The English colonies never had a race of woodsmen like the coureurs du
bois of New France. These were a strange mixture: French peasants, half-
breeds, Canadian-born Frenchmen, gentlemen of birth with lives and
fortunes gone askew, and many of the native Canadian noblesse, who, like
the nobles of France, forbidden to become merchants, became adventurers
with the coureurs du bois, who were ever with them in spirit more than
with the merchant. The peasant prefers the gentleman to the bourgeois as
his companion. Many a coureur du bois divided his tale of furs with a
distressed noble or seigneur, who dare not work in the fields.

The veteran Charles le Moyne, with his sons, each of whom played a daring
and important part in the history of New France,--Iberville greatest,--
was one of the few merchants in whom was combined the trader and the
noble. But he was a trader by profession before he became a seigneur.
In his veins was a strain of noble blood; but leaving France and settling
in Canada, he avoided the little Court at Quebec, went to Montreal, and
there began to lay the foundation of his fame and fortune, and to send
forth men who were as the sons of Jacob. In his heart he was always in
sympathy with the woodsmen, and when they were proclaimed as perilous to
the peace and prosperity of the king's empire, he stood stoutly by them.
Adventurers, they traded as they listed; and when the Intendant Duchesnau
could not bend them to his greedy will, they were to be caught and hanged
wherever found. King Louis hardly guessed that to carry out that order
would be to reduce greatly the list of his Canadian noblesse. It struck
a blow at the men who, in one of the letters which the grim Frontenac
sent to Versailles not long before his death, were rightly called "The
King's Traders"--more truly such than any others in New France.

Whether or not the old seigneur knew it at the time, three of his own