6 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who 

 had stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia ; and be 

 fore 1800 nearly thirty Boston vessels yearly sailed to 

 the Northern Pacific for the fur trade. 



Eager to forestall the Hudson s Bay Company, now 

 beginning to rub its eyes and send explorers westward 

 to bring Indians down to the bay,* Alexander Mac- 

 Kenzie of the Nor Westers pushed down the great 

 river named after him,f and forced his way across the 

 northern Rockies to the Pacific. Flotillas of North- 

 West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie s lead north 

 to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At 

 Michilimackinac one of the most lawless and roaring 

 of the fur posts was an association known as the Mack 

 inaw Company, made up of old French hunters under 

 English management, trading westward from the Lakes 

 to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor Wester, and 

 Mackinaw were daily pressing closer and closer to that 

 vast unoccupied Eldorado the fur country between 

 the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward 

 by the Mississippi, west by the Pacific. 



Possession is nine points out of ten. The question 

 was who would get possession first. 



Unfortunately that question presented itself to three 

 alert rivals at the same time and in the same light. 

 And the war began. 



* This was probably the real motive of the Hudson s Bay 

 Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769- 71. 

 Hearne, unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing 

 to his too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French 

 in La Perouse s campaign of 1782. 



f To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the 

 Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted. 



