Much depended on those same ships reaching their destination. Starvation would confront the officers and servants in the country and the want of the returns in England during those early days of the venture would have been a serious setback to their credit. While the ships were in the roadstead unloading and loading it was an anxious time to the captain and the officer ashore for as the work had to be done by lighters (the ship lying three miles from the land) there was always the danger of a strong wind springing up. In such events the boats scurried ashore while the ship slipped her cable and put to sea till fair weather. In parting with their charter to the Canadian Government the company reserved certain acreages about each and every one of their forts and posts besides two sections in each township from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains and from the international boundary line to the northern edge of the Fertile Belt. These reserves of land sold to the incoming settlers as the country is filling up is a great source of revenue to the share holders and are becoming more and more valuable each succeeding year. Where most of the old prairie posts stood in the old days, the company now have "Sale Shops" for the whites and at these places they are successfully meeting competition, by the superiority and cheapness of the goods they supply. In old Canada the fur trade had always been the principal commerce of the country and after the French regime several Scotch merchants of Montreal prosecuted it with more vigor than heretofore. This they did under the name of "The Northwest Company." Their agents and "Couriers des Bois" were ever pushing westward and had posts strung from Ottawa to the Rocky Mountains and all the pelts from that immense country were brought yearly to the headquarters in Montreal. The Hudson's Bay Company after having inhabited all the territory that they could rightly claim under their charter, began to oppose the Northwest Company in the country they had in a way discovered. The Hudson's Bay Company after getting out of the Bay found the Northwest Company's people trading on the Red, Assiniboine and Saskatchewan, all rivers that they could claim by right of their charter seeing they all drained into Hudson's Bay and then began one of the keenest and most bloody commercial warfares in history. Might was right and wherever furs were found the strongest party, for the time being, took them. Retaliation was the unwritten law of the country and what was this week a Hudson's Bay post was next week occupied by a party of Northwesters or vice versa. There is hardly a place in what is now the peaceful and law abiding Manitoba and the western provinces but what, if it could tell the tale, had witnessed at some time in its early history sanguinary conflicts between the two powerful and rival companies.