confluence of the rivers and the lakes for the protection of the trade,
and the restraint of these profligates of the wilderness. The most
important of these was at Michilimackinac, situated at the strait of the
same name, which connects Lakes Huron and Michigan. It became the great
interior mart and place of deposit, and some of the regular merchants
who prosecuted the trade in person, under their licenses, formed
establishments here. This, too, was a rendezvous for the rangers of the
woods, as well those who came up with goods from Montreal as those who
returned with peltries from the interior. Here new expeditions
were fitted out and took their departure for Lake Michigan and the
Mississippi; Lake Superior and the Northwest; and here the peltries
brought in return were embarked for Montreal.

The French merchant at his trading post, in these primitive days of
Canada, was a kind of commercial patriarch. With the lax habits and easy
familiarity of his race, he had a little world of self-indulgence and
misrule around him. He had his clerks, canoe men, and retainers of
all kinds, who lived with him on terms of perfect sociability, always
calling him by his Christian name; he had his harem of Indian beauties,
and his troop of halfbreed children; nor was there ever wanting a
louting train of Indians, hanging about the establishment, eating and
drinking at his expense in the intervals of their hunting expeditions.

The Canadian traders, for a long time, had troublesome competitors in
the British merchants of New York, who inveigled the Indian hunters
and the coureurs des bois to their posts, and traded with them on more
favorable terms. A still more formidable opposition was organized in
the Hudson's Bay Company, chartered by Charles II., in 1670, with the
exclusive privilege of establishing trading houses on the shores of that
bay and its tributary rivers; a privilege which they have maintained to