16 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent 

 with a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon ! 

 The ship was blown to atoms, bodies torn asunder, and 

 the sea scattered with bloody remnants of what had been 

 living men but a moment before. 



The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis, 

 the clerk,* had determined to effect the death of his 

 enemies on his own pyre. Unable to escape with the 

 other four refugees under cover of night, he had 

 put a match to four tons of powder in the hold. But 

 the refugees might better have perished with the Ton- 

 quin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where they 

 were captured and tortured to death with all the pro 

 longed cruelty that savages practise. Between twenty 

 and thirty lives were lost in this disaster to the Pacific 

 Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria 

 with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to 

 wait the coming of the overland traders whom Mr. 

 Astor was sending by way of the Missouri and Co 

 lumbia. 



* Franchere, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so 

 detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life 

 entering the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material 

 from Franchere, says Lewis, and may have had special informa 

 tion from Mr. Astor ; but all accounts Franchere s, and Ross 

 Cox s, and Alexander Ross s are from the same source, the 

 Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the massacre, sprang 

 overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him on 

 account of his race. Franchere became prominent in Montreal, 

 Cox in British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of 

 Winnipeg, where the story of the fur company conflict became 

 folk-lore to the old settlers. There is scarcely a family but has 

 some ancestor who took part in the contest among the fur com 

 panies at the opening of the nineteenth century, and the tale is 

 part of the settlement s tcaditions. 



