und across the river, lying in camp, with his skull split to the
neck. By the sword he had lived, by the sword he perished. Was the
murder the result of a drunken quarrel, or did some frenzied
frontiersman with deathless woes bribe the hand of the assassin? The
truth of the matter is unknown, and Pontiac's death remains a theme for
fiction.

What with struggles for power and Indian wars, one might think that the
few hundred English colonists of Quebec and Montreal had all they could
do. Not so: their quarrels with the French Catholics and fights with
the Indians are merely incidental to the main aim of their lives, to
the one object that has brought them stampeding to Canada as to a new
gold field, namely, quick way to wealth; and the only quick way to
wealth was by the fur trade. In the wilderness of the Up Country
wander some two or three thousand cast-off wood rovers of the old
French fur trade. As the prodigals come down the Ottawa, down the
Detroit, down the St. Lawrence, the English and Scotch merchants of
Montreal and Quebec meet them. Mighty names those merchants have in
history now,--McGillivrays and MacKenzies and McGills and Henrys and
MacLeods and MacGregors and Ogilvies and MacTavishes and Camerons,--but
at this period of the game the most of them were what we to-day would
call petty merchants or peddlers. In their storehouses--small,
one-story, frame affairs--were packed goods for trade. With these
goods they quickly outfitted the French bushrover--$3000 worth to a
canoe--and packed the fellow back to the wilderness to trade on shares
before any rival firm could hire him. Within five years of Wolfe's
victory in 1759 all the French bushrovers of the Up Country had been
reengaged by merchants of Montreal and Quebec.

{293}

[Illustration: MONTREAL (From a contemporary print)]

Then imperceptible changes came,--the changes that work so silently
they are like destiny. Because it is unsafe to let the rascal
bushrovers and voyageurs go off by themselves with $3000 worth to the
canoe load, the merchants began to accompany them westward.
"Bourgeois," the voyageurs call their outfitters. Then, because
success in fur trade must be kept secret, the merchants cease to have
their men come down to Montreal. They meet them with the goods
halfway, at La Verendrye's old stamping ground on Lake Superior, first
at the place called Grand Portage, then, when the United States
boundary is changed in 1783, a