e fort. I had ridden that distance in five days and two hours.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The Hudson Bay Company--Furs and Free Trade--Fort Ellice--Quick
Travelling-Horses--Little Blackie--Touchwood Hills--A Snow-storm--The
South Saskatchewan--Attempt to cross the River--Death of poor
Blackie--Carlton.

IT may have occurred to some reader to ask, What is this company whose
name so often appears upon these pages? Who are the men composing it, and
what are the objects it has in view? You have glanced at its early
history, its rivalries, and its discoveries, but now, now at this present
time, while our giant rush of life roars and surges along, what is the
work done by this Company of Adventurers trading into the Bay of Hudson?
Let us see if we can answer. Of the two great monopolies which the
impecuniosity of Charles II. gave birth to, the Hudson Bay Company alone
survives, but to-day the monopoly is one of fact, and not of law. All men
are now free to come and go, to trade and sell and gather furs in the
great Northern territory, but distance and climate raise more formidable
barriers against strangers than law or protection could devise. Bold
would be the trader who would carry his goods to the far away Mackenzie
River; intrepid would be the voyageur who sought a profit from the lonely
shores of the great Bear Lake. Locked in their fastnesses of ice and
distance, these remote and friendless solitudes of the North must long
remain, as they are at present, the great fur preserve of the Hudson Bay
Company. Dwellers within the limits of European states can ill comprehend
the vastness of territory over which this Fur Company holds sway. I say
holds sway, for the north of North America is still as much in the
possession of the Company, despite all cession of title to Canada, as
Crusoe was the monarch of his island, or the man must be the owner of the
moon. From Pembina on Red River to Fort Anderson on the Mackenzie is as
great a distance as from London to Mecca. From the King's Posts to the
Pelly Banks is farther than from Paris to Samarcand, and yet today
throughout that immense region the Company is king. And what a king! no
monarch rules his subjects with half the power of this Fur Company. It
clothes, feeds, and utterly maintains nine-tenths of its subjects. From
the Esquimaux at Ungava to the Loucheaux at Fort Simpson, all live by and
through this London Corporation. The earth possesses not a wilder spot
than the