JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 171 



North of the boundary the free trapper had small 

 chance against the Hudson s Bay Company. As long 

 as the slow-going Mackinaw Company, itself chiefly re 

 cruited from free trappers, ruled at the junction of the 

 Lakes, the free trappers held the hunting-grounds of 

 the Mississippi; but after the Mackinaw was absorbed 

 by the aggressive American Fur Company, the free 

 hunters were pushed westward. On the Lower Mis 

 souri competition raged from 1810, so that circum 

 stances drove the free trapper westward to the moun 

 tains, where he is hunting in the twentieth century as 

 his prototype hunted two hundred years ago. 



In Canada of course after 1870 he entered the 

 mountains chiefly by three passes: (1) Yellow Head 

 Pass southward of the Athabasca; (2) the narrow gap 

 where the Bow emerges to the plains that is, the river 

 where the Indians found the best wood for the making 

 of bows; (3) north of the boundary, through that nar 

 row defile overtowered by the lonely flat-crowned peak 

 called Crowds Nest Mountain that is, where the fugi 

 tive Crows took refuge from the pursuing Blackfeet. 



if Johnston had not married Wabogish s daughter and if John 

 ston s daughter had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead 

 of going to her relatives of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would 

 have written no Hiawatha? Would they not hesitate before 

 slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba and the famous 

 MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to the 

 Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer ? Do they for 

 get that Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, 

 is related to the proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured 

 the West, the Bois-Brules f The writer knows the West from 

 only fifteen years of life and travel there ; yet with that imper 

 fect knowledge cannot recall a single fur post without some tra 

 dition of an unfamed Pocahontas. 



