wealthy Company, reaching back to the times of easy-going Charles II.,
who gave them their charter. For a hundred years they lived in
self-confidence and prudence in their forts of Churchill and York, on
the shore of Hudson Bay. They were even at times so inhospitable as to
deal with the Indians through an open window of the fort. This was in
striking contrast to the "Nor'-Wester" who trusted the Indians and lived
among them with the freest intercourse. For the one hundred years spoken
of, the Indians from the Red River Country, the Saskatchewan, the Red
River and Lake Winnipeg, found their way by the water courses to the
shores of the Hudson Bay. But the enterprise of the Montreal merchants
in leaving their forts and trading in the open with the Indians,
prevented the great fleets of canoes, from going down with their furs,
as they had once done to Churchill and York. The English Company felt
the necessity of starting into the interior, and so within six years of
the time of the expedition of Thomas Curry, appeared five hundred miles
inland from the Bay, and erected a fort--Fort Cumberland--a few hundred
yards from the "Nor'-Westers'" Trading House, on the Saskatchewan River.
By degrees before the end of the century almost every place of any
importance, in the fur-producing country, saw the two rival forts built
within a mile or two of each other. Shortly before the end of the 18th
Century, the "Nor'-Westers" came into the Red River Valley and built one
or two forts near the 49th parallel, N. lat.--the U.S. boundary of
to-day. But four years after the new Century began, the "Nor'-Westers"
decided to occupy the "Forks" of the Red and Assiniboine River, near
where Verandrye's Fort Rouge had been built some sixty years before.
Evidently both companies felt the conflict to be on, in their efforts to
cover all important parts, for they called this Trading House Fort
Gibraltar, whose name has a decided ring of the war-like about it. It is
not clear exactly where the Hudson's Bay post was built, but it is said
to have rather faced the Assiniboine than the Red River, perhaps near