Under French rule, fur trade had been regulated by license. Under English rule was no restriction. First to launch out from Montreal with a cargo of goods for trade, was Alexander Henry, senior, in 1760. From the Michilimackinac region and westward, Henry in ten years, from 1765 to 1775, brought back to Montreal such a wealth of furs, that peltry trade became a fever. No capital was needed but the capital of boundless daring. Montreal merchants advanced goods for trade. One went with the canoes as partner and commander. Three thousand dollars worth of goods constituted a load. Frenchmen were engaged as hunters and voyageurs—eight to a canoe, and before the opening of the century, as many as five hundred canoes yearly passed up the Ottawa from Montreal for the _Pays d’en Haut_, west of Lake Superior, ten and twenty canoes in a brigade. In this way, Thomas Curry had gone from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, and Lake Winnipeg up the Saskatchewan, in 1766, as far as the Forks, bribing that renegade Louis Primo, to steal the furs bought by Cocking for the Hudson’s Bay, and to lead the brigade on down to Montreal. One voyage sufficed to yield Curry $50,000 clear, a sum that was considered a fortune in those days, and enabled him to retire. The fur fever became an epidemic, a mania. James Finlay of Montreal, in 1771, pushed up the Saskatchewan beyond the Forks, or what is now Prince Albert. Todd, McGill & Company outfitted Joseph and Benjamin Frobisher for a dash north of the Saskatchewan in 1772-5, where, by the luckiest chance in the world, they met the Chippewyan and Athabasca Indians on their way to Churchill with furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Frobishers struck up friendship with “English Chief”—leader of the Indian brigades—plied the argument of rum night and day, bade the Indians ignore their debts to the English company, offered to outfit them for the next year’s hunt and bagged the entire cargo of furs—such an enormous quantity that they could take down only half the cargo that year and had to leave the other half cached, to the everlasting credit of the Indian’s honesty and discredit of the white man’s. Henceforth, this post was known as Portage de Traite. It led directly from the Saskatchewan to the Athabasca and became a famous meeting place. Portage “of the Stretched Frog” the Indians called it, for the Frobishers had been so keen on the trade that they had taught the Indians how to stretch skins, and the Indians had responded in mischief by tacking a stretched frog skin on the door of the cabin. Pushing yet farther toward Athabasca, the Frobisher brothers built another post norwestward, Isle à la Crosse, on an island where the Indians met for the sport of lacrosse.