,
who gave them their charter. For a hundred years they lived in
self-confidence and prudence in their forts of Churchill and York, on
the shore of Hudson Bay. They were even at times so inhospitable as to
deal with the Indians through an open window of the fort. This was in
striking contrast to the "Nor'-Wester" who trusted the Indians and lived
among them with the freest intercourse. For the one hundred years spoken
of, the Indians from the Red River Country, the Saskatchewan, the Red
River and Lake Winnipeg, found their way by the water courses to the
shores of the Hudson Bay. But the enterprise of the Montreal merchants
in leaving their forts and trading in the open with the Indians,
prevented the great fleets of canoes, from going down with their furs,
as they had once done to Churchill and York. The English Company felt
the necessity of starting into the interior, and so within six years of
the time of the expedition of Thomas Curry, appeared five hundred miles
inland from the Bay, and erected a fort--Fort Cumberland--a few hundred
yards from the "Nor'-Westers'" Trading House, on the Saskatchewan River.
By degrees before the end of the century almost every place of any
importance, in the fur-producing country, saw the two rival forts built
within a mile or two of each other.
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