peaking from the Great Lakes to
the Pacific and from mid-continent to the North Pole. It was as large
as half a dozen European Kingdoms and has become one of the greatest
adjuncts of the British Empire, but King Charles did not know nor care
much more about it than the French king who later on gave up Canada with
a light heart, saying it was only "a few hundred acres of snow."

It is not our duty in this book to follow the fortunes of "the Governor
and Company of the Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay" as
the Royal Charter described this little band of less than a score of men
to whom had been handed over the control of half a continent. It is
enough to say that the Hudson's Bay Company, as the popular habit of
shortening long titles rendered it, held this vast region for two whole
centuries. During that time the immense resources of the country tempted
others to disregard the monopolistic provisions of the Royal Charter and
to venture in upon forbidden ground. Companies such as the North-West
Fur Company, formed by the Scottish merchants of Montreal, rushed to
secure part of the rich harvest in trade that was being reaped by the
English Company, whose employees, it may be said, were largely the hardy
Scots from the Highlands and Islands. But the leaders of the Hudson's
Bay Company, "stabbed broad awake" by this opposition and strengthened
by the trustworthiness and endurance of their employees, held their
ground and extended their operations till they by degrees absorbed all
opponents and became in 1821 monarchs of all they surveyed.

Meanwhile in the Old Land many things of world-wide interest and
influence had been transpiring. The years around the opening of the
nineteenth century were made stormy by the Napoleonic effort to
subjugate Europe and while their men of military age were away fighting
for the liberty of Europe against "the little giant of Corsica," certain
areas in the north of Scotland were "cleared" of their inhabitants by
heartless landlords who felt that sheep were more profitable for the
owner of estates than human tenants. To these evicted crofters in the
Highlands came that noble altruist and philanthropic colonizer, the Earl
of Selkirk, who, having obtained from the Hudson's Bay Company an
immense district principally in what is now Manitoba, offered the
outcasts of a tyrannous land system homes in the great free spaces of
Rupert's Land, as the Hudson Bay territory was called. The offe