avoring to keep up suave conversation;
Nicholas Garry at the other end of the table, also very pompous and
smooth, but with a look on his face as if he were sitting above a powder
mine, the Highland pipers dressed in tartans, standing at each end of the
hall, filling the room with the drone and the skurl of the bagpipes.

[Illustration: SIR GEORGE SIMPSON, GOVERNOR OF HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, 1820]

By the union of the companies both sides avoided proving their rights in
the law courts. Most important of all, the Hudson's Bay Company escaped
proving its charter valid; for the charter applied only to Hudson Bay and
adjacent lands "not occupied by other Christian powers"; but on the union
taking place, the British government granted to the new Hudson's Bay
Company license of exclusive monopoly to _all_ the Indian territory,
meaning (1) Hudson Bay Country, (2) the interior, (3) New Caledonia as
well as Oregon. In fact, the union left the fur traders ten times more
strongly intrenched than before. {407} By the new arrangement Dr. John
McLoughlin was appointed chief factor of the western territories known as
Oregon and New Caledonia. When the War of 1812 closed, treaty provided
that Oregon should be open to the joint occupancy of English and American
traders till the matter of the western boundary could be finally settled.
Oregon roughly included all territory between the Columbia and the
Spanish fort at San Francisco, namely, Washington, Oregon, Northern
California, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, parts of Montana and Wyoming. It was
cheaper to send provisions round by sea to the fur posts of New
Caledonia, in modern British Columbia, than across the continent by way
of the Saskatchewan; so McLoughlin's district also included all the
territory far as the Russian possessions in Alaska.

This part of the Hudson's Bay Company's history belongs to the United
States rather than Canada, but it is interesting to remember that just as
the French fur traders explored the Mississippi far south as the Gulf of
Mexico, so English fur traders first explored the western states far
south as New Spain. This western field was perhaps the most picturesque
of all the Hudson's Bay Company's possessions.

Fort Vancouver, ninety miles inland from the sea on the Columbia, was the
capital of this transmontane kingdom, and yearly till 1846 the fur
brigades set out from Fort Vancouver two or three hundred strong by pack
horse and canoe. Well-known officer