way, at first before the white man's
boat with oars and sails, and now before his steamer. But in distant
or secluded wilds it lingers still--the same craft to-day that it was
when the Celtic coracles were paddled on the Thames before the Romans
ever heard of England--the horse, the ship, the moving home of those
few remaining nomads whose life is dying with its own.

The great historic age of inland small craft--the age of dug-out,
bateau, and canoe; the age of Indian, pioneer, and voyageur--was the
eighteenth century, when fresh-water sailing craft were few, when
steamers were unknown, and when savage and civilized men and methods
were mingled with each other in the fur trade over a larger area than
they used in common either before that time or since. The seventeenth
century saw the slow beginnings of this age after Champlain had founded
Quebec in 1608 and had taken the warpath with the Hurons against the
Iroquois. The nineteenth century saw its almost equally slow decline,
which began in 1815, at the close of the war with the United States,
and may be said to have been practically completed with the two
North-West Rebellions of 1870 and 1885. The latter year, indeed,
closed a real {31} epoch with three significant events: the end of the
last Indian and half-breed war in Canada, the completion of the first
trans-continental Canadian railway, and the return from Egypt of the
first and last Canadians to go on an oversea campaign as professed
voyageurs.

Under the French regime the fur trade reached well past Lake Superior.
Nepigon and the Kaministikwia were the two most important junctions of
routes at the western end of the lake. Under British rule the Montreal
'fur lords' used the 'Grand Portage,' which ends on a bay of Lake
Superior some way south of the modern Fort William. It was a regular
bush road, nearly ten miles long, made to avoid the falls of the
Pigeon. As early as 1783, the year in which King George III first
recognized the United States as an independent power, the fur lords
kept no less than five hundred men in constant work at the height of
the season, during the latter half of August. Horses and oxen were
used later on; but the voyageur himself was the chief beast of burden
here, as everywhere else. There were two kinds of voyageur. One was
the mere merchant carrier, who went from Montreal to the Grand Portage
in big boats of four tons burden having a crew of ten men. These were
the 'pork