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Updated: September 15, 2025
Jolly parties from the fur-trading posts and mission home joined with others in making merry groups, who for hours at a time engaged in this joyous and exhilarating sport. Sometimes several young gentlemen in the service of the Hudson Bay Company would come over from the fort and join them in their moonlight excursions.
This was no easy task, but in general they managed to do it for nearly a century. The most active and at the same time the most picturesque figure in the fur-trading system of New France was the coureur-de-bois. Without him the trade could neither have been begun nor continued successfully.
The Selkirk settlers had now gained a footing in the land and the banks of the Red River had become the paradise of retired officers of the fur-trading companies. Happy families were growing up in the homes of the Settlement and education was necessary.
Cold weather drove him westward across the Pacific, and he spent the next winter at Owyhee, where, in February of the following year, he was killed by the natives. All these explorers were looking for chances for fur-trading, which was at that time the chief industry of the Pacific coast.
After 1763, when the two provinces of Canada were definitely ceded to Great Britain, the exploring energies of the Hudson's Bay Fur-trading Company revived.
Between 1602 and 1668, English adventurers from London and Bristol, notable amongst whom were WILLIAM BAFFIN, LUKE FOX, and CAPTAIN JAMES, mapped the coasts of Hudson's Bay and Baffin's Bay and brought to the notice of merchants in England the abundance of whales in these Arctic waters, and of fur-bearing beasts and fur-trading Indians in the region of Hudson's Bay.
So much had been said of St. Ignace, and so long had the name been familiar throughout New France, that my first view of the place brought me bitter disappointment. The faces of the others in our party pictured the same disillusion. Hugo Chevet had been in these parts before on fur-trading expeditions, and 'twas probable that De Artigny had stopped there on one of his voyages with La Salle.
So constantly employed had he been in thus advancing the interests of this fur-trading corporation that some winters he travelled thousands of miles with his own dog-train and guides. In his wanderings he had met with some strange adventures, and had passed through some trying ordeals. Later on we may hear from his own lips the recital of some of these stirring events.
Every night of the fur-trading month there was a ball in Mackinac, given either by the householders or their guests; and it often happened that a man spent in one month all he had earned by his year of tremendous and far-reaching toil. But he had society, and what was to him the cream of existence, while it lasted.
Yet, though only two thousand whites are fur-trading in Canada, no interpretation of Canadian life is complete without reference to that far domain of the North, where the hunter roams in loneliness, and the night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the call of the wolf pack.
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