collateral lights supplied by the published journals of
other travellers who have visited the scenes described: such as Messrs.
Lewis and Clarke, Bradbury, Breckenridge, Long, Franchere, and Ross Cox,
and make a general acknowledgment of aid received from these quarters.

The work I here present to the public is necessarily of a rambling
and somewhat disjointed nature, comprising various expeditions and
adventures by land and sea. The facts, however, will prove to be linked
and banded together by one grand scheme, devised and conducted by
a master spirit; one set of characters, also, continues throughout,
appearing occasionally, though sometimes at long intervals, and the
whole enterprise winds up by a regular catastrophe; so that the work,
without any labored attempt at artificial construction, actually
possesses much of that unity so much sought after in works of fiction,
and considered so important to the interest of every history.

WASHINGTON IRVING

CHAPTER I.

Objects of American Enterprise.--Gold Hunting and Fur
Trading.--Their Effect on Colonization.--Early French Canadian
Settlers.--Ottawa and Huron Hunters.--An Indian Trading Camp.
Coureurs Des Bois, or Rangers of the Woods.--Their Roaming
Life.--Their Revels and Excesses.--Licensed Traders.
Missionaries.--Trading Posts.--Primitive French Canadian
Merchant.--His Establishment and Dependents.--British Canadian
Fur Merchant.--Origin of the Northwest Company.--Its
Constitution.--Its Internal Trade.--A Candidate for the
Company.--Privations in the Wilderness.--Northwest Clerks.
Northwest Partners.--Northwest Nabobs.--Feudal Notions in the
Forests.--The Lords of the Lakes.--Fort William.--Its
Parliamentary Hall and Banqueting Room.--Wassailing in the
Wilderness.

TWO leading objects of commercial gain have given birth to wide and
daring enterprise in the early history of the Americas; the precious
metals of the South, and the rich peltries of the North. While the fiery
and magnificent Spaniard, inflamed with the mania for gold, has extended
his discoveries and conquests over those brilliant countries scorched by
the ardent sun of the tropics, the adroit and buoyant Frenchman, and the
cool and calculating Briton, have pursued the less splendid, but no
less lucrative, traffic in furs amidst the hyperborean regions of the
Canadas, until they have advanced even within the Arctic Circle.