the last vestige of civilization and
henceforth identifies himself with the life of the savage.

After the British conquest of Canada and the American Declaration of
Independence came a change in the status of the French trapper. Before,
he had been lord of the wilderness without a rival. Now, powerful
English companies poured their agents into his hunting-grounds. Before,
he had been a partner in the fur trade. Now, he must either be pushed
out or enlist as servant to the newcomer. He who had once come to
Montreal and St. Louis with a fortune of peltries on his rafts and
canoes, now signed with the great English companies for a paltry one,
two, and three hundred dollars a year.

It was but natural in the new state of things that the French trapper,
with all his knowledge of forest and stream, should become _coureur des
bois_ and _voyageur_, while the Englishman remained the barterer. In the
Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly enlisted with four
companies: the Mackinaw Company, radiating from Michilimackinac to the
Mississippi; the American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri
Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward to the Rockies; and
the South-West Company, which was John Jacob Astor's amalgamation of the
American and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the Nor' Westers
and X. Y.'s, who had sprung up in opposition to the great English
Hudson's Bay Company.

* * * * *

Though he had become a burden-carrier for his quondam enemies, the
French trapper still saw life through the glamour of _la gloire_ and
_noblesse_, still lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and
starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back and laughed at
hardship; courted danger and trolled off one of his _chansons_ brought
over to America by ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath
at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself reverently with a
prayer to Sainte Anne, the _voyageurs'_ saint, just before his canoe
took the plunge.

Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, like Manuel Lisa of St.
Louis, might sit in a counting-house or fur post adding up rows of
figures, and your Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value
of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe sliding past wooded
banks with a throb of the keel to the current and the whistle of
wild-fowl overhead; clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds,
clear sky below w