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Now began the preparations on a great scale for the colonization of New France. By the spring of 1628 a fleet of eighteen or twenty ships belonging to the company assembled in the harbour of Dieppe, laden deep with food, building materials, implements, guns, and ammunition, including about one hundred and fifty pieces of ordnance for the forts at the trading-posts.
Astor's mercantile career was that vast and brilliant enterprise which Washington Irving has commemorated in "Astoria." No other single individual has ever set on foot a scheme so extensive, so difficult, and so costly as this; nor has any such enterprise been carried out with such sustained energy and perseverance. To establish a line of trading-posts from St.
A hundred years before the white men set up their trading-posts on the Arkansas and Platte, a band of mountain hunters made a descent on what they took to be a small company of plainsmen, but who proved to be the enemy in force, and who, in turn, drove the Utes for the aggressors were of that tribe into the hills.
Muskets and steel traps enabled them to obtain many more furs. Thus the Indians were soon furnished with an abundant supply of fire-arms, and became unerring marksmen. Year after year the returns from the trading-posts became more valuable; and the explorations were pushed farther and farther into the interior.
By luck or pluck, by trusted honesty or sublime assurance, and with little aid from his government, he soon outdistanced Frenchman and Dutchman, Spaniard and Portuguese, in the area and richness of the regions over which his flag floated and in which his trading-posts or his settlements were established.
On the west coast, especially, where the Mediterranean peoples, from the Phenicians to the Portuguese, have had trading-posts for over two thousand years, the harm done to such seaboard towns as Tangier, Rabat and Casablanca is hard to estimate.
Their trails spread still farther into the Western wilderness. They set up trading-posts in the very region which the English settlers expected to occupy in the due process of their advance.
The savages were now sought out in their prairie homes, and the company began to set up trading-posts in the interior, all the way from Rainy Lake to Edmonton House on the North Saskatchewan. Such was the situation of affairs in the fur-bearing country when the Earl of Selkirk had his vision of a rich prairie home for the desolate Highlanders.
The natives in those times were numerous and warlike; the trading-posts were isolated and far apart; and in the summer season, when the managers proceeded to the dépôts, with the greater part of their people, were entirely at the mercy of the natives, who would not have failed to take advantage of such opportunities to avenge their wrongs, had they suffered any.
What young man of our race would not gladly give a year of his life to roll backward the scroll of time for five decades and live that year in the romantic bygone-days of the Wild West; to see the great Missouri while the Buffalo pastured on its banks, while big game teemed in sight and the red man roamed and hunted, unchecked by fence or hint of white man's rule; or, when that rule was represented only by scattered trading-posts, hundreds of miles apart, and at best the traders could exchange the news by horse or canoe and months of lonely travel?
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