But the fur trade paid too well to be left alone by the Montrealers who knew of Verandrye’s exploits on the Ottawa and the Upper Lakes.  When Canada became British, many daring spirits hastened to it from New York and New Jersey States.  Montreal became the home of many young men of Scottish families.  Some of their fathers had fled to the Colonies after the Stuart Prince was defeated at Culloden, and after the power of the Jacobites was broken.  Some of the young men of enterprising spirit were the sons of officers and men who had fought in the Seven Years’ War against France and now came to claim their share of the conqueror’s spoils.  Some men were of Yankee origin, who with their proverbial ability to see a good chance, came to what has always been Canada’s greatest city, on the Island of Montreal.  It was only half a dozen years after Wolfe’s great victory, that a great Montreal trader, Alexander Henry, penetrated the western lakes to Mackinaw—­the Island of the Turtle, lying between Lakes Huron and Michigan.  At Sault Ste. Marie, he fell in with a most noted French Canadian, Trader Cadot, who had married a Saulteur wife.  He became a power among the Indians.  With Scottish shrewdness Henry acquired from the Commandant at Mackinaw the exclusive right to trade on Lake Superior.  He became a partner of Cadot, and they made a voyage as Canadian Argonauts, to bring back very rich cargoes of fur.  They even went up to the Saskatchewan on Lake Winnipeg.  After Henry, came another Scotchman, Thomas Curry, and made so successful a voyage that he reached the Saskatchewan River, and came back laden with furs, so that he was now satisfied never to have to go again to the Indian country.  Shortly afterwards James Findlay, another son of the heather, followed up the fur-traders’ route, and reached Saskatchewan.  Thus the Northwest Fur Trade became the almost exclusive possession of the Scottish Merchants of Montreal.  With the master must go the man.  And no man on the rivers of North America ever equalled, in speed, in good temper, and in skill, the French Canadian voyageur.  Almost all the Montreal merchants, the Forsythes, the Richardsons, the McTavishes, the Mackenzies, and the McGillivrays, spoke the French as fluently as they did their own language.  Thus they became magnetic leaders of the French canoemen of the rivers.  The voyageurs clung to them with all the tenacity of a pointer on the scent.  There were Nolins, Falcons, Delormes, Faribaults, Lalondes, Leroux, Trottiers, and hundreds of others, that followed the route until they became almost a part of the West and retired in old age, to take up a spot on some beautiful bay, or promontory, and never to return to “Bas Canada.”  Those from Montreal to the north of Lake Superior were the pork eaters, because they lived on dried pork, those west of Lake Superior, “Couriers of the Woods,” and they fed on pemmican, the dried flesh of the buffalo.  They were mighty in strength, daring in spirit, tractable