THE FRENCH TRAPPER 55 



tries on his rafts and canoes, now signed with the great 

 English companies for a paltry one, two, and three 

 hundred dollars a year. 



It was but natural in the new state of things that 

 the French trapper, with all his knowledge of forest 

 and stream, should become courewr des lois and voy- 

 agcur, while the Englishman remained the barterer. 

 In the Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly 

 enlisted with four companies : the Mackinaw Company, 

 radiating from Michilimackinac to the Mississippi ; the 

 American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri 

 Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward 

 to the Kockies; and the South- West Company, which 

 was John Jacob Astor s amalgamation of the American 

 and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the 

 Nor Westers and X. Y/s, who had sprung up in oppo 

 sition to the great English Hudson s Bay Company. 



Though he had become a burden-carrier for his 

 quondam enemies, the French trapper still saw life 

 through the glamour of la gloire and noblesse, still 

 lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and 

 starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back 

 and laughed at hardship; courted danger and trolled 

 off one of his chansons brought over to America by 

 ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath 

 at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself 

 reverently with a prayer to Sainte Anne, the voyageurs 

 saint, just before his canoe took the plunge. 



Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, 

 like Manuel Lisa of St. Louis, might sit in a counting- 

 house or fur post adding up rows of figures, and your 

 Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value 



