8 THE ARCTIC PRAIRIES 



The Hudson's Bay Company has always been the 

 guardian angel of the north. 



I suppose that there never yet was another purely 

 commercial concern that so fully realized the moral 

 obligations of its great power, or that has so uniformly 

 done its best for the people it ruled. 



At all times it has stood for peace, and one hears 

 over and over again that such and such tribes were 

 deadly enemies, but the Company insisted on their 

 smoking the peace pipe. The Sioux and Ojibway, 

 Black-Foot and Assiniboine, Dog-Rib and Copper- 

 Knife, Beaver and Chipewyan, all offer historic illus- 

 trations in point, and many others could be found for 

 the list. 



The name Peace River itself is the monument of a 

 successful effort on the part of the Company to bring 

 about a better understanding between the Crees and 

 the Beavers. 



Besides human foes, the Company has saved the 

 Indian from famine and plague. Many a hunger- 

 stricken tribe owes its continued existence to the 

 fatherly care of the Company, not simply general and 

 indiscriminate, but minute and personal, carried into 

 the details of their lives. For instance, when bots so 

 pestered the Caribou of one region as to render their 

 hides useless to the natives, the Company brought in 

 hides from a district where they still were good. 



The Chipewyans were each spring the victims of 

 snow-blindness until the Company brought and suc- 

 ceeded in popularizing their present ugly but effectual 

 and universal peaked hats. When their train-dogs 



