GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 269 



walls ; but here there was danger of the French fleet, and the walls 

 were built with bastion and trench and rampart. 



Again to the map. Between Hudson Bay and the Rocky 

 Mountains stretches an American Siberia — the Barren Lands. 

 Here, too, on every important water-way, Athabasca and the Liard 

 and the MacKenzie, into the land of winter night and midnight 

 sun extend fur trading posts. We think of these northern streams 

 as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with mean log villages on their 

 banks. The fur posts of the sub-Arctics are not imposing with 

 picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe was feared 

 here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the world, 

 with two tributaries each more than 1000 miles in length. It 

 has a width of a mile, and a succession or rapids that rival the St. 

 Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's, 

 and half a dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New 

 England states without raising a sand bar. 



The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is 

 a wilderness of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of 

 a continent. Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses, are fur 

 posts. 



Such is the realm of the northern fur trade to-day. 



Before 1812 there was no international boundary in the fur 

 trade. But after the war Congress barred out Canadian com- 

 panies. The next curtailment of hunting-ground came in 1869- 

 1870, when the company surrendered proprietary rights to the 

 Canadian Government, retaining only the right to trade in the 

 vast north land. The formation of new Canadian provinces took 

 place south of the Churchill ; but north the traders barter pelts 

 undisturbed as of old. Yearly the staffs are shifted from post to 

 post as the fortunes of the hunt vary ; but the principal posts not 

 including winter quarters for a special hunt have probably not 

 exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen below one hundred 

 for the last century. Of these the greater numbers are of course 

 in the Far North. When the Hudson's Bay Company was fighting 



