skirling, while he as lord ascendant of the mighty mountains shook hands with the Indians and treated them to tobacco. Simpson passed south to Vancouver. New Year’s Day, 1829, the clerks of St. James determined to punish the Carriers for their raid. Bounteous was the régale of rum dealt out. When the Carriers lay drunk, out sallied the voyageurs and gave the Indians such a pummeling as stirred up bad blood for a year. Douglas’ life was no longer safe in Caledonia. In 1830, he left Fraser River to join McLoughlin in Oregon. He had come to New Caledonia, raw, impulsive, violent in his forcefulness to succeed. He went down to Oregon, still young, but a drilled disciplinarian of life’s hard knocks--reserved to a fault, deliberate to a degree, cautious and tactful in a way that must have delighted McLoughlin’s heart. When Connolly left New Caledonia for Montreal, where he rose to eminence, there came as Chief Factor, Peter Skene Ogden, fresh from leading the southern brigades. * * * * * McLoughlin needed Douglas in Oregon. The Company, that had begun two centuries before with one little fort on a frozen sea, had not only stretched its tentacles across the continent but was reaching out to Hawaii, to Mexico, to Alaska. And this galvanizing energy resulted directly from the energy of that little man, George Simpson. “If” is a word that opens the door of lost opportunities. _If_ Sir George Simpson had been seconded in his aims by the Governing Board of the Hudson’s Bay Company; and _if_ those gentlemen who lived fat on their fur dividends had mended their ignorance sufficiently to know what Sir George was driving at; and _if_ the Company had bought over the bonded debts of Mexico--as Simpson advised--and traded the debts for the grant of California to the English; and _if_ the Company had been less niggardly and paid down promptly the $30,000 asked for Russia’s holdings in California--_if_ all these things, then, one wonders whether the southern bounds of British Columbia to-day would be the northern bounds of modern Mexico. But man’s blunders are destiny’s plays; and the opportunities missed by one nation the prizes seized by another. Far reaching and statesmanlike in grasp were the schemes McLoughlin had in hand. Baranoff, the famous old governor of Alaska, had died just a few years before the union of the two English companies, and from the time of his death the grip of the Russian Fur Company slackened on Alaska. Naval officers came out as governors. Naval officers knew nothing of the tricks of the fur trade. Returns to the St. Petersburg company began to decrease. Was Alaska worth holding? That was the question Russians were asking.