array, gained no place upon the written records, since they took part
in no striking achievement worthy of mention in the dispatches and
memoirs of their day. The _coureur-de-bois_ was rarely a chronicler.
If the Jesuits did not deign to pillory him in their _Rélations_,
or if the royal officials did not single him out for praise in
the memorials which they sent home to France each year, the
_coureur-de-bois_ might spend his whole active life in the forest
without transmitting his name or fame to a future generation. And that
is what most of them did. A few of the voyageurs found that one trip
to the wilds was enough and never took to the trade permanently. But
the great majority, once the virus of the free life had entered their
veins, could not forsake the wild woods to the end of their days. The
dangers of the life were great, and the mortality among the traders
was high. _Coureurs de risques_ they ought to have been called, as
La Hontan remarks. But taken as a whole they were a vigorous,
adventurous, strong-limbed set of men. It was a genuine compliment
that they paid to the wilderness when they chose to spend year after
year in its embrace.

In their methods of trading the _coureurs-de-bois_ were unlike
anything that the world had ever known before. The Hanseatic merchants
of earlier fur-trading days in Northern Europe had established their
forts or factories at Novgorod, at Bergen, and elsewhere, great
_entrepôts_ stored with merchandise for the neighboring territories.
The traders lived within, and the natives came to the posts to barter
their furs or other raw materials. The merchants of the East India
Company had established their posts in the Orient and traded with the
natives on the same basis. But the Norman voyageurs of the New World
did things quite differently. They established fortified posts
throughout the regions west of the Lakes, it is true, but they did not