r it was
a hard-drinking period, a time of loyal toasts, and bacchanalian songs,
and brimming bumpers.

While the chiefs thus revelled in hall, and made the rafters resound
with bursts of loyalty and old Scottish songs, chanted in voices cracked
and sharpened by the northern blast, their merriment was echoed
and prolonged by a mongrel legion of retainers, Canadian voyageurs,
half-breeds, Indian hunters, and vagabond hangers-on who feasted
sumptuously without on the crumbs that fell from their table, and made
the welkin ring with old French ditties, mingled with Indian yelps and
yellings.

Such was the Northwest Company in its powerful and prosperous days, when
it held a kind of feudal sway over a vast domain of lake and forest. We
are dwelling too long, perhaps, upon these individual pictures, endeared
to us by the associations of early life, when, as yet a stripling youth,
we have sat at the hospitable boards of the "mighty Northwesters,"
the lords of the ascendant at Montreal, and gazed with wondering
and inexperienced eye at the baronial wassailing, and listened with
astonished ear to their tales of hardship and adventures. It is one
object of our task, however, to present scenes of the rough life of the
wilderness, and we are tempted to fix these few memorials of a transient
state of things fast passing into oblivion; for the feudal state of Fort
William is at an end, its council chamber is silent and deserted; its
banquet hall no longer echoes to the burst of loyalty, or the "auld
world" ditty; the lords of the lakes and forests have passed away; and
the hospitable magnates of Montreal where are they?

CHAPTER II.

Rise of the Mackinaw Company.--Attempt of the American
Government to Counteract Foreign Influence Over the Indian
Tribes.--John Jacob Astor.--His Birth-Place.--His Arrival in
the United States.--What First Turned His Attention to the
Fur Trade.--His Character, Enterprises, and Success.--His
Communications With the American Government.--Origin of the
American Fur Company

THE success of the Northwest Company stimulated further enterprise in
this opening and apparently boundless field of profit. The traffic of
that company lay principally in the high northern latitudes, while
there were immense regions to the south and west, known to abound with
valuable peltries; but which, as yet, had been but little explored by
the fur trader. A new association of British me