The idleness of which Thompson complained was, however, to end before long. With the arrival of the annual ship in 1785, orders came that the young apprentice should proceed to York factory, the principal dépôt of the Company, situated near the mouth of the Hayes river, one hundred and fifty miles further up the Bay. South of the Churchill, the rim of granite which hems the coast recedes for some miles inland, leaving a vast waste of marshy alluvial between the hills and the water line. Trees there are none, and the monotony of the landscape is relieved only by boulders which the ice has scattered over the face of the land.

To journey on foot the length of this swamp, with two drunken Indians alone for company, was enough to test the courage and reliance of a boy of fifteen. Equipped with but a single blanket to protect him from the chill of the September nights, the young David was ferried across the river and put ashore on the south bank. The day was fine; but the Indians had been given their usual gallon of grog on leaving the fort, and they soon reduced themselves to a drunken stupor. A night in the open, however, restored them to their senses. The next morning the party made an early start, marching till evening without breakfast or dinner. During the day, the Indians had shot a goose and three ducks. When they finally came to something like a dry spot by the bank of a stream, the wild fowl were hastily cooked and eaten; and the wearied travellers, wrapped in their blankets, flung themselves on the ground to sleep.

Day after day, they trudged along the beach at high water mark, always wet and muddy. Innumerable creeks which drained the swamp crossed their path and interrupted their progress. Finally they came to the mighty Kissiskatchewan or Nelson river, on the north bank of which the Indians had laid up a canoe. Paddling across to the south shore, they crossed the tongue of low land that separates the mouth of the Nelson from that of the Hayes river; and were at last in York.

The governor to whom Thompson reported was the notorious Humphrey Marten. This old tyrant was now in his twenty-fourth year of service with the Company. Surrounded by his numerous native wives and a horde of half-breed children, he ruled the fort with a rod of iron. The Indians who visited the factory he would beat most cruelly, sending them away with revenge burning in their hearts. In the fort, his subordinates felt the weight of his unbridled temper; and they bowed to his brutality only because they feared his vindictiveness. Amid such surroundings and under such a taskmaster, Thompson passed the following year. He kept the accounts of the factory in his neat handwriting, and joined with the rest of the staff in the hunting necessary to supply the fort with food during the winter.

CHAPTER II
HE FINDS HIS MÉTIER

His first two years of service brought nothing but disappointment and disillusion to David Thompson. Vaguely sensible of his capacities, he was conscious of nothing except that as yet he had been given no scope to realize them. But in the summer of 1786 a new and important chapter opened in his life. Fitted out with a trunk, a handkerchief, shoes, shirts, a gun, powder, and a tin cup, he was included in a party of forty-six "Englishmen" who left for the interior under the leadership of Robert Longmore to establish trading posts on the Saskatchewan river to the west of those already occupied by the Company.

For over one hundred years from the time when the merry monarch had vested in them a monopoly of trading rights in the vast territory whose waters drain into Hudson Bay, the "adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay" had maintained their factories on the coast, and allowed the Indians from the interior to make their way to them for trade. Great rivers flowed from all directions to the Bay; but the courses of these rivers were still unknown to the map makers of the British Admiralty in 1784, the year in which David Thompson landed at Churchill. For Hudson Bay is encircled from Labrador on the north-east to the Arctic on the north-west by a giant horse shoe of Archaean rock, most of it clothed with the dense northern forest; and so long as the red men were willing to make the tedious journey up and down the rivers, the slumbering giant on the Bay was content to accept the annual tribute of furs which they flung at his feet. Each September, when the ships from London arrived, the factories were crammed with pelts that meant a fortune on the markets of the Continent; and the traders eagerly awaited a fresh supply of guns, axes, and kettles for the Indian, and awls and beads for his squaw, as well as the fire-water which made him the anxious though reluctant slave of the great white chiefs on the Bay.

But the monopoly of trade to which the Company laid claim had not been accepted without challenge. On the eastern face of North America, the St. Lawrence river points like a finger to the heart of the continent, and from the head of Lake Superior it is possible, by a comparatively easy portage, to cross the height of land and descend through Rainy lake, the Lake of the Woods, and the Winnipeg river to Lake Winnipeg. Lake Winnipeg forms a vast collecting basin for the waters of the interior, before they finally discharge through the Nelson river into Hudson Bay. Thus it affords communication south and west by way of the Red and Assiniboine rivers through the prairie country of southern Manitoba, the Dakotas, and Minnesota; while, from the north west corner of the lake, the Saskatchewan carries the traveller to its sources in the Rockies. While therefore the English had waited for the Indians to bring their furs down to them on the Bay, the French from Quebec had pushed their way along these waters to the heart of the hunting grounds, and the advance of these gallant adventurers was marked by a string of forts that extended from Dulhut's post at the head of Lake Superior to Fort La Jonquière near the site of Calgary.

The fall of Quebec in 1759 had brought with it the destruction of the organized French fur trade, and the traders were scattered through the wilds. But new groups of adventurers, mainly of Scotch descent, swarmed westward from their headquarters at Montreal, and penetrated into the wilderness further than the French had ever gone. By the year 1772, the Montreal traders had crossed from the Saskatchewan to the still more northerly Churchill river, and cut the line of communication ordinarily used by the Indians of Lake Athabaska in their long journey to Hudson Bay. The consolidation of the rival interests into one great firm—the North West Company—was accomplished in 1784 at the very time of Thompson's arrival in the West. This achievement brought vastly increased strength to the Montreal traders by mitigating the evils of their fierce competition. Thus the Hudson's Bay Company was threatened with the loss of its fur supply at the same moment as the French war interrupted its convoys, and La Pérouse swept the Bay, destroying the posts at Churchill, York, and Albany.