GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS 3 



together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor 

 of the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie 

 of the Nor Westers. Banded together, they thought 

 no more of coasting round the sheeted antarctics, or 

 slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie 

 Eiver under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than 

 people to-day think of running from New York to New 

 port. When the conflict of 1812 cut off communication 

 between western fur posts and New York by the over 

 land route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn t 

 think himself a hero at all for sailing to Kamtchatka 

 and crossing the whole width of Asia, Europe, and the 

 Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor. 



The American fur trader knew only one rule of ex 

 istence to go ahead without any heroics, whether the 

 going cost his own or some other man s life. That is 

 the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is 

 one of the most thrilling pages in history. 



About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre 

 Radisson and Chouart Groseillers, two French adven 

 turers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed the chain of 

 waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior north 

 westward to the region of Hudson Bay.* Returning 

 with tales of fabulous wealth to be had in the fur trade 

 of the north, they were taken in hand by members of 

 the British Commission then in Boston, whose influ 

 ence secured the Hudson s Bay Company charter in 

 1670; and that ancient and honourable body as the 

 company was called reaped enormous profits from the 



* Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this 

 trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants. 



