th their packs of valuable
peltry, and had shown an especial and fascinated interest in their
stories of the boundless country that lay north and west of the string
of settlements on the St Lawrence. This country was so vast in extent
that even the most remote tribes yet visited by the white traders could
state nothing definite as to its outer boundaries, though, in answer to
the eager questions of the white men, they invented many untrue tales
about it.

The fur-traders themselves were divided into two classes. The more
staid and respectable class built trading forts in the interior on the
borders of territories occupied by the Indians. Here they kept a
supply of the things required by the natives: guns, powder and balls,
tobacco, blankets, bright-coloured cotton, axes and small tools, flints
and steels, vermilion for war-paint, and beads of every colour and {10}
description. The Indians brought their furs into the forts and
bartered them for the goods that they needed. Sometimes, with no sense
of real values, they traded beaver skins and other pelts of high worth
for a piece of gaudy cotton, a little vermilion, or a handful of beads.
The white men, of course, brought things which rapidly became
indispensable to the Indians, whose native bows and arrows and hatchets
of stone seemed almost useless compared with the muskets and the steel
axes brought from Europe. To acquire these things became vital to the
Indians, and the traders who now supplied them acquired each year
thousands of beautiful furs. These were tied up securely into packs
and carried in canoes down to Montreal or Three Rivers, where they were
bought by the great merchants and sent by ship to France. The furs
that had been bought from the Indian for a mere trifle fetched hundreds
of francs when they finally reached Paris.

The second class of traders, known as coureurs de bois, or
wood-runners, were very different from the first. Speaking generally,
they were young men, sometimes of good family, who found life in the
older towns and settlements prosaic and uninteresting, and when {11}
they went to the interior did not care to be tied down to the humdrum
existence of the trading forts. Instead of requiring the Indians to
bring their furs down to some fort, these enterprising rovers of the
forest went into the Indian country. Sometimes they took light trading
goods with them to barter with the redskins for furs, but oftener they
themselves hunte