o other adventures are on record similar to Colter's: one of
Oskononton's escape by diving under a raft, told in Ross's Fur Hunters;
the other of a poor Indian fleeing up the Ottawa from pursuing Iroquois
of the Five Nations and diving under the broken bottom of an old
beaver-dam, told in the original Jesuit Relations.

And yet when the Astorians went up the Missouri a few years later,
Colter could scarcely resist the impulse to go a fourth time to the
wilds. But fascinations stronger than the wooings of the wilds had come
to his life--he had taken to himself a bride.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 38: Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment
if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian; that if
Johnston had not married Wabogish's daughter and if Johnston's daughter
had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead of going to her relatives
of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would have written no Hiawatha? Would
they not hesitate before slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba
and the famous MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to
the Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer? Do they forget that
Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, is related to the
proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured the West, the
_Bois-Brules_? The writer knows the West from only fifteen years of life
and travel there; yet with that imperfect knowledge cannot recall a
single fur post without some tradition of an unfamed Pocahontas.]

CHAPTER XIV

THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD

In the history of the world only one corporate company has maintained
empire over an area as large as Europe. Only one corporate company has
lived up to its constitution for nearly three centuries. Only one
corporate company's sway has been so beneficent that its profits have
stood in exact proportion to the well-being of its subjects. Indeed, few
armies can boast a rank and file of men who never once retreated in
three hundred years, whose lives, generation after generation, were one
long bivouac of hardship, of danger, of ambushed death, of grim purpose,
of silent achievement.

Such was the company of "Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's
Bay," as the charter of 1670 designated them.[39] Such is the Hudson's
Bay Company to-day still trading with savages in the white wilderness of
the north as it was when Charles II granted a royal charter for the fur
trade to his co