8 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 



This Company was called " The Governor and Company 

 of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay," 

 or in brief, " The Hudson's Bay Company." At first it 

 occupied a few small buildings, called factories or forts, 

 situated at advantageous places near the mouths of rivers 

 on the shore of Hudson Bay, where the Indians, who were 

 accustomed to roam through the great unknown inland 

 country, could come down in canoes to trade their furs for 

 guns, knives, and other commodities brought from England 

 by the white people. 



About the beginning of the eighteenth century, some of 

 the Indians who came to the more northern factories or trading- 

 posts, and especially to those situated at the mouths of the 

 Churchill and Nelson Rivers, brought with them rough pieces 

 of native copper, and ornaments and weapons fashioned from 

 this metal. On being asked where the copper came from, 

 they said that they found it on the banks of a river, far away 

 to the north, and that it could be collected from the surface 

 in great abundance, but that the distance through which it was 

 necessary for them to carry it prevented them from bringing 

 much of it to the factories. These stories, along with the 

 specimens which the Indians had in their possession, gradually 

 aroused more and more interest in the minds of the fur- 

 traders. At last they determined that there were far greater 

 riches within their reach than could be obtained by trading 

 with the Indians for furs, and decided to go in search of the 

 copper mines whatever the cost of such a search might be. 

 Among the first to take up this quest was Captain James 

 Knight, a man of about eighty years of age, who had spent 

 most of his life in trading for furs with the Indians, and who 

 for several years had been in charge of York Factory for the 

 Hudson's Bay Company. With him were Captain Barlow, 

 another fur-trader from Fort Albany, and Captain Vaughan. 



When the Committee, appointed in 1748 by the British 

 House of Commons to inquire into the state and conditions 



