Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/27

 rivalry and great wealth of both companies served 23 to stimulate them to reach out toward the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

After Canada had become an English dependency and the competition had grown into such proportions as to interfere with the great monopoly, in the year 1821, there was a coalition between the Northwest and the Hudson Bay Companies on a basis of equal value, and the consolidated stock was marked at $1,916,000, every dollar of which was profits, as was shown at the time, except the original stock of both companies, which amounted to about $135,000. And yet during all this period there had been made an unusual dividend to stockholders of 10 per cent.

Single vessels from headquarters carried furs to London valued at from three to four hundred thousand dollars. It is not at all strange that a company which was so rolling in wealth and which was in supreme control of a territory reaching through seventy-five degrees of longitude, from Davis Strait to Mt. Saint Elias, and through twenty-eight degrees of latitude, from the mouth of the Mackenzie to the California border, should hold tenaciously to its privileges.

It was a grand monopoly, but it must be said of it that no kingly power ever ruled over savage subjects with such wisdom and discretion. Of necessity, they treated their savage workmen