[78] Upon the new post was bestowed the name of Cumberland House.
[79] The following were the prices paid by the Company about 1780, at its inland posts:—
| A gun | 20 | Beaver skins. |
| A strand blanket | 10 | do. |
| A white do. | 8 | do. |
| An axe of one pound weight | 3 | do. |
| Half a pint of gunpowder | 1 | do. |
| Ten balls | 1 | do. |
The principal profits accrued from the sale of knives, beads, flint, steels, awls and other small articles. Tobacco fetched one beaver skin per foot of "Spencer's Twist," and rum "not very strong," two beaver skins per bottle.
[80] "What folly," asks one of the Company's servants, "could be more egregious than to erect a fort of such extent, strength and expense and only allow thirty-nine men to defend it?"
[81] An account of Hearne's journey was found in MS. among the papers of the Governor, and La Pérouse declares in his memoirs that Hearne was very pressing that it should be returned to him as his private property. "The goodness of La Pérouse's heart induced him to yield to this urgent solicitation, and he returned the MS. to him on the express condition, however, that he should print and publish it immediately on his arrival in England." "Notwithstanding this," observes Mr. Fitzgerald, "Hearne's travels did not appear until 1795, i.e., twenty-three years after they were performed." This gentleman, so distinguished in his zeal to prove a case against the Company, evidently overlooks the circumstance of the gist of travels having been issued in pamphlet form in 1773 and again in 1778-80. The volume of 1795 was merely an application—the product of Hearne's leisure upon retirement.
[82] White Man's Lake.
[83] Of David Thompson we get a portrait from Mr. H. H. Bancroft. He was, he says, "of an entirely different order of man from the orthodox fur-trader. Tall and fine looking, with sandy complexion, with large features, deep-set studious eyes, high forehead and broad shoulders, the intellectual was set upon the physical. His deeds have never been trumpeted as have those of some of the others; but in the westward explorations of the North-West Company, no man performed more valuable service or estimated his achievements more modestly. Unhappily his last days were not as pleasant as fell to the lot of some of the worn out members of the Company. He retired, almost blind, to Lachine House, once the headquarters of the Company, where he was met with in 1831 in a very decrepit condition."
[85] To exhibit anew the exaggeration common to the acquisition of new possessions, I may observe that Shelekoff reported that he had subjected to the crown of Russia, "fifty thousand men in the Island of Kodiak alone." But Lisiansky, who took a prominent part in the Russian Company, remarks, in 1805, that "the population of the island, when compared with its size, is very small." After the "minutest research" at that time he found it amounted to only four thousand souls.