vil
with which northern myth has personified Cold--fur hunting,
fur-trading, will last long as man lasts. We are entering, not on the
extermination of fur, but on a new cycle of smaller furs. In the days
when mink went begging at eighty cents, mink was not fashionable. Mink
is fashionable to-day; hence the absurd and fabulous prices. Long ago,
when ermine as miniver--the garb of nobility--was fashionable and
exclusive, it commanded fabulous prices. Radicalism abolished the
exclusive garb of royalty, and ermine fell to four cents a pelt,
advanced to twenty-five cents and has sold at one dollar. To-day, mink
is the fashion, and the little mink is pursued; but to-morrow fashion
will veer with the caprices of the wind. Some other fur will come into
favor, and the little mink will have a chance to multiply as the ermine
has multiplied.

In spite of the cry of the end of fur, more furs are marketed in the
world than ever before in the history of the race--forty million
dollars' worth; twenty millions of which are handled in New York and
Chicago and St. Louis and St. Paul; some five millions passing through
Edmonton and Winnipeg and Montreal and Quebec; three millions for home
consumption, two millions plus for export. Some years ago I went
through all the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company in London from 1670
to 1824 and have transcripts of those Minutes now in my library. In
not a single year did the fur record exceed half a million dollars'
worth. Compare that to the American traffic to-day of twenty millions,
or to the three and four hundred thousand dollar cargoes that each of
the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillons' ships bears to Europe from
Canada yearly.

"How much can a good Indian hunter make in a season?" I asked a
fur-trader of the Northwest, because in nearly all accounts written
about furs, you read a wail of reproach at milady for wearing furs when
trapping entails such hardship and poverty on the part of the hunter.

"A good hunter easily earns six hundred dollars or seven hundred
dollars a winter if he will go out and not hang around the minute he
gets a little ahead. It takes from three thousand dollars to four
thousand dollars to outfit a small free-trader to go up North on his
own account. This stock he will turn over three or four times at a
profit of one hundred per cent. on the supplies. For example, ten
dollars cash will buy a good black otter up North. In trade, it will
cost from twe