Many of these people were trappers and hunters. The fur trade was yearly becoming a greater business; hundreds, despite danger or privation, were eager to pursue wherever it might lead. The pressure of civilised life with its rigid financial demands was, and is, so intense that whenever a channel of escape opens, the flow through it is as natural as that of water through a puncture in the bottom of the kettle. There were large profits to be made in furs, though it was usually the organiser and business manager who reaped the full rewards. The Pacific coast offered in this line brilliant prospects, and American vessels pushed around Cape Horn and sailed up the western shores to secure a share of the trade of that region. Spain, Great Britain, and Russia were also active there in the fur business, as well as in that of "claiming." The Americans then had no claims in that quarter. The year following the agreement on the western boundary of the United States, 1784, found a number of Montreal merchants organising with the determination of participating in the rich returns of the fur trade; a business where a penny whistle was traded for a gold dollar. These men of Montreal formed an association which they entitled the North-west Company, consolidating with it a number of small rival concerns which for some years had been operating separately, and often disastrously, for they were frequently at war. The North-west Company intended to occupy the country beyond Lake Superior and oppose there the increasing power of the Hudson Bay Company. One of the men taken into this partnership was Alexander Mackenzie. He was the man for the hour. He proceeded to the far shores of the Saskatchewan, where posts had been established beyond those of the Verendryes and earlier Frenchmen, whose former presence was now marked only by the names they had applied to the natural features of the country. But though the Verendryes were forgotten, the _Voyageur_ was still a chief factor in travel and in trapping operations, and the _chansons_ yet echoed through the forests of that wild landscape, where, in the words of Butler,[57] "there are rivers whose single lengths roll through twice a thousand miles of shoreland; prairies over which a rider can steer for months without resting his gaze on aught save the dim verge of the ever-shifting horizon; mountains rent by rivers, ice-topped, glacier seared, impassable; forests whose sombre pines darken a region half as large as Europe; sterile, treeless wilds, whose 400,000 square miles lie spread in awful desolation.... In summer, a land of sound, a land echoing with the voices of birds, the ripple of running water, the mournful music of the waving pine branch; in winter, a land of silence, a land hushed to its inmost depths by the weight of ice, the thick falling snow, the intense rigour of a merciless cold."