If the Hudson’s Bay Company is to hold its monopoly by virtue of settlements, it must see to the welfare of those settlements, so in June, 1808, the first schoolmasters of the Northwest are sent out at salaries of £30 a year--James Clouston, and Peter Sinclair, and George Geddes. There is no dividend, owing to the embargo of war, and the Company is driven, in 1809, to petition the Lords of Trade for help. They aver there are six hundred families at their settlements, that the yearly outfits cost the Company £40,000; that the sales never exceed £30,000 and this year are only £3,000; they apply for remission of duty on furs and a loan of £60,000 from the imperial treasury. The duty is remitted but the loan is not granted, and My Lord Selkirk becomes, by virtue of having purchased nearly £40,000 of stock, a leading director in the Hudson’s Bay Company. My Lord Selkirk has been out to Montreal. He has been fêted and feasted and dined and wined by the Beaver Club of the Nor’Westers, whom he pumps to a detail about the fur trade. Also he meets John Jacob Astor and learns what he can from him. Also he meets that Northwest clerk who had been dismissed up the Saskatchewan and came over to the Hudson’s Bay Company--Colin Robertson. He brings Colin Robertson back with him to England, and the aforetime Northwest clerk is called on January 3, 1810, to give advice to the Hudson’s Bay directors on the state of the fur trade in Canada. * * * * * But to return to that Louisiana Boundary--it is as great a shock to the Nor’Westers as to the Hudson’s Bay. In the first place, as told elsewhere, the boundary treaty of 1798 has compelled them to move headquarters from Grand Portage to Fort William. The Nor’Westers suddenly awaken to the value of Alexander MacKenzie’s voyage to the Pacific. Supposing he had followed that great river on down to the sea, would it have led him where the American, Robert Gray, found the Columbia, and where the explorers, Lewis and Clarke, later coming overland from the Missouri, wintered? It was determined to follow MacKenzie’s explorations up with all speed. It became a race to the Pacific. Which fur traders should pre-empt the vast domain first--Hudson’s Bay, Astor’s Americans, or Nor’Westers?