bartered.  They are short-sighted men who hold that because the flint-gun and the sable possess such different values in London, these articles should also possess their relative values in North America, and argue from this that the Hudson Bay Company treat the Indians unfairly; they are short-sighted men, I say, and know not of what they speak.  That old rough flint has often cost more to put in the hands of that Dogrib hunter than the best finished central fire of Boss or Purdey.  But that is not all that has to be said about the trade of this Company.  Free trade may be an admirable institution for some nations-making them, amongst other things, very-much more liable to national destruction; but it by no means follows that it should be adapted equally well to the savage Indian.  Unfortunately for the universality of British institutions, free trade has invariably been found to improve the red man from the face of the earth.  Free trade in furs means dear beavers, dear martens, dear minks, and dear otters; and all these “dears” mean whisky, alcohol, high wine, and poison, which in their turn mean, to the Indian, murder, disease, small-pox, and death.  There is no need to tell me that these four dears and their four corollaries ought not to be associated with free trade, an institution which is so pre-eminently pure; I only answer that these things have ever been associated with free trade in furs, and I see no reason whatever to behold in our present day amongst traders, Indian, or, for that matter, English, any very remarkable reformation in the principles of trade.  Now the Hudson Bay Company are in the position of men who have taken a valuable shooting for a very long term of years or for a perpetuity,-and who therefore are desirous of preserving for a future time the game which they hunt, and also of preserving the hunters and trappers who are their servants.  The free trader is as a man who takes his shooting for the term of a year or two and wishes to destroy all he can.  He has two objects in view; first, to get the furs himself, second, to prevent the other traders from getting them.  “If I cannot get them, then he shan’t.  Hunt, hunt, hunt, kill, kill, kill; next year may take care of itself.”  One word more.  Other companies and other means have been tried to carry on the Indian trade and to protect the interests of the Indians, but all have failed; from Texas to the Saskatchewan there has been but one result, and that result has been the destruction of the wild animals and the extinction, partial or total, of the Indian race.

I remained only long enough at Fort Ellice to complete a few changes in costume which the rapidly increasing cold rendered necessary.  Boots and hat were finally discarded, the stirrup-irons were rolled in strips of buffalo skin,-the large moose-skin “mittaines” taken into wear, and immense moccassins got ready.  These precautions were necessary, for before us there now lay a great open region with treeless expanses that were sixty miles across them-a vast tract of rolling hill and plain over which, for three hundred miles, there lay no fort or house of any kind.