ount, for several reasons,--the chief of which is the destruction of
the fur-bearing animals.

In certain parts of the country, it is the Company's policy to destroy
them along the whole frontier; and our general instructions recommend
that every effort be made to lay waste the country, so as to offer no
inducement to petty traders to encroach on the Company's limits. Those
instructions have indeed had the effect of ruining the country, but
not of protecting the Company's domains. Along the Canadian frontier,
the Indians, finding no more game on their own lands, push beyond the
boundary, and not only hunt on the Company's territory, but carry a
supply of goods with them, which they trade with the natives. Their
Honours' fiat has also nearly swept away the fur animals on the west
side of the Rocky Mountains; yet I doubt whether all this precaution
will ensure the integrity of their domains. The Americans have taken
possession of the Columbia, and will speedily multiply and increase:
ere many years their trappers will be found scouring the interior,
from the banks of the Columbia to New Caledonia, and probably
penetrating to the east side of the Rocky Mountains. Should they
do so, that valuable part of the country embraced by the Peace and
McKenzie Rivers would soon be ruined; for the white trapper makes
a clean sweep wherever he goes. Taking all these circumstances
into consideration, I do not see any great probability--to say the
least--that the trade will ever attain the prosperity of days bygone.

Even in such parts of the country as the Company endeavour to
preserve, both the fur-bearing and larger animals have of late become
so scarce, that some tribes are under the necessity of quitting their
usual hunting-grounds. A certain gentleman, in charge of a district to
which some of those Indians withdrew, on being censured for harbouring
them in his vicinity, writes thus:--"Pray, is it surprising, that poor
Indians, whose lives are in jeopardy, should relish a taste of buffalo
meat? It is not the Chippewayans alone that leave their lands to go
in search of food to preserve their lives; the Strongwood Crees and
Assineboines are all out in the plains, because, as they affirm, their
usual hunting-grounds are so exhausted that they cannot live upon
them. It is no wish of mine that those Indians should visit us--we
have trouble enough with our own,--but to turn a poor Indian out of
doors, who arrives at the Company's establi