What with struggles for power and Indian wars, one might think that the few hundred English colonists of Quebec and Montreal had all they could do. Not so: their quarrels with the French Catholics and fights with the Indians are merely incidental to the main aim of their lives, to the one object that has brought them stampeding to Canada as to a new gold field, namely, quick way to wealth; and the only quick way to wealth was by the fur trade. In the wilderness of the Up Country wander some two or three thousand cast-off wood rovers of the old French fur trade. As the prodigals come down the Ottawa, down the Detroit, down the St. Lawrence, the English and Scotch merchants of Montreal and Quebec meet them. Mighty names those merchants have in history now,--McGillivrays and MacKenzies and McGills and Henrys and MacLeods and MacGregors and Ogilvies and MacTavishes and Camerons,--but at this period of the game the most of them were what we to-day would call petty merchants or peddlers. In their storehouses--small, one-story, frame affairs--were packed goods for trade. With these goods they quickly outfitted the French bushrover--$3000 worth to a canoe--and packed the fellow back to the wilderness to trade on shares before any rival firm could hire him. Within five years of Wolfe's victory in 1759 all the French bushrovers of the Up Country had been reëngaged by merchants of Montreal and Quebec. {293} [Illustration: MONTREAL (From a contemporary print)] Then imperceptible changes came,--the changes that work so silently they are like destiny. Because it is unsafe to let the rascal bushrovers and voyageurs go off by themselves with $3000 worth to the canoe load, the merchants began to accompany them westward. "Bourgeois," the voyageurs call their outfitters. Then, because success in fur trade must be kept secret, the merchants cease to have their men come down to Montreal. They meet them with the goods halfway, at La Vérendrye's old stamping ground on Lake Superior, first at the place called Grand Portage, then, when the United States boundary is changed in 1783, at Kaministiquia, or modern Fort William, named after William McGillivray. Pontiac's War puts a stop to the new trade, but by 1766 the merchants are west again. Henry goes up the Saskatchewan to the Forks, and comes back with such wealth of furs he retires a rich magnate of Montreal. The Frobisher brothers strike for new hunting ground. So do Peter Pond and Bostonnais Pangman, and the MacKenzies, Alexander {294} and Roderick. Instead of following up the Saskatchewan, they strike from Lake Winnipeg northward for Churchill River and Athabasca, and they bring out furs that transform those peddlers into merchant princes. A little later the chief buyer of the Montreal furs is one John Jacob Astor of New York. Then another change. Rivalry hurts fur trade. Especially do different prices demoralize the Indians. The Montreal merchants pool their capital and