he Bighorn Range,
an outlying buttress of the Rocky Mountains, running athwart the
sources of the Yellowstone. The wars between France and England,
however, stopped French trade in that northwestern region, and the
Hudson's Bay Company's posts at the north were the only signs of
European occupation when Wolfe and Montcalm fell on the Plains of
Abraham, and the fleur-de-lis was struck on the old fort of the
Canadian capital.

Towards the latter part of the eighteenth century, the merchants of
Canada, who were individually dealing in furs, formed an association
which, under the title of the Northwest Company, was long the rival of
the Hudson's Bay adventurers. Both these companies were composed of
Englishmen and Scotchmen, but they were nevertheless bitter enemies,
engaged as they were in the same business in the wilderness. The
employes of the Hudson's Bay Company were chiefly Scotch, while the
Canadian Company found in the French Canadian population that class of
men whom it believed to be most suitable to a forest life. The
differences in the nationality and religion of the servants of the
companies only tended to intensify the bitterness of the competition,
and at last led to scenes of tumult and bloodshed. The Northwest
Company found their way to the interior of Rupert's Land by the Ottawa
River and the Great Lakes. Their posts were seen {383} by the
Assiniboine and Red rivers, even in the Saskatchewan and Athabascan
districts, and in the valley of the Columbia among the mountains of the
great province which bears the name of that noble stream. The
Mackenzie River was discovered and followed to the Arctic Sea by one of
the members of the Northwest Company, whose name it has always borne.
At a later time a trader, Simon Fraser, first ventured on the river
whose name now recalls his famous journey, and David Thompson, a
surveyor of the Northwest Company, discovered the river of the same
name. Previous, however, to these perilous voyages, the Hudson's Bay
Company had been forced by the enterprise of its rival to reach the
interior and compete for the fur traffic which was being so largely
controlled by the Canadian Company. In 1771, Samuel Hearne, one of the
Hudson's Bay Company's employes, discovered the Coppermine River, and
three years later established a fort on the Saskatchewan, still known
as Cumberland House. In later years, Sir John Franklin, George Back,
and Thomas Simpson added largely to the geogra