These were the prices at the southern forts, Albany and Moose River, under competition. The Company charged higher prices in the north, as they frankly said—“The [a]French Raids on the Bay] French being not so near these places, and therefore can’t interfere with the Company’s trade so much as they do at Albany and Moose River, where they undersell the Company, and by that means carry off the most valuable furs.”
When the last skin had been turned into the store, and the last counter had been exchanged for British goods, the tribesmen vanished away into the wilderness, and the piles of furs were sorted and packed for the ocean voyage. Every summer a single London ship sailed into the Bay, discharged her cargo of provisions for the white men and merchandise for the red, filled her hold with the precious “peltries,” and sped away home before the early winter barred the straits with ice.
If the Company had only had the Indians to reckon with, it might have gone on gathering the furry harvest of the West with imperial ease. But, as we have seen, there were other white men in America who had no notion of submitting to such a monopoly. The King of France claimed as his own the territory that King Charles had given away. Several times before the close of the seventeenth century the French raided the Bay and captured or destroyed the English forts, coming overland from Canada and also sailing round through Hudson Straits. In 1697, France and England being at war, five ships swooped down upon Fort York, at the mouth of Nelson River, and captured the place after defeating three English vessels. A peace treaty, signed that same year, left England with only one little foot-hold on Hudson Bay, at Fort Albany. It was sixteen years before another treaty, at the end of another war, restored the whole of the north land to the English King and Company. [a]Outlaws of River and Forest]
There was no end, even then, to the furious competition of the French fur-buyers. If it had been only the official French Company, that would have been bad enough; but swarms of independent French traders were bidding against both the French Company and the English.
These men were outlaws. Flogging, and branding with red-hot irons, were the mildest of the penalties decreed against the “free traders” by their own French Government. Yet the temptation of fortunes to be made by fur proved stronger than all the risks. Hundreds of young men took to the woods, and spent their lives roaming from one Indian camp to another, living as the Indians lived, and buying up in advance the skins which should have gone down to the Company at Quebec. At one time, when the whole population of the French colony was only about 10,000, as many as 800 men were away in the forest, defying the King and his officers. These “coureurs de bois,” or forest-runners, were protected not only by the forest hiding them, but often by the very officials who were supposed to be hunting them down. Many officials were quite ready to take big bribes from the outlaws. The Governor himself went in for unlawful trading on a large scale, in secret partnership with outlaws who smuggled the beaver-skins over to the English colonists in the south.
In the summer of 1731, a French army captain named Pierre de la Vérendrye—Canadian born, he was—set out from Montreal for the West. Like most of the earlier explorers, French or English, he was keen to discover an outlet to the Western Ocean. The Governor gave his full consent—but he would give nothing more. [a]Vérendrye and His Sons] Some of the merchants were then persuaded to “stake” the expedition, supplying Vérendrye with goods to trade for furs in all the unknown lands he was to discover. The captain took with him his three sons, the youngest only sixteen, and a nephew as second in command, besides a dozen soldiers and a band of Indians.
It was a long and tragic journey. At the western end of Lake of the Woods, Vérendrye built a fort among the Crees. Some of these Indians one day fired on a party of Sioux, and then pretended that the French had done it. In revenge, the Sioux set upon a French detachment, on its way to fetch up supplies from Michilimackinac, and killed every man, including a priest and the explorer’s eldest son. The merchants at home in Canada were grumbling because the cargoes sent down to them were not as large as they had expected, and jealous rivals falsely accused Vérendrye of keeping some of the furs for himself. More than once he had to go back east before he could get enough goods for trading.
At last, in the February of 1737, he got as far as the south end of Lake Winnipeg, where his sons had already built a fort. The year after, he made his way up the Red River to its junction with the Assiniboine and established a trading post—Fort Rouge, now part of the city of Winnipeg. Pressing on to the West, he built another fort at Portage la Prairie, where Indians bound for Hudson Bay used to lift their canoes from the Assiniboine for the overland carry to Lake Manitoba.
Surely the ocean could not be far away now! Montreal was fifteen hundred miles behind him in the East—how could he know that the ocean of his dreams was still nearly as far again to the West? The Assiniboines knew nothing of such a sea, but they had heard tales [a]First Sight of the Rockies] of it through the Mandans, farther south. Southward, accordingly, the captain marched for a month and a half across the plains, till he found the Mandans on the Missouri River. But even they could only tell him a vague story of white men in armor who were said to have built stone houses beside salt water, somewhere away in the south-west—the Spaniards, perhaps, on the Pacific coast of Mexico.