For this crime and before the Company in England could be notified, Mowat was carried away in irons. Two servants--McNab and Russell--and one of the Corrigals volunteered to accompany him as witnesses for the defense. For a winter Mowat was imprisoned in the miserable butter vat of a jail at Fort William, and when it was found that every indignity and insult would not drive the three witnesses away, they were arrested as abettors of the so-called crime. At Mowat’s trial in Montreal, of the four judges who presided, one was notoriously corrupt and two, the fathers of Northwest partners. Of the jury, half the number were Nor’Westers. Naturally, Mowat was pronounced guilty. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and branding. When he was discharged penniless, he set out through the United States to take ship for England. It is supposed that he was lost in a storm, or drowned crossing some of the New England rivers. The rivalry between Hudson’s Bay and Nor’Westers had become lawless outrage. The Company in England is meantime having troubles of its own. The English government desires them in 1807 to state what “the boundaries of Louisiana ought to be” in the impending treaty with the United States, which is to give access for American traders to the country north of Louisiana in return for similar free access for British traders to American territory. The English traders state what the boundaries of Louisiana ought to be, and to the ignorance of the English shareholders do we owe in this case, as in a hundred others, the fifty years’ boundary dispute as to limits from the Lake of the Woods to Oregon. As for reciprocity of access to each other’s hunting field, the Hudson’s Bay Company opposes it furiously. Access to American territory they already have without the asking and are likely to have for another fifty years, as there is no inhabitant to prevent them, but to grant the Americans access to Hudson’s Bay territory is another matter; so in the treaty of reciprocal favors across each other’s territory, My Lord Holland provides “always the actual settlements of the Hudson’s Bay Company excepted.”