Possession is nine points out of ten. The question was who would get possession first. Unfortunately that question presented itself to three alert rivals at the same time and in the same light. And the war began. The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle from the Lakes to the Mississippi. Therefore they did little but try to keep other traders out of the western preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somnolent state till the very extremity of outrage brought such a mighty awakening that it put its rivals to an eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were not asleep. And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumulated what was a gigantic fortune in those days as a purchaser of furs from America and a seller to Europe, was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard, of New Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the Osage tribes, was not asleep. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all conspired to make immortal.] [Footnote 2: While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he heard a voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?" Turning, Lewis saw Windsor had slipped to the verge of a precipice, where he lay with right arm and leg over it, the other arm clinging for dear life to the bluff. With his hunting-knife he cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his moccasins so that his toes could have the prehensile freedom of a monkey's tail, and thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.] [Footnote 3: Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.] [Footnote 4: 1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in Havana after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mississippi for France--one instance which shows how completely the influence of the fur trade connected every part of America, from the Gulf to the pole, as in a network irrespective of flag.] [Footnote 5: The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in contradistinction to the trappers and _voyageurs_.] [Footnote 6: This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71. Hearne, unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing to his too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French in La Perouse's campaign of 1782.] [Footnote 7: To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.] CHAPTER II THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT