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 where Notre Dame Avenue East, or the Hudson’s Bay stores is to-day.  It was probably built a few years after Fort Gibraltar, and was called “Fidler’s Fort.”  By this time, however, the Hudson’s Bay Company, working from their first post of Cumberland House, pushed on to the Rocky Mountains to engage in the Titanic struggle which they saw lay ahead of them.  One of their most active agents, in occupying the Red River Valley, was the Englishman Peter Fidler, who was the surveyor of this district, the master of several forts, and a man who ended his eventful career by a will made—­providing that all of his funds should be kept at interest until 1962, when they should be divided, as his last chimerical plan should direct.  It thus came about that when the Colonists arrived there were two Traders’ Houses, on the site of the City of Winnipeg of to-day, within a mile of one another, one representing a New World, and the other an Old World type of mercantile life.  It was plain that on the Plains of Rupert’s Land there would come a struggle for the possession of power, if not for very existence.

CHAPTER II.

“A Scottish duel.”