in Canada; and the old English company had no fear of rivalry in the north. It never sought inland tribes, but waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come down to its fur posts on the bay. Young Le Moyne d'Iberville[4] might march overland from Quebec to the bay, catch the English company nodding, scale the stockades, capture its forts, batter down a wall or two, and sail off like a pirate with ship-loads of booty for Quebec. What did the ancient company care? European treaties restored its forts, and the honourable adventurers presented a bill of damages to their government for lost furs.

But came a sudden change. Great movements westward began simultaneously in all parts of the east.

This resulted from two events—England's victory over France at Quebec, and the American colonies' Declaration of Independence. The downfall of French ascendency in America meant an end to that license system which limited the fur trade to favourites of the governor. That threw an army of some two thousand men—voyageurs, coureurs des bois, mangeurs de lard,[5] famous hunters, traders, and trappers—on their own resources. The MacDonalds and MacKenzies and MacGillivrays and Frobishers and MacTavishes—Scotch merchants of Quebec and Montreal—were quick to seize the opportunity. Uniting under the names of North-West Fur Company and X. Y. Fur Company, they re-engaged the entire retinue of cast-off Frenchmen, woodcraftsmen who knew every path and stream from Labrador to the Rocky Mountains. Giving higher pay and better fare than the old French traders, the Scotch merchants prepared to hold the field against all comers in the Canadas. And when the X. Y. amalgamated with the larger company before the opening of the nineteenth century, the Nor' Westers became as famous for their daring success as their unscrupulous ubiquity.

But at that stage came the other factor—American Independence. Locked in conflict with England, what deadlier blow to British power could France deal than to turn over Louisiana with its million square miles and ninety thousand inhabitants to the American Republic? The Lewis and Clark exploration up the Missouri, over the mountains, and down the Columbia to the Pacific was a natural sequel to the Louisiana Purchase, and proved that the United States had gained a world of wealth for its fifteen million dollars. Before Lewis and Clark's feat, vague rumours had come to the New England colonies of the riches to be had in the west. The Russian Government had organized a strong company to trade for furs with the natives of the Pacific coast. Captain Vancouver's report of the north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who had stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia; and before 1800 nearly thirty Boston vessels yearly sailed to the Northern Pacific for the fur trade.

Eager to forestall the Hudson's Bay Company, now beginning to rub its eyes and send explorers westward to bring Indians down to the bay,[6] Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers pushed down the great river named after him,[7] and forced his way across the northern Rockies to the Pacific. Flotillas of North-West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie's lead north to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At Michilimackinac—one of the most lawless and roaring of the fur posts—was an association known as the Mackinaw Company, made up of old French hunters under English management, trading westward from the Lakes to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor' Wester, and Mackinaw were daily pressing closer and closer to that vast unoccupied Eldorado—the fur country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward by the Mississippi, west by the Pacific.

Possession is nine points out of ten. The question was who would get possession first.

Unfortunately that question presented itself to three alert rivals at the same time and in the same light. And the war began.

The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle from the Lakes to the Mississippi. Therefore they did little but try to keep other traders out of the western preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somnolent state till the very extremity of outrage brought such a mighty awakening that it put its rivals to an eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were not asleep. And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumulated what was a gigantic fortune in those days as a purchaser of furs from America and a seller to Europe, was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard, of New Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the Osage tribes, was not asleep.

CHAPTER II

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT

If only one company had attempted to take possession of the vast fur country west of the Mississippi, the fur trade would not have become international history; but three companies were at strife for possession of territory richer than Spanish Eldorado, albeit the coin was "beaver"—not gold. Each of three companies was determined to use all means fair or foul to exclude its rivals from the field; and a fourth company was drawn into the strife because the conflict menaced its own existence.

From their Canadian headquarters at Fort William on Lake Superior, the Nor' Westers had yearly moved farther down the Columbia towards the mouth, where Lewis and Clark had wintered on the Pacific. In New York, Mr. Astor was formulating schemes to add to his fur empire the territory west of the Mississippi. At St. Louis was Manuel Lisa, the Spanish fur trader, already reaching out for the furs of the Missouri. And leagues to the north on the remote waters of Hudson Bay, the old English company lazily blinked its eyes open to the fact that competition was telling heavily on its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a hand in the merry game of a fur traders' war, though the real awakening had not yet come.

Lisa was the first to act on the information brought back by Lewis and Clark. Forming a partnership with Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia, Ill., and engaging Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as interpreter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in the spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of the Missouri in the full flood-tide of spring this unwieldy craft was slowly hauled or "cordelled," twenty men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by means of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above brushwood. Where the water was shallow the voyageurs poled single file, facing the stern and pushing with full chest strength. In deeper current oars were used.

Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowledge but that the wilderness was peopled by hostiles, poor Bissonette deserted when they were only at the Osage River. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to bring the deserter back dead or alive—orders that were filled to the letter, for the poor fellow was brought back shot, to die at St. Charles. Passing the mouth of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white man drifting down-stream in a