Once at the settlement, the Indians set up their tepees, boiled their kettles, and unpacked their bundles of peltry.  A day was then given over to a great council which, the governor of the colony, in scarlet cloak and plumed hat, often came from Quebec to attend.  There were the usual pledges of friendship; the peace-pipe went its round, and the song of the calumet was sung.  Then the trading really began.  The merchants of Montreal had their little shops along the shore where they spread out for display the merchandise brought by the spring ships from France.  There were muskets, powder, and lead, blankets in all colors, coarse cloth, knives, hatchets, kettles, awls, needles, and other staples of the trade.  But the Indian had a weakness for trinkets of every sort, so that cheap and gaudy necklaces, bracelets, tin looking-glasses, little bells, combs, vermilion, and a hundred other things of the sort were there to tempt him.  And last, but not least in its purchasing power, was brandy.  Many hogsheads of it were disposed of at every annual fair, and while it lasted the Indians turned bedlam loose in the town.  The fair was Montreal’s gala event in every year, for its success meant everything to local prosperity.  Indeed, in the few years when, owing to the Iroquois dangers, the flotilla failed to arrive, the whole settlement was on the verge of bankruptcy.

What the Indian got for his furs at Montreal varied from time to time, depending for the most part upon the state of the fur market in France.  And this, again, hinged to some extent upon the course of fashions there.  On one occasion the fashion of wearing low-crowned hats cut the value of beaver skins in two.  Beaver was the fur of furs, and the mainstay of the trade.  Whether for warmth, durability, or attractiveness in appearance, there was none other to equal it.  Not all beaver skins were valued alike, however.  Those taken from animals killed during the winter were preferred to those taken at other seasons, while new skins did not bring as high a price as those which the Indian had worn for a time and had thus made soft.  The trade, in fact, developed a classification of beaver skins into soft and half-soft, green and half-green, wet and dry, and so on.  Skins of good quality brought at Montreal from two to four livres per pound, and they averaged a little more than two pounds each.  The normal cargo of a large canoe was forty packs of skins, each pack weighing about fifty pounds.  Translated into the currency of today a beaver pelt of fair quality was worth about a dollar.  When we read in the official dispatches that a half-million livres’ worth of skins changed owners at the Montreal fair, this statement means that at least a hundred thousand animals must have been slaughtered to furnish a large flotilla with its cargo.