For over one hundred years from the time when the merry monarch had vested in them a monopoly of trading rights in the vast territory whose waters drain into Hudson Bay, the "adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay" had maintained their factories on the coast, and allowed the Indians from the interior to make their way to them for trade. Great rivers flowed from all directions to the Bay; but the courses of these rivers were still unknown to the map makers of the British Admiralty in 1784, the year in which David Thompson landed at Churchill. For Hudson Bay is encircled from Labrador on the north-east to the Arctic on the north-west by a giant horse shoe of Archaean rock, most of it clothed with the dense northern forest; and so long as the red men were willing to make the tedious journey up and down the rivers, the slumbering giant on the Bay was content to accept the annual tribute of furs which they flung at his feet. Each September, when the ships from London arrived, the factories were crammed with pelts that meant a fortune on the markets of the Continent; and the traders eagerly awaited a fresh supply of guns, axes, and kettles for the Indian, and awls and beads for his squaw, as well as the fire-water which made him the anxious though reluctant slave of the great white chiefs on the Bay. But the monopoly of trade to which the Company laid claim had not been accepted without challenge. On the eastern face of North America, the St. Lawrence river points like a finger to the heart of the continent, and from the head of Lake Superior it is possible, by a comparatively easy portage, to cross the height of land and descend through Rainy lake, the Lake of the Woods, and the Winnipeg river to Lake Winnipeg. Lake Winnipeg forms a vast collecting basin for the waters of the interior, before they finally discharge through the Nelson river into Hudson Bay. Thus it affords communication south and west by way of the Red and Assiniboine rivers through the prairie country of southern Manitoba, the Dakotas, and Minnesota; while, from the north west corner of the lake, the Saskatchewan carries the traveller to its sources in the Rockies. While therefore the English had waited for the Indians to bring their furs down to them on the Bay, the French from Quebec had pushed their way along these waters to the heart of the hunting grounds, and the advance of these gallant adventurers was marked by a string of forts that extended from Dulhut's post at the head of Lake Superior to Fort La Jonquière near the site of Calgary.