l on a
tram-car pulled by a horse. The men, however, would not be robbed of the
glee of running that last rapid, and, with just enough weight for
ballast in their canoes and boats, they would make the furious descent.

At the head of the tramway on the Grand Rapids portage stands the Great
House, facing old warehouses through which have passed millions of
dollars' worth of furs. The Great House is gambrel-roofed and is built
of heavily timbered logs whitewashed. Round it is a picket fence; below
are wine cellars. It is dismantled and empty now; but here no doubt good
wines abounded and big oaths rolled in the days when the lords of an
unmapped empire held sway.

[Illustration: THE PRINCIPAL POSTS OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY
Map by Bartholomew.]

A glance at the map of the Hudson's Bay Company's posts will show the
extent of the fur traders' empire. To the Athabaska warehouses at Fort
Chipewyan came the furs of Mackenzie river and the Arctic; to Fort
Edmonton came the furs of the Athabaska and of the Rockies; to Fort Pitt
came the peltry of the Barren Lands; and all passed down the broad
highway of the Saskatchewan to Lake Winnipeg, whence they were sent out
to York Factory on Hudson Bay, there to be loaded on ships and taken to
the Company's warehouses in London.

* * * * *

Incidentally, the fur hunters were explorers who had blazed a trail
across a continent and penetrated to the uttermost reaches of a northern
empire the size of Europe. But it was fur these explorers were seeking
when they pushed their canoes up the Saskatchewan, crossed the Rocky
Mountains, went down the Columbia. Fur, not glory, was the quest when
the dog bells went ringing over the wintry wastes from Saskatchewan to
Athabaska, across the Barren Lands, and north to the Arctic. Beaver, not
empire, was the object in view when the horse brigades of one hundred
and two hundred and three hundred hunters, led by Ogden, or Ross, or
M'Kay or Ermatinger went winding south over the mountains from New
Caledonia through the country that now comprises the states of
Washington and Oregon and Idaho, across the deserts of Utah and Nevada,
to the Spanish forts at San Francisco and Monterey. It is a question
whether La Salle could have found his way to the Mississippi, or
Radisson to the North Sea, or Mackenzie to the Pacific, if the little
beaver had not inspired the search and paid the toll.

CHAPTER II

THE TRAGEDY OF