Lastly, a kind of hybrid people has been formed, born of colonial fathers and Indian mothers. These men, called "Burnt-woods," because of the colour of their skin, act as brokers between the authors of their dual origin. They speak the language of their fathers and of their mothers, and have the vices of both races. These bastards of civilized and of savage nature sell themselves to the Americans and the English by turns, to hand over to them the monopoly of the fur-trade; they keep alive the rivalry between the English companies, the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Fur Company, and the American companies, the Columbian American Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company and others: they themselves go hunting for account of the traders and with hunters paid by the companies. [Sidenote: The Wars of the Companies.] The great war of American Independence is the only one which people know of. They are ignorant of the fact that blood has been shed on behalf of the paltry interests of a handful of merchants. The Hudson's Bay Company in 1811 sold to Lord Selkirk[501] a tract of land on the bank of the Red River. The North-West or Canadian Company took umbrage at this transaction. The two companies, allied to various Indian tribes and seconded by the "Burnt-woods," came to blows. This domestic conflict, so horrible in its details, took place on the frozen wastes of Hudson's Bay. Lord Selkirk's colony was destroyed in the month of June 1815[502], at the exact period of the Battle of Waterloo. Upon those two theatres, one so brilliant, the other so obscure, the misfortunes of the human species were the same. Seek no longer in America the skillfully constructed political constitutions of which Charlevoix has written the history: the monarchy of the Hurons, the republic of the Iroquois. A somewhat similar destruction has been accomplished and is still being accomplished in Europe under our very eyes; a Prussian poet, at a banquet of the Teutonic Order, held about the year 1400, sang in old Prussian the heroic deeds of the ancient warriors of his country: no one present understood him, and he received one hundred empty walnuts by way of recompense. Today, the language of Lower Brittany, the Basque and Gaelic languages, are dying out from cottage to cottage, keeping pace with the deaths of the goatherds and husbandmen. In the English County of Cornwall, the language of the natives became extinct about the year 1676. A fisherman said to some travellers: "I know hardly more than four or five persons who speak Cornish, and they are old folk like myself, between sixty and eighty years of age; none of the young people know a word of it."