nabled the older Company to reach the stations on the
Bay at an earlier season of the year than was possible for their
rivals by the overland route. Yet such was the zeal animating the
Canadian companies that, conquering all difficulties of season and
situation, they delivered goods to the Indians in their villages and
tepees, thus anticipating their journey to the north; and some time
after the Conquest forty canoes of about four tons burden each left
the St. Lawrence every year for the interior.

The fall of Quebec marked a crisis in the affairs of the Hudson's Bay
Company, and for a time indeed it seemed as if it also would pass away
with the old _regime_. Their foes at this time began to multiply; for
while the veteran _coureurs de bois_ of Canada were ready enough,
after the Conquest, to take service under their new masters, the
Colonial forces were now further augmented by a large body of Scotch
settlers, partly Jacobite refugees, and partly soldiers of the
Highland regiments of Amherst and Wolfe. With vitality thus renewed
the Canadians now turned to the west, their emissaries penetrating as
far westward as Sturgeon Lake on the Saskatchewan, where a trading
station was erected to divert the Indians from the forts at Hudson's
Bay. But suddenly the "Adventurers of England" awoke from their long
sleep, and Hearne, their agent, was forthwith sent to open up new
territories, across which a chain of stations soon marked the
successive stages of their progress, from Cumberland House to distant
Athabasca. The spirit of competition was now aflame, and on many
occasions in the course of the next fifty years it caused the opposing
Companies to pass the limits of commercial strife and contend in open
warfare, until mutual interest and vice-regal authority at last
combined to reconcile them.

A great and threatening rival to the Hudson's Bay Company had come.
The North-West Company, founded at Montreal in 1782, under the
leadership of Simon McTavish, was founded on principles which made it
a power against the older organisation, its agents receiving a
stimulus to enterprise from a share in the profits of the undertaking
and pay double that given by the English Company. These advantages
proved so potent, that soon after beginning operations the
North-Westers were able to send abroad skins to four times the value
of those exported by their great rival.

But this zeal was met in a new and robust spirit which held the issue
o