the map. Between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains stretches
an American Siberia--the Barren Lands. Here, too, on every important
waterway, Athabasca and the Liard and the MacKenzie into the land of
winter night and midnight sun, extend Hudson's Bay Company posts. We
think of these northern streams as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with
mean log villages on their banks. The fur posts of the sub-arctics are
not imposing with picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe
was feared here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the
world, with two tributaries each more than 1,000 miles in length. It has
a width of a mile, and a succession of rapids that rival the St.
Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's, and half a
dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New England States
without raising a sand bar.

The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is a wilderness
of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of a continent.
Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses are fur posts.

Such is the realm of the Hudson's Bay Company to-day.

Before 1812 there was no international boundary in the fur trade. But
after the war Congress barred out Canadian companies. The next
curtailment of hunting-ground came in 1869-'70, when the company
surrendered proprietary rights to the Canadian Government, retaining
only the right to trade in the vast north land. The formation of new
Canadian provinces took place south of the Saskatchewan; but north the
company barters pelts undisturbed as of old. Yearly the staffs are
shifted from post to post as the fortunes of the hunt vary; but the
principal posts not including winter quarters for a special hunt have
probably not exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen below one
hundred for the last century. Of these the greater numbers are of course
in the Far North. When the Hudson's Bay Company was fighting rivals,
Nor' Westers from Montreal, Americans from St. Louis, it must have
employed as traders, packers, _coureurs_, canoe men, hunters, and
guides, at least 5,000 men; for its rival employed that number, and "The
Old Lady," as the enemy called it, always held her own. Over this
wilderness army were from 250 to 300 officers, each with the power of
life and death in his hands. To the honour of the company, be it said,
this power was seldom abused.[43] Occasionally a brutal sea-captain
might use lash and triangle and bra