[Footnote 9: Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C.
were not yet so far south.]

[Footnote 10: In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus
of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the northern
continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden gives full
particulars.]

[Footnote 11: This on the testimony of a North-West partner, Alexander
Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa.
Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians, note the
corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.]

[Footnote 12: Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinction
to the North-West.]

[Footnote 13: The modern Winnipeg.]

[Footnote 14: MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts.]

[Footnote 15: Franchere, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so
detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering
the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from Franchere, says
Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all
accounts--Franchere's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's--are from
the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the
massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him
on account of his race. Franchere became prominent in Montreal, Cox in
British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where
the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old
settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part
in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth
century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.]

[Footnote 16: A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost
everything going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.]

[Footnote 17: Doings in the North-West camp have only become known of
late from the daily journals of two North-West partners--MacDonald of
Garth, whose papers were made public by a descendant of the MacKenzies,
and Alexander Henry, whose account is in the Ottawa Library.]

CHAPTER III

THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP

"_It had been decided in council at Fort William that the company should
send the Isaac Todd to the Columbia River, where the Americans had
established Astoria, and that a party should proceed from Fort William
(overland) to meet the ship on the coast_," wrote MacDonald of Garth, a
North-West partner, for the perusal of his children.

This was d