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And it was a wonderful world a world of vast silence, empty of everything but the creatures of the wild. The nearest Hudson's Bay post was a hundred miles away, and the first town of civilization was a straight three hundred to the south. Two years before, Tusoo, the Cree trapper, had called this his domain.
This he thought to be a plan of the Hudson's Bay Company, to regain their failing prestige and to strike a blow at the Nor'-Wester trade. To the fur trader or the rancher, the incoming of the farmer is ever obnoxious. The beaver and the mink desert the streams whenever the plowshare disturbs the soil.
Blake laughed as he found a seat. He imagined that their appearance must have been somewhat startling, but he knew it takes a good deal to disturb the equanimity of a Hudson's Bay Scot. "From Sweetwater, but we have been up in the timber belt since winter set in. Now we have run out of provisions and my partner's lamed by snowshoe trouble."
On the distinctions which they make rests Hudson's claim to take practical precedence of Verrazano and of Gomez, who sailed in past Sandy Hook nearly a hundred years ahead of him; and of those shadowy nameless shipmen who in the intervening time, until his coming, may have made our harbor one of their stations for refitting and watering on their voyages from and to Portugal and Spain.
It has disagreeable duties; it involves repeated removals, and the alternation of bad climates from Hudson's Bay to Calcutta's Black Hole. The juniors of the regimental officers are mere boys, the seniors great empty cartouch-boxes, and the women have cabals, there is a sameness even in its variety; but worse than all, it has no home in short, the whole thing is a bore.
Helena, Wales to Hudson's Bay, Mason to the Cape of Good Hope, Captain Cooke to Otaheite, &c. The observations of the southern hemisphere compared with those of Europe, and especially with the observations made by an Austrian astronomer Father Hell at Wardhus in Lapland, gave for the distance of the sun the result which has since figured in all treatises on astronomy and navigation.
The answer set me wondering to what pass things had come between the two great companies that they were shipping each other's traders gratuitously out of the country. I recalled the talk at the Quebec Club about Governor McDonell of the Hudson's Bay trying to expel Nor'-Westers and concluded our people could play their own game against the commander of Red River.
These were in existence when the old order passed away in 1870, but they are all absorbed into the City of Winnipeg of to-day. The Hudson's Bay Company, while long attached to its ancient customs, brought over from the seventeenth century, has fully and heartily adopted the new order of things. Glorying in the old, it has embraced the new, and has become thoroughly modern in all its enterprises.
They are nearly all of Canadian origin many of them half-breeds, and extremely skilful in the navigation of the lakes and rivers of this untrodden wilderness. Of course most of them are in the employ of the Hudson's Bay Company; and when not actually engaged in "voyaging" do a little hunting and trapping on their own account.
"Such a Government would not only relieve the Hudson's Bay Company of an immense responsibility, but it would render titles to land sold by them, and claims to interest in the minerals, far more certain, marketable, and profitable than at present.
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