lage,
but then the general rendezvous where sometimes over a thousand men met;
for, at this time, the company had fifty clerks, seventy interpreters,
eighteen hundred and twenty canoe-men, and thirty-five guides. It sent
annually to Montreal 106,000 beaver-skins, to say nothing of other
peltries. When the proprietors from Montreal met the proprietors from
the northern posts, and with their clerks gathered at the banquet in
their large log hall to the number of a hundred, the walls hung with
spoils of the chase, the rough tables furnished with abundance of
venison, fish, bread, salt pork, butter, peas, corn, potatoes, tea,
milk, wine and _eau de vie_, while, outside, the motley crowd of engages
feasted on hulled corn and melted fat--was it not a truly baronial
scene? Clerks and engages of this company, or its rival, the Hudson Bay
Company, might winter one season in Wisconsin and the next in the remote
north. For example, Amable Grignon, a Green Bay trader, wintered in 1818
at Lac qui Parle in Minnesota, the next year at Lake Athabasca, and the
third in the hyperborean regions of Great Slave Lake. In his engagement
he figures as Amable Grignon, _of the Parish of Green Bay, Upper
Canada_, and he receives $400 "and found in tobacco and shoes and two
doges," besides "the usual equipment given to clerks." He afterwards
returned to a post on the Wisconsin river. The attitude of Wisconsin
traders toward the Canadian authorities and the Northwestern wilds is
clearly shown in this document, which brings into a line Upper Canada,
"the parish of Green Bay," and the Hudson Bay Company's territories
about Great Slave Lake![200]

How widespread and how strong was the influence of these traders upon
the savages may be easily imagined, and this commercial control was
strengthened by the annual presents made to the Indians by the British
at their posts. At a time when our relations with Great Britain were
growing strained, such a power in the Northwest was a serious
menace.[201] In 1809 John Jacob Astor secured a charter from the State
of New York, incorporating the American Fur Company. He proposed to
consolidate the fur trade of the United States, plant an establishment
in the contested Oregon territory, and link it with Michillimackinac
(Mackinaw island) by way of the Missouri through a series of trading
posts. In 1810 two expeditions of his Pacific Fur Company set out for
the Columbia, the one around Cape Horn and the other by way o