82 TRANSACTIONS. 1906-7. 



to be the bartering of the minimum value in trading goods for 

 the maximum value in peltries; but wittingly or unwittingly 

 they moved towards a quite different gaol. The same spirit 

 of adventure that drew their forefathers across an untravelled 

 sea to the discovery of a new world, kept the eyes of these fur- 

 traders turned ever toward the setting sun. Generation after 

 generation, French and English, they responded to the call of 

 the west. As the earlier discoverers had sailed the ocean to 

 the shores of this western continent; so these men, following a 

 similar impulse, crossed the continent to another and greater 

 sea. 



To fur-traders and explorers alike the remarkable system 

 of waterways that covers North America like a gigantic web was 

 of vital importance. The story of the exploration of Western 

 America is really the story of the opening up of the river systems 

 of the continent. In their relation to the problem of interior 

 transportation the waterways of North America are perhaps 

 the most remarkable in the world. It is literally true that a 

 man might start in a canoe from Quebec or Montreal, and with 

 nothing more serious than an occasional portage reach by water 

 Hudson Bay or the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Sea, or the Pacific. 

 And this is not merely theoretically possible; it has answered 

 the test of practical experience. Canadian fur-traders and 

 explorers, French and English, actually travelled in bark canoes 

 from the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi; to the 

 mouth of the Mackenzie; to the mouth of the Nelson; to the 

 mouth of the Columbia. 



As the rivers and lakes of Western America were the highways 

 of the fur-trade, the portages connecting one great waterway 

 with another became strategical points in its development. 

 When the first French traders entered what is now Western 

 Canada, one hundred and seventy-five years ago, they crossed 

 the most famous of all the portages — Grand Portage, about forty 

 miles south of the present town of Port Arthur. This was what 

 might be cahed the jumping-off-place for the western fur country. 

 It was the connecting link between the Great Lakes and the 

 waterways of the plains; between the civilized east and the un- 

 civilized and unexplored west. 



Many years after, when the first English traders from Canada, 

 following in the footsteps of the French, reached Cumberland lake 

 on the Saskatchewan, they turned north by way of Sturgeon-Weir 



