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Updated: September 15, 2025
It was not until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that seems to have been well past the middle of the century.
No one might tell what lay around the next bend of our widening waterway. We were explorers. A virgin world lay before us. The nature of the country along the stream kept the settlements back a distance; so that to us, now, in reality, retracing one of the ancient fur-trading routes, we might almost have been the first to break these silences.
The miner, wherever he went, sounded the knell of fur-trading; and the trapper did not like to have his game preserve overrun by fellows who scared off all animals from traps, set fire going to clear away underbrush, and owned responsibility to no authority.
Very strange does it now appear when we read of those days, or talk to old men who were participants in those events when the officials of the fur-trading company, from the despotic governor himself down to the lowest clerk, travelled over half the continent in birch canoes, manned by Indians or half-breeds, looking after the interest of the greatest fur-trading company the world has ever seen.
From Baldwin the captain heard that Bob Corkey had, during his wanderings, fallen in with Bounce and Badger, and that these three had formed a partnership, in which they tried their luck at gold-digging, farming, fur-trading, and many other sources of livelihood, but, up to the last news of them, without success.
But when we began work, they practically never got any with which to pay. The fur-trading companies settled in kind, values were often measured, not by so many dollars, but by so many pelts. The traders gave out supplies on credit, took the fish or fur from their planters in return, and made up the balance, when there was any, in goods.
The great fur-trading company that had for so long a time held despotic power in the land, in their short-sightedness, fearing a diminution in the returns of the fur by the hunters if one-seventh of the time was to be, as they put it, spent in idleness, sneered at the actions of the missionaries, and by bribes and threats, endeavoured to induce the Indians to ignore their teachings on the subject.
"Yess, after a lifetime; and McLaughlin had brain and heart, too. If England would listen to him, she would learn sometings. He plants, he plows, he bass gardens and mills and houses and herds. Yess, if they let McLaughlin alone, they would haf a civilization on the Columbia, and not a fur-trading post. Then they could oppose your civilization there. That iss what he preaches.
Expecting to reap great advantage from Anticosti as a fishing and fur-trading station, he built a fort thereon; but after living some time on the island with his family, he was obliged to abandon it. His patronymic was adopted as the name of a mountain situated near the Rivere des Plaines, a tributary of the Illinois; and Joliet is also the appellation, given in his honor, of a town near Chicago.
To both companies the conflict had proved ruinous. Each was as anxious as the other for the terms of peace by which the great fur-trading rivals were united a few years after the massacre of Seven Oaks. So ended the despotic rule of gentlemen adventurers in the far north.
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