The work I here present to the public is necessarily of a rambling and somewhat disjointed nature, comprising various expeditions and adventures by land and sea. The facts, however, will prove to be linked and banded together by one grand scheme, devised and conducted by a master spirit; one set of characters, also, continues throughout, appearing occasionally, though sometimes at long intervals, and the whole enterprise winds up by a regular catastrophe; so that the work, without any labored attempt at artificial construction, actually possesses much of that unity so much sought after in works of fiction, and considered so important to the interest of every history. WASHINGTON IRVING CHAPTER I. Objects of American Enterprise.--Gold Hunting and Fur Trading.--Their Effect on Colonization.--Early French Canadian Settlers.--Ottawa and Huron Hunters.--An Indian Trading Camp. Coureurs Des Bois, or Rangers of the Woods.--Their Roaming Life.--Their Revels and Excesses.--Licensed Traders. Missionaries.--Trading Posts.--Primitive French Canadian Merchant.--His Establishment and Dependents.--British Canadian Fur Merchant.--Origin of the Northwest Company.--Its Constitution.--Its Internal Trade.--A Candidate for the Company.--Privations in the Wilderness.--Northwest Clerks. Northwest Partners.--Northwest Nabobs.--Feudal Notions in the Forests.--The Lords of the Lakes.--Fort William.--Its Parliamentary Hall and Banqueting Room.--Wassailing in the Wilderness. TWO leading objects of commercial gain have given birth to wide and daring enterprise in the early history of the Americas; the precious metals of the South, and the rich peltries of the North. While the fiery and magnificent Spaniard, inflamed with the mania for gold, has extended his discoveries and conquests over those brilliant countries scorched by the ardent sun of the tropics, the adroit and buoyant Frenchman, and the cool and calculating Briton, have pursued the less splendid, but no less lucrative, traffic in furs amidst the hyperborean regions of the Canadas, until they have advanced even within the Arctic Circle. These two pursuits have thus in a manner been the pioneers and precursors of civilization. Without pausing on the borders, they have penetrated at once, in defiance of difficulties and dangers, to the heart of savage countries: laying open the hidden secrets of the wilderness; leading the way to remote regions of beauty and fertility that might have remained unexplored for ages, and beckoning after them the slow and pausing steps of agriculture and civilization.