Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/511

Rh Those who, by the comforts of the winter fireside, enjoy reading tales of adventure or descriptions of home life in far-off solitudes and under grim and perilous surroundings, will find the Hudson Bay literature a rich repository. How some of those young men, exiled from the Scotch Islands, made life tolerable and even gay in those posts, with Christmas festivities and on occasions of arrivals of mails, of supplies, and of bands of trappers, may be read in many graphic and truthful relations.

From the first incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company there were constant rivalries and feuds between its employés and the French hunters and traders, — a wild and adventurous race, who were experts and heroes in all wilderness prowess. After the cession of Canada, by conquest, to the British, in 1762, the French, not dislodged from the woods, still continued the fur-trade through the coureurs de bois. The English monopoly for a while slackened in its vigor. The prize at stake, however, was a tempting one. Individual and associated enterprise, involving fierce altercations and treacherous alliances with the Indians, were enlisted in the fur-traffic. In 1783 some merchants of Montreal entered into a partnership company, and in 1787 united with another, thus constituting the famous Northwest Company. It was for a time very prosperous. It had twenty-three shareholders or partners, and employed two thousand men as clerks, guides, interpreters, and boatmen, scattered over the inner lakes and rivers at immense distances to receive peltries and distribute supplies. As no attempt was made by the foreign agents to colonize or permanently occupy Indian territories, but as the aim was to keep them in their wild state for hunting and trapping, the natives took no umbrage against the intruders, but on the contrary, learning to appreciate and to depend upon British goods, they became strongly enlisted in the British interest, as Americans have found to their cost. The Hudson Bay Company supplied the Blackfoot