Joseph Robson went out to Hudson Bay in 1733, as a stone-mason, and was employed in the construction of Fort Churchill. He appears to have had disagreements with the governor, and returned to England in 1736. In 1744, he was again sent out as surveyor and superintendent of buildings at York factory, and explored the Nelson River. Returning to England in 1747, he testified on behalf of the Company in 1749, before the House of Commons committee; but some years later published a work, _An Account of Six Years’ Residence in Hudson’s Bay_ (London, 1752), in which he animadverts against the treatment of servants and Indians by the Company’s governors. Long attempts to controvert him in this paragraph; but on p. 170 he uses his testimony in favor of the management of the Company.—ED. Footnote 83: For the history of the formation of the North West Company, see preface, _ante_, p. 16.—ED. Footnote 84: The Cristinaux (Kiristinou, Killistinoe) Indians, now known as Crees, are Algonquian tribes who have always been associated with the Assiniboins (Assinipoils), a Siouan tribe derived early from the Yankton Dakotas. Their habitat has been the wilderness between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay, and the land to the west as far as the Assiniboin and Saskatchewan rivers. They were well known to the early French explorers (see _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, xvi), and were the chief Indians with whom the Hudson’s Bay Company traded. They still number over twelve thousand. See Henry, _Travels_ (Bain ed.), p. 249.—ED. Footnote 85: This was the work of Edward Umfreville, _Present State of Hudson’s Bay_ (London, 1790), written with a view of opposing the continuance of the Company’s charter, and exposing the practices of the officers. Umfreville had been in the service of the Company from 1771 to 1782.—ED. Footnote 86: On this subject of courtship and marriage, see also Grant, “Sauteux Indians,” in Masson, _Bourgeois_, ii, pp. 319–321.—ED. Footnote 87: The British fort at Mackinac was still upon the south shore of the strait, where Mackinaw City now stands; but the governor, Patrick Sinclair, had already begun the erection of a new fort on the island, to which the establishment moved in the spring of 1781. See “Story of Mackinac,” in Thwaites’s _How George Rogers Clark won the Northwest_.—ED. Footnote 88: For a contemporary account of this well-known incident, see Henry, _Travels_, chaps. 8, 9, and 10.—ED. Footnote 89: The “Poes” were the Potawatomi Indians (called Poux by the French). For their history and that of Fort St. Joseph, see vol. i of this series, pp. 115, 117.—ED. Footnote 90: