268 EARLY HISTORY OF OREGON. 



company, had confined their posts to the shores of the ample 

 territory which had been granted to them by the Charter of 

 Charles II., and left the task of procuring furs to the enter- 

 prise of the native hunters. The practice of the hunters was 

 to suspend their chase during the summer months, when the 

 fur is of inferior quality and the animals rear their young, and 

 to descend by the lakes and rivers of the interior to the estab- 

 lished marts of the Company, with the produce of the past 

 winter's campaign. The Northwest Company adopted a 

 totally different system. They dispatched their servants into 

 the very recesses of the wilderness to bargain with the native 

 hunters at their homes. They established " wintering part- 

 ners" in the interior of the country to superintend the inter- 

 course with the various tribes of Indians, and employed at one 

 time not fewer than two thousand voyageurs, or boatmen. 

 The natives being thus no longer called away from their pur- 

 suit of the beaver and other animals, by the necessity of 

 resorting as heretofore to the factories of the Hudson's Bay 

 Company, continued on their hunting-grounds during the 

 whole year, and were tempted to kill the cub and full-grown 

 animal alike, and thus to anticipate the supply of future years. 

 As the nearer hunting-grounds became exhausted, the North- 

 west Company advanced their stations westwardly into regions 

 previously unexplored, and in 1806 they pushed forward a 

 post across the Rocky Mountains, through the passage where 

 the Peace River descends through a deep chasm in the chain, 

 and formed a trading establishment on a lake now called 

 Frazer's Lake, situated in 54° north latitude. It is from this 

 period, according to Mr. Harnon, who was a partner in the com- 

 pany, and superintendent of its trade on the wertern side of the 

 Rocky Mountains, that the name of New Caledonia had been 

 used to designate the northern portion of the Oregon Territory. 



