great lakes was
reached by water. Another military road, also built by Simcoe, followed
the old Indian trail through thirty-three miles of forest from York to
Lake Simcoe. This shorter route to Lake Superior enabled the North-West
Fur Company--established by Frobisher and McTavish, of Montreal, in
1776--to avoid canoeing up the Ottawa and its tortuous tributaries. The
batteaux were brought up the St. Lawrence, breaking bulk at certain
"carrying places," then under sail up Lake Ontario to York. From here
the cargoes were hauled by horses over Yonge's military road to Lake
Simcoe, thence by river and stormy Lake Huron to Fort Michilimackinac,
Great Turtle Island--the Mackinaw of to-day--at the head of Lake
Michigan. By this route fifty dollars was saved on every ton of freight
from Ottawa to the middle north. At Mackinaw the goods were reshipped by
bark canoe to the still remoter regions in the further West, where
Spanish pedlars on the southern tributaries of the lower Mississippi
traded with the Akamsea Indians in British goods distributed from
Mackinaw.

The records of these trips through a wilderness of forest and stream,
with their exhilarating hardships, had a singular fascination for Isaac
Brock. It was not long before he had won, with his conquering ways and
robust manhood, the allegiance of the big-hearted fur-traders in
Montreal. Their wild legends of the great fur country rang in his ears,
and his receptive mind was soon stored with the exploits of Radisson and
Groseillers, Joliette, Marquette, and other famous pathfinders, with
whose exploits a century and a half before, aided by his fluency in
French, he became wonderfully familiar.

He found the evolution of the Canadian highway a subject of absorbing
interest. From his Caughnawaga guides he learned how the tracks made by
lynx and beaver, rabbit and wolverine, wolf and red deer--invariably the
safest and firmest ways--were in turn naturally followed by Indian
voyageur and fur-trader, until the blazed trail became the bridle-road
for the pack-horse of the pioneer. This, as the white settler drifted
in, became the winter-road; then, as civilization stifled the call of
the wild, there uprose from swamp and muskeg the crude corduroy,
expanding by degrees into the half-graded highway, until the turnpike
and toll-bar, with its despotic keeper, exacted its tribute from
progress. This was the prelude to a still more amazing transformation,
for the day soon came, t