a Compagnie de la Nouvelle France." Thus there had arisen
rival claims to the possession of this sterile region, and although
treaties had at various times attempted to rectify boundaries or to
rearrange watersheds, the question of the right of Canada or of the
Company to hold a portion of the vast territory draining into Hudson Bay
had never been legally solved.

For some eighty years after this settlement on James's Bay, the
Company held a precarious tenure of their forts and factories. Wild-looking
men, more Indian than French, marched from Canada over the height of
land and raided upon the posts of Moose and Albany, burning the stockades
and carrying off the little brass howitzers mounted thereon. The same
wild-looking men, pushing on into the interior from Lake Superior, made
their way into Lake Winnipeg, up the great Saskatchewan River, and
across to the valley of the Red River; building their forts for war
and trade by distant lake-shore and confluence of river current, and
drawing off the valued trade in furs to France; until all of a sudden
there came the great blow struck by Wolfe under the walls of Quebec, and
every little far-away post and distant fort throughout the vast interior
continent felt the echoes of the guns of Abraham. It might have been
imagined that now, when the power of France was crushed in the Canadas,
the trade which she had carried on with the Indian tribes of the Far West
would lapse to the English company trading Into Hudson Bay; but such was
not the case.

Immediately upon the capitulation of Montreal, fur traders from the
English cities of Boston and Albany appeared in Montreal and Quebec, and
pushed their way along the old French route to Lake Winnipeg and into the
valley of the Saskatchewan. There they, in turn, erected their little
posts and trading-stations, laid out their beads and blankets, their
strouds and cottons, and exchanged their long-carried goods for the
beaver and marten and fisher skins of the Nadow, Sioux, Kinistineau, and
Osinipoilles. Old maps of the North-west still mark spots along the
shores of Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan with names of Henry's House,
Finlay's House, and Mackay's House. These "houses" were the
Trading-posts of the first English free-traders, whose combination in
1783 gave rise to the great North-west Fur Company, so long the fierce
rival of the Hudson Bay. To picture here the jealous rivalry which during
forty years raged throughout these immen