io ON SNOW-SHOES TO THE BARREN GROUNDS 



them into parts hitherto unknown, and cause bloodshed 

 whenever they met the agents of their rivals. It was the 

 greed for trade, indeed, that quickened the steps of the 

 first adventurers into the silent, frozen land of the North. 

 Samuel Hearne, the first white man to pass beyond Great 

 Slave Lake, made his trip in 1769 by order of the Hud- 

 son Bay Company, and in search of copper- mines. It 

 was in quest of trade for the Northwest Company that 

 Alexander Mackenzie (1789) penetrated to the Arctic 

 Ocean down the river which bears his name. I have 

 never been able to appreciate the justice in the command 

 that knighted Mackenzie and ignored Hearne. The lat- 

 ter's trip was really a most remarkable one overland a 

 great part, and always the more difficult. Mackenzie's 

 trip, as compared with it, reads like a summer day's pleas- 

 uring. 



For forty years these two companies traded with the 

 Indians, and fought one another at every opportunity, 

 meanwhile pushing their posts farther and farther into 

 the interior; but in 1821 a compromise was effected, an 

 amalgamation resulted, and the Hudson's Bay Company 

 reigned supreme. And so it has continued to reign -ever 

 since; for though it retired from the government of Ru- 

 pert's Land in 1870, and handed it over to the Dominion 

 of Canada for 300,000 sterling, yet, so far as the country 

 is concerned of which Edmonton is the distributing-point, 

 the Hudson's Bay Company is as much the ruler in fact as 

 ever it was in law. But this particular section, even though 

 so extensive, is only one of the many in which, from end to 

 end of British North America, this company counts alto- 

 gether something like two hundred trading -posts. Nor 

 are furs its sole commodity : from Montreal to Victoria 

 along the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and at the centres of 

 the Indian countries in which they trade, may be seen the 



