ves raw pelts from trappers who wander
through the forests of Minnesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a
year ago the writer employed as guides in the mountains three trappers
who have spent their lives ranging the northern wilds and the Upper
Missouri; but outside the mountain and forest wastes, the vast
hunting-grounds of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by the
fences of settlers.

In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the conflict--once in the
seventies when Louis Riel, a half-breed demagogue, roused the Metis
against the surveyors sent to prepare Red River for settlement, and
again in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-breeds of the
Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds to their lands. Though the
Hudson's Bay Company had nothing to do with either complaint, the
conflict waged round their forts.

In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took possession of Fort
Garry, and for no other reason than the love of killing that riots in
savage blood as in a wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In
the second rebellion Riel's allies came down on the far-isolated Fort
Pitt three hundred strong, captured the fort, and took the factor, Mr.
MacLean, and his family to northern wastes, marching them through swamps
breast-high with spring floods, where General Middleton's troops could
not follow. The children of the family had been in the habit of bribing
old Indian gossips into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the
friendship now stood the white family in good stead. Day and night in
all the weeks of captivity the friendly Indians never left the side of
the trader's family, slipping between the hostiles and the young
children, standing guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of
defence till all were safely back among the whites.

This time Riel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay Company resumed its sway
of all that realm between Labrador and the Pacific north of the
Saskatchewan.

Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black spot. The world looks
only at the black spot.

In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals, it has been the
trader living alone, unprotected and unfearing, one voice among a
thousand, who has restrained the Indian tribes from massacres that would
have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of a century.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: For example, the Deschamps of Red River.]

[Footnote 28: Chittenden.]

[Footnote 29: