consciousness was born.

In the West a something more entered into the national spirit. French
fur-traders, wood-runners, voyageurs had drifted North and West, men of
infinite resources, as much at home with a frying-pan over a camp-fire
as over a domestic hearth, who could wrest a living from life anywhere.
English adventurers of similar caliber had drifted in from Hudson Bay.
These little lords in a wilderness of savages had scattered west as far
as the Rockies, south to California. They knew no law but the law of a
strong right arm and kept peace among the Indians only by a dauntless
courage and rough and ready justice. They could succeed only by a good
trade in furs, and they could obtain a good trade in furs only by
treating the Indians with equity. Every man who plunged into the fur
wilderness took courage in one hand and his life in the other. If he
lost his courage, he lost his life. Indian fray, turbulent rapids,
winter cold took toll of the weak and the feckless. Nature accepts no
excuses. The man who defaulted in manhood was wiped out--sucked down
by the rapids, buried in winter storms, absorbed into the camps of
Indian degenerates. The men who stayed upon their feet had the stamina
of a manhood in them that could not be extinguished. It was a
wilderness edition of that dauntlessness which brought the Loyalists to
Ontario and the French devotees to Quebec. This, too, made for a
dogged, strong, obstinate race. At the time of the fall of French
power at Quebec in 1759 there were about two thousand of these
wilderness hunters in the West. Fifty years later by way of Hudson Bay
came Lord Selkirk's Settlers--Orkneymen and Highlanders, hardy, keen
and dauntless as their native rock-bound isles.

These four classes were the primary first ingredients that went into
the making of Canada's national consciousness and each of the four