebec and Tadousac, a journey of many hardships and romantic incidents.2

Mr. Joseph James Hargrave was evidently an intelligent observer and candid reporter of matters which came under his own knowledge during his seven years' residence in the Dominion province now called Manitoba. He traces in his Red River (Montreal, 1871) the history of the Red River settlement from its origin under Lord Selkirk, and gives a sufficiently full statement of the disasters, sufferings, and finally the limited prosperity

1 Cf. also his Fur Hunters of the Far West (London, 1855).

2 As illustrating other adventures of this period, cf. Archibald McDonald's Peace River, a canoe voyage from Hudson's Bay to the Pacific (Ottawa, 1872), and the publication by Viscount Milton and Dr. Wm. B. Cheadle, called The Northwest Passage by Land. Being the Narra

tive of an Expedition from the Atlantic to the Pacific (London, 1865). The route followed was down the Red River to Fort Garry, hence through British Columbia. The writers both wield a ready and lively pen, sketching many striking scenes, with incidents of perilous adventure, strange companionships, hunting expeditions, and camp-life.

which it had reached at the time of his visit. It will be remembered that the settlement was the scene of the sharpest rivalry and contests, involving a great loss of life, between the opposing parties of the Hudson Bay and the Northwest Companies. Notwithstanding its chartered privileges and its position and resources on the spot, the Bay Company was the loser in that strife. The period of Mr. Hargrave's residence was between 1861 and 1869. The volume will always be of high historical value, because it so faithfully describes and comments upon scenes and occurrences which have so rapidly changed on the panorama of the past. The community which he portrays was a strangely heterogeneous one, bringing together people of many nationalities, of various mixtures of blood, and many of whom appeared during the year in the three characters of farmers, fishermen, and hunters.

In 1873, the investigation over the bounds of the province of Ontario led to two treatises, both of which are retrospective in their historical bearing. In David Mills' Boundaries of Ontario (Toronto, 1873), the second part is given to a historical summary of the French and English contests for the possession of Hudson's Bay from 1670 to the treaty of Utrecht; while a sketch of the early rivalry of the French and English in securing the fur trade is found in Charles Lindsey's Investigations of the unsettled Boundaries of Ontario (Toronto, 1873).1

In The Great Lone Land: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the Northwest of America (London, 1873), Captain W. F. Butler relates the occasion of his first range of distant travel in the Northwest. His errand into the country was induced by an official connection with the military expedition which went from Canada to suppress the revolt of the French half-breeds, under the "Dictator" Louis Riel, in 1869-1870, when the Red River settlement was made over from the control of the Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada. He passed through the United States, and anticipated for several months the arrival of the military force which came by the old Canadian route. He himself had some stirring adventures. Being on the spot, a keen, intelligent, and impartial observer, he gives us a most graphic account of the revolt, which threatened to be very serious in its origin and progress, but which ended in an absurd and inglorious discomfiture. Intending to return after this affair, he found himself invested with some judicial functions and the power of conferring them on others. He was thus led to make an expedition through the Saskatchewan Valley all the way to the company's post at the Mountain House, meeting with all the wild experiences of free adventure. He was an intrepid traveller, heroic and enduring, and his pages are vigorously written. He received the hospitalities of the company's officers and posts, and he passes no strictures on its policy. He traversed regions in which the natives had been wellnigh extirpated by an appalling visitation of the smallpox, which had also been severe in its ravages at some of the posts. He took with him large supplies of medical stores and directions for treating the disease. He is an ardent champion of the native qualities and the rights of the red man in his ever-ruinous contact with the whites.

A year later, Captain Butler, in his Wild North Land, being the story of a winter journey with dogs across northern North America (London, 1874), gives a delightful and instructive narrative of another expedition in the wilderness. This was wholly of a private nature, and was prompted by the spirit of adventure, made more exciting by its previous indulgence. His wanderings this time were principally on foot. He started from the Red River in the autumn of 1872, and in March following reached Lake Athabasca. Then he followed the winding Peace River to the Rocky Mountains, and through the north of British Columbia and New Caledonia, coming out on Fraser's River in June. His transient stops at the posts of the Bay Company, his sketches of the articles in which

1 Cf. Statutes, documents, and papers bearing on the discussion respecting the northern and western boundaries of Ontario, including the principal evidence supposed to be for or against the Province (Toronto, 1878).

Correspondence, papers, and documents, 18561882, relating to the northerly and westerly boundaries of Ontario (Toronto, 1882).