Those who did not
choose to fit out the expeditions themselves, were permitted to
sell them to the merchants; these employed the coureurs des bois,
or rangers of the woods, to undertake the long voyages on shares,
and thus the abuses of the old system were revived and
continued.
The pious missionaries employed by the Roman Catholic Church to
convert the Indians, did everything in their power to counteract
the profligacy caused and propagated by these men in the heart of
the wilderness. The Catholic chapel might often be seen planted
beside the trading house, and its spire surmounted by a cross,
towering from the midst of an Indian village, on the banks of a
river or a lake. The missions had often a beneficial effect on
the simple sons of the forest, but had little power over the
renegades from civilization.
At length it was found necessary to establish fortified posts at
the confluence of the rivers and the lakes for the protection of
the trade, and the restraint of these profligates of the
wilderness. The most important of these was at Michilimackinac,
situated at the strait of the same name, which connects Lakes
Huron and Michigan. It became the great interior mart and place
of deposit, and some of the regular merchants who prosecuted the
trade in person, under their licenses, formed establishments
here. This, too, was a rendezvous for the rangers of the woods,
as well those who came up with goods from Montreal as those who
returned with peltries from the interior. Here new expeditions
were fitted out and took their departure for Lake Michigan and
the Mississippi; Lake Superior and the Northwest; and here the
peltries brought in return were embarked for Montreal.
The French merchant at his trading post, in these primitive days
of Canada, was a kind of commercial patriarch. With the lax
habits and easy familiarity of his race, he had a little world of
self-indulgence and misrule around him. He had his clerks, canoe
men, and retainers of all kinds, who lived with him on terms of
perfect sociability, always calling him by his Christian name; he
had his harem of Indian beauties, and his troop of halfbreed
children; nor was there ever wanting a louting train of Indians,
hanging about the establishment, eating and drinking at his
expense in the intervals of their hunting expeditions.
The Canadian traders, for a long time, had troublesome
competitors in the British merchants of New York, who inveigled
the Indian hunters and the coureurs des bois to their posts, and
traded with them on more favorable terms. A still more formidable
opposition was organized in the Hudson's Bay Company, chartered
by Charles II., in 1670, with the exclusive privilege of
establishing trading houses on the shores of that bay and its
tributary rivers; a privilege which they have maintained to the
present day. Between this British company and the French
merchants of Canada, feuds and contests arose about alleged
infringements of territorial limits, and acts of violence and
bloodshed occurred between their agents.
In 1762, the French lost possession of Canada, and the trade fell
principally into the hands of British subjects. For a time,
however, it shrunk within narrow limits. The old coureurs des
bois were broken up and dispersed, or, where they could be met
with, were slow to accustom themselves to the habits and manners
of their British employers. They missed the freedom, indulgence,
and familiarity of the old French trading houses, and did not
relish the sober exactness, reserve, and method of the new-
comers. The British traders, too, were ignorant of the country,
and distrustful of the natives. They had reason to be so. The
treacherous and bloody affairs of Detroit and Michilimackinac
showed them the lurking hostility cherished by the savages, who
had too long been taught by the French to regard them as enemies.
It was not until the year 1766, that the trade regained its old
channels; but it was then pursued with much avidity and emulation
by individual merchants, and soon transcended its former bounds.
Expeditions were fitted out by various persons from Montreal and
Michilimackinac, and rivalships and jealousies of course ensued.
The trade was injured by their artifices to outbid and undermine
each other; the Indians were debauched by the sale of spirituous
liquors, which had been prohibited under the French rule. Scenes
of drunkeness, brutality, and brawl were the consequence, in the
Indian villages and around the trading houses; while bloody feuds
took place between rival trading parties when they happened to
encounter each other in the lawless depths of the wilderness.
To put an end to these sordid and ruinous contentions, several of
the principal merchants of Montreal entered into a partnership in
the winter of 1783, which was augmented by amalgamation with a
rival company in 1787. Thus was created the famous "Northwest
Company," which for a time held a lordly sway over the wintry
lakes and boundless forests of the Canadas, almost equal to that
of the East India Company over the voluptuous climes and
magnificent realms of the Orient.
The company consisted of twenty-three shareholders, or partners,
but held in its employ about two thousand persons as clerks,
guides, interpreters, and "voyageurs," or boatmen. These were
distributed at various trading posts, established far and wide on
the interior lakes and rivers, at immense distances from each
other, and in the heart of trackless countries and savage tribes.
Several of the partners resided in Montreal and Quebec, to manage
the main concerns of the company. These were called agents, and
were personages of great weight and importance; the other
partners took their stations at the interior posts, where they
remained throughout the winter, to superintend the intercourse
with the various tribes of Indians.
