Again the assailants fired a volley. No answering shot came from the fort. Rushing through the smoke the traders found François Deschamps backed up in a corner like a beast at bay, one wrist broken and all ammunition gone. A dozen rifle-shots cracked sharp. The fellow fell and his body was thrown into the flames. The old mother was buried without shroud or coffin in the clay bank of the river. A young boy mortally wounded was carried from the ruins to die in Union. This dark act marked the last important episode in the long conflict among traders. A decline of values followed the civil war. Settlers were rushing overland to Oregon, and Fort Union went into the control of the militia. To-day St. Louis is still a centre of trade in manufactured furs, and St. Paul yet receives raw pelts from trappers who wander through the forests of Minnesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a year ago the writer employed as guides in the mountains three trappers who have spent their lives ranging the northern wilds and the Upper Missouri; but outside the mountain and forest wastes, the vast hunting-grounds of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by the fences of settlers. In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the conflict--once in the seventies when Louis Riel, a half-breed demagogue, roused the Metis against the surveyors sent to prepare Red River for settlement, and again in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-breeds of the Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds to their lands. Though the Hudson's Bay Company had nothing to do with either complaint, the conflict waged round their forts. In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took possession of Fort Garry, and for no other reason than the love of killing that riots in savage blood as in a wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In the second rebellion Riel's allies came down on the far-isolated Fort Pitt three hundred strong, captured the fort, and took the factor, Mr. MacLean, and his family to northern wastes, marching them through swamps breast-high with spring floods, where General Middleton's troops could not follow. The children of the family had been in the habit of bribing old Indian gossips into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the friendship now stood the white family in good stead. Day and night in all the weeks of captivity the friendly Indians never left the side of the trader's family, slipping between the hostiles and the young children, standing guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of defence till all were safely back among the whites. This time Riel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay Company resumed its sway of all that realm between Labrador and the Pacific north of the Saskatchewan. Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black spot. The world looks only at the black spot.