se territories would be to fill a
volume with tales of adventure and discovery.

The zeal with which the North-west Company pursued the trade in furs
quickly led to the exploration of the entire country. A Mackenzie
penetrated to the Arctic Ocean down the immense river which bears his
name--a Frazer and a Thompson pierced the tremendous masses of the Rocky
Mountains and beheld the Pacific rolling its waters against the rocks of
New Caledonia. Based upon a system which rewarded the efforts of its
employees by giving them a share in the profits of the trade, making them
partners as well as servants, the North-west Company soon put to sore
straits the older organization of the Hudson Bay. While the heads of both
companies were of the same nation, the working men and voyageurs were of
totally different races, the Hudson Bay employing Highlanders and Orkney
men from Scotland, and the North-west Company drawing its recruits from
the hardy French inhabitants of Lower Canada. This difference of
nationality deepened the strife between them, and many a deed of cruelty
and bloodshed lies buried amidst the oblivion of that time in those
distant regions. The men who went out to the North-west as voyageurs and
servants in the employment of the rival companies from Canada and from
Scotland hardly ever returned to their native lands. The wild roving life
in the great prairie or the trackless pine forest, the vast solitudes of
inland lakes and rivers, the chase, and the camp-fire had too much of
excitement in them to allow the voyageur to return again to the narrow
limits of civilization. Besides, he had taken to himself an Indian wife,
and although the ceremony by which that was effected was frequently
wanting in those accessories of bell, book, and candle so essential to
its proper well-being, nevertheless the voyageur and his squaw got on
pretty well together, and little ones, who jabbered the smallest amount
of English or French, and a great deal of Ojibbeway, or Cree, or
Assineboine, began to multiply around them.

Matters were in this state when, in 1812, as we have already seen in an
earlier chapter, the Earl of Selkirk, a large proprietor of the Hudson
Bay Company, conceived the idea of planting a colony of Highlanders on
the banks of the Red River near the lake called Winnipeg.

Some great magnate was intent on making a deer forest in Scotland about
the period that this country was holding its own with difficulty against
Napo