The North West Company meanwhile had sent young Simon Fraser up into the mountains to discover the true course of the river which Mackenzie had left because it seemed to go south instead of west. It was supposed to be the head waters of the Columbia. Fraser and a brother Scot, John Stuart, began by building little forts for trade. One of these, where the mysterious river was joined by the Nechaco, he called Fort George, after the King. There he embarked on one of the most perilous voyages ever undertaken. With Stuart, and Jules Maurice Quesnel, nineteen voyageurs and two Indians, in four birch-bark canoes, he trusted himself to a torrent of which he knew nothing except that Indians living on its banks declared no man could ever get through alive. Running rapids where the chances were ten to one for death, clinging with heavy loads on their backs to the precipitous walls of canyons when the raging torrent absolutely compelled a portage, building new bark canoes when the old were smashed beyond repair, those brave men came out at last on smooth water where the tides of the Pacific rose and fell. Near where they landed, the city of New Westminster now stands. They had explored the whole length of the Fraser River, which to-day thrills even railway travellers in the safety of an observation car. * * * * * The dangers conquered by these brave young men were great enough; but, after all, it was only the grim force of nature they had to fight as they broke their way through the mountains, with some little trouble now and then from timid guides and suspicious bands of Indians. Back on the plains and woodlands in the heart of the continent, there was danger of another kind, and a most disgraceful one. The two companies were practically at war. In a “civilized” land, with the law wide awake, unscrupulous competitors have to be satisfied with slower methods of ruining each other. In the wild west of our fathers’ time the voice of civilization was feeble, and law was laughed at. The passion of gain was free to indulge its natural tendency to crime. Parties of rival traders, meeting in solitudes where no witnesses were to be feared, fought out their differences with gun and hatchet. All the trickery of war was brought into play as well as its violence. At some points both companies had trading posts, and the rival traders now and then entertained each other in quite a neighborly way. Once the Hudson’s Bay men, having discovered that an Indian hunting party had just returned to its camp forty miles away, invited the Nor’-westers to a dance, and kept them revelling while four Hudson’s Bay sledges dashed away over the snow and bought up the whole of the catch. Next day the Nor’-westers heard of the same hunting party and made the same long journey, hoping to do a big trade, but came back, of course, empty-handed and full of wrath. [Illustration]