The great canoe, the travois, and the sledge were inventions of the early French fur trade, but we used them as we needed them when the fur country became our own. France ceded her trading posts to England in 1763, and England transferred them to us in 1796. The great Northwest Company had by 1783 extended its posts all along our Northern border, not being too particular about crossing the line; but by 1812 we had made our authority felt, and by 1816 had passed a law excluding foreigners from our fur trade. The old Northwest Company handed over to the younger American Fur Company all the posts found to be within our marches. We heard, for the time, of the Pacific Fur Company, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company, of the “free trappers” and “free traders” of the West. It matters not what form or name that trade assumed. The important fact is that we now, by means of this wild commerce, began to hear of such lands as Oregon, of that region now known as Montana, of a thousand remote and unmapped localities, which might ultimately prove inhabitable. Summer or winter, over all these new lands the wild new travel of the West went on, and after fashions it determined for itself. Thus, in the country of the Missouri, the left fork of our great American waterway, there was no birch-bark for the making of the canot du Nord. Hence the keel-boat, the setting pole and the sweep, the sail and the tracking line. Yet the great craft, like the Northern birch-bark ship, must at last reach a land of waterways too small for its bulk. The Montana adventurers had not birch-bark, but they had the buffalo. They made “bull boats” out of the sun-dried hides, and these rude craft served to carry many a million dollars’ worth of furs over gaps that would have seemed full long to a walking man. The outlying posts[22] at the head of the far-off streams received their supplies from the annual caravan of keel-boats, or the later great Mackinaw boats, square-sterned craft fifty feet long, of twelve-foot beam, of four-foot freeboard, and a carrying capacity of fourteen tons.[23] Each of these boats required a crew of twelve men, and it took six months of the hardest labor towing, tracking, poling, and rowing to get the clumsy craft from St. Louis to such a spot as old Fort Benton. The run downstream required only about thirty days, and it was commonly believed that the square stern of the Mackinaw caused it to run faster than the current in taking the rapids of the Missouri.