The explorations that had begun when Radisson came to Hudson Bay in his canoe from Lake Superior, were now completed by the Company’s boats going down the MacKenzie to the Arctic and down the Yukon to Bering Sea. How big was the empire won from savagery by fur trader? Within a few thousand miles of the same size as Europe. Spain won a Mexico and a Peru from savagery; but her soldiers’ cruelty outdid the worst horrors of Indian warfare, steeped every mile of the forward march with the blood of the innocent natives, and reduced those natives to a state of slavery that was a hell upon earth. The United States won an empire from savagery, but she did it by an ever-shifting frontier, that was invariably known from Tennessee to Oregon, as “the Bloody Ground.” Behind that shifting frontier was the American pioneer with his sharp-shooter. In front of that frontier was the Indian with his tomahawk. Between them was the Bloody Ground. In the sixteen-hundreds, that Bloody Ground was west of the Alleghanies in Ohio and Tennessee and Kentucky. In the seventeen-hundreds, it had shifted forward to the Mississippi. In the eighteen-hundreds, it was on the plains and in the mountains and in Oregon. Always, the forward step of white man, the backward step of red man--had meant a battle, bloodshed; now the colonists wiped out by the Sioux in Minnesota; or the missionaries massacred by the Cayuse in Oregon; or the Indians shot down and fleeing to the caves of the mountains like hunted animals. How many massacres marked the forward march of the Hudson’s Bay Company from Atlantic to Pacific? Not one. The only massacre, that of Seven Oaks, was a fight of fur trader against fur trader. The raids such as Hearne saw on the Coppermine were raids of tribe on tribe, not white man on Indian, nor Indian on white man. “Smug old lady,” enemies designated the Hudson’s Bay Company. “Oppressor, monopoly, intriguing aristocrats,” the early settlers of Oregon called her. Grant all the sins of omission common to smug, conservative old ladies! Grant all the sins of commission--greed, secrecy, craft, subterfuge--common the world over to monopolies! _Of these things and more was the Hudson’s Bay Company guilty in its long despotic reign of two hundred years. But set over against its sins, this other fact, a record which no other organization in the world may boast--the bloodless conquest of an empire from savagery!_ * * * * *