[Illustration: In the Heart of the Wilderness—Southern Utah. Photograph by F. S. Dellenbaugh.] In 1669 the British formed a settlement in the shape of a fur-trading post on the coast of Hudson Bay. This was the first of a series of establishments founded by "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay," a company which, because of its masterly control, wise management, general fairness to the natives, and complete efficiency, was highly successful and of wide and long-continued influence. [Illustration: Great Falls of the Missouri. From _The Trail of Lewis and Clark_. O. D. Wheeler.] As the eighteenth century opened, the French seemed to be in the lead. They claimed and controlled Canada and the greater part of the Mississippi valley, and by 1710 there were many French colonies and posts on the banks of the Mississippi. Eight years later Bienville founded New Orleans, and two after that Antoine Crozat received from the King a grant of the privilege of exclusive trade in Louisiana, a privilege which he relinquished in 1717, when it was taken by the Compagnie d'Orient, or, as it also was called, Law's Mississippi Company. It was so held for fifteen years, when it was governed as a French province. By 1722 the French had established a fort on the Missouri called Orleans, about two hundred and fifty miles above the mouth, by some authorities said to have been the result of the Spanish expedition under Villazur, which was destroyed, according to some reports, in an attempt to annihilate the Missouris, who were friendly to the French. But the Spaniards claimed that the French instigated the attack upon their 1720 expedition to the Platte; and the French, it appears, claimed that the Spanish were striving to wipe out their allies. There were now open into the interior two great water highways, one by the St. Lawrence, the other by the Mississippi-Missouri. Transportation was almost exclusively by boat, hence the waterways were seldom departed from for any great distance, and the immense tract lying west of the Missouri and upper Mississippi was still an unknown country. From time to time rumours were repeated of a huge river which flowed towards the Sea of the West, but the traders did not always heed the tales of the natives. As early as 1716 there was a definite statement that "towards the source (of the Mississippi) there is in the highlands a river that leads to the western ocean." Whether some Frenchman had made the journey or not is unknown, but it is not improbable that a daring _coureur de bois_ had slipped along from tribe to tribe and finally arrived at the Pacific.