As early as 1641 two Jesuits, Jogues and Raymbault, extended their missionary labours to the shores of Lake Superior. The main mission, La Pointe, now Bayfield, on the south shore, was established in 1670, and the Indians remained during French rule entirely under their influence. At the period of the conquest the trade of the French disappeared, for they had no longer the power to visit the country, and by degrees it fell into British hands. On the one side, the Hudson’s Bay Company, from the north, pushed onwards to control it, for a period with success; on the other, parties were started from Montreal to obtain a share of the great profits which were made, the value of which was fully known. The French trade had been carried on under admirable regulations. Liquor, so ruinous to the Indian, was withheld from him. The enterprising Montreal trader introduced it, regardless of consequences: hence the orgies, the drunkenness and the quarrels which were a scandal even to the wilderness. To intensify this condition of affairs, some Montreal merchants entered into a partnership in 1787, and formed the celebrated North-West Trading Company. It then consisted of twenty-three partners, with a staff of agents, factors, clerks, guides, interpreters, voyageurs, amounting in all to two thousand persons. If the individual trader disappeared from the field, there were two powerful companies remaining, who had to operate in the same field side by side, and there sprang up the fiercest and most embittered rivalry. I shall hereafter refer more definitely to this contention. This state of things was leading to the common ruin of the two companies, when, in 1821, after forty-three years of competition, discord and disaster, the two formed one corporation under the title of the Hudson’s Bay Company. As I looked upon the old fort on the site of its departed greatness, I thought of the many stirring scenes which it witnessed before and after the beginning of this century. The stone store houses, once so well filled with every requirement, erected around the sides of a square, are now empty, containing a few boxes of rusty flint muskets and bayonets, with chests of old papers, dating back, some of them, more than a hundred years. The buildings will all soon be unroofed, to make way for a railway station. A year ago I saw two old cannon in the front of the courtyard. On that occasion I believe they fired their last salute. They are now removed. The old rickety flagstaff still remains, and so soon as it is known that a member of the Company of Adventurers is within the precincts the flag is run up as a salute, a service probably for the last time performed at Fort William. In a few months the whole scene will be changed. There is still an agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company in charge, Mr. Richardson, whose complexion of bronze tells of many years of exposure; and his attendant, an Indian, who has been attached to the fort for forty years.