ment of business. The diary goes on to relate that several hundred white men were there assembled, and that over seven hundred Indian women were retained by the company to scrape and clean the skins, and to make up the packages of pelts. The writer describes the scene as having all the air of a busy city.

On that night of the 3rd of July, 1800, according to the diary, the factors gave a "great ball." The large dining room, with its puncheon floor sixty feet long, was cleared, and inspiring music was furnished by the bagpipe, violin, and flute. Thirty-six gallons of rum were issued by the factors, which made the night hilarious. There was a plenty of women, too, and "beautiful half-breeds" who danced well. One Indian woman got drunk and killed her husband.

These scenes at Grand Portage took place twenty years before the corner stone of Fort Snelling was laid, and thirtyeight years before the first white man claimed land in the vicinity of St. Paul. Here was a busy town, a mart of exchange and trade, with a commerce extending to Montreal, 1,800 miles east, and to Great Slave lake, 2,000 miles northwest. Transportation must have been vigorously conducted for the vast distances covered. Count Andriani, an Italian, was at Grand Portage in 1791, and its activities were the same. Surely trade and commerce in Minnesota, and pretty good transportation, too, did not begin with the men of this generation.

A romantic interest attaches to some of these bold and daring early voyageurs and traders, brave Scotchmen, whose fortunes were lost in the memorable battle of Culloden, in 1746, and who fled to British America. Their blood gave vigor and force to the affairs of the traders. In the veins of many of the half-breeds and bright bois brulé girls on the Red river flows the blood of the men who fought for Lochiel and the Camerons, near Inverness, in 1746. It only needs the glamour of the glittering pen of a Walter Scott, or the power which warms Cooper's thrilling stories, to weave their wild annals into romances as fascinating as Waverley, and as charming as the border scenes depicted in the Leatherstocking tales. I have also read, in Parkman's histories of New France, how Cardinal Richelieu headed the company of the "One Hundred Associates," in 1627, who engaged in the fur trade in Canada. That

company was at last merged in the Northwest Company, which links these noted characters to our territory, and to a time within the memory of men yet living. Upon our own border we are allied back to the days of Louis XIV, of France; to Charles II, of England; and to the great chiefs and clans of Scotland, who fought at Culloden when the flag of the Stuarts went down forever.

Thus began the era and the reign of the celebrated fur companies in and about the basin of lake Superior. They were the lords of the lake. They dwelt in semi-baronial state in their grand chateau at the Sault Ste. Marie, or transacted the yearly business at their castellated rendezvous, Grand Portage, now in Cook County, Minnesota.

We must here notice a very remarkable body of men, brought into action by the fur companies, who rapidly became a distinctive class. The voyageurs and coureurs des bois (rangers of the woods) were the pioneers of the commerce of lake Superior, and of our northern waters. They were the common carriers of that era. Bold, daring, courageous, they navigated the entire chain of lakes and rivers from Montreal to Athabasca, freighting pelts and transporting supplies over an area of country as large as Europe. Swarthy, sunburnt, and fearless, they were the heroes of the paddle; and for years their cheery songs were heard and their fleets were seen along the rugged shores of our great lake and in all the country northwestward, portaging over rocks, shooting rapids along roaring rivers, and traversing mighty wildernesses. They would have laughed at the obstacles of the Klondike. At a later date, they performed the almost incredible feat of crossing and recrossing the continent in birch bark canoes, in a single season, and passed from the mouth of the Columbia, on the Pacific, to Fort William, on Lake Superior, with all the regularity of a steamboat. They were indeed a wonderful race, lively, fickle, polite, reckless, and immoral, full of song and stories of wild adventure. They crossed and recrossed the continent long years before Jay Cooke or James J. Hill ever dreamed of marrying our inland sea, with steel bands, to the Pacific ocean, and nearly upon the same geographic lines. One has to read the brilliant pages of Irving's Astoria, or the adventures of Capt. Bonneville, to fully appreciate the char

acter of the early voyageurs who so boldly crossed the continent in canoes more than a hundred years ago.

In 1765, by an edict of royal authority, the traders were required to procure a license, and the first authorized trader was Alexander Henry, grandfather of our late friend and associate, Norman W. Kittson. Henry received the exclusive right to trade on Lake Superior. He was methodical, and kept a diary to which we are deeply indebted. His first stock consisted of the freight of four large canoes, on twelve months' credit, to be paid in beaver pelts. All accounts were kept in beaver skins. I have found the market price at that period, in the Hudson Bay Company's journals. A single blanket was worth ten skins; a common gun, twenty; a pound of powder, two; a pound of shot, one; and a pint of rum would buy anything an Indian had. The amazing extent of this trade is evidenced from the fact that Henry, in one expedition, secured 12,000 beaver skins, besides great numbers of otter and marten, and the skins of some silver-tailed foxes.

Some idea of the extent of the canoe commerce along the shores of our great lake may be further gathered from Harmon's journal (published in 1820), who records that he left the Sault Ste. Marie, on his way to Grand Portage, June 1st, 1800, in company with three hundred men, in thirty-five canoes. On his way beyond Grand Portage, in the descent of Rainy river, he met, on July 26th, twenty-four canoes from Lake Athabasca, laden with furs to be sent to Montreal. Surely there were men here engaged in all the activities of a wonderful commerce, before our advent upon the stage. Neither Duluth, St. Paul, nor St. Anthony, were the first commercial marts of our territory; for the records of the Hudson Bay Company, seen at Fort William, pertaining to dates earlier than those already noticed, show that Grand Portage was a commercial emporium, full of trade, shops, style and fashion, with drinking places and police officers, the very day John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence.

But we must no longer pursue this fascinating theme, which might be profitably continued through the wars and consolidations of the great fur companies.

The period of their extensive trade on Lake Superior and in the area of the great Canadian Northwest, under the British

flag, with encroachment on territory in Minnesota surrendered to the United States by the treaty of 1783, extended no later than forty years from that date. In 1823 the expedition of Major Long, visiting Fort William on their eastward return from Lake Winnipeg, found the large fort nearly deserted, the fur trade on this route north of Lake Superior having greatly declined. This traffic had passed to the rivals and successors of the Northwest company, being diverted northward to the Hudson Bay Company, and southward to fur traders of the United States.

John Jacob Astor, a German furrier and merchant of New York, who had the highest enterprise for the extension of domestic and foreign trade, went to Montreal in 1816 and bought all the posts and factories of the Northwest Company south of the line which Franklin's sagacity and foresight had given us as the international boundary. American lads from Vermont were brought out, and under the influence of the American Fur Company lake Superior began to be gradually Americanized. Astor's first agent was Ramsay Crooks, father of Col. William Crooks of St. Paul. Their headquarters were at La Pointe, on an island partly inclosing Chequamegon bay near the head of the lake. Charles H. Oakes, a youth from Vermont, appeared upon the scene. Associated with Oakes was Charles William Wulff Borup, a young Dane, from Copenhagen, and many other names of strong and able men, like William and Allan Morrison. In 1842, the American Fur Company closed its business and sold its interests to Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and Company, of St. Louis, who were represented by Henry M. Rice. In 1849 Rice retired from the trade, and the fur interests, no longer represented by a powerful company, soon ceased to maintain the ancient supremacy, and gradually melted away before the advent of new interests. Thus practically closed the most remarkable era of early trade and commerce ever connected with the history and fortunes of any people.

The Indian title existed around the entire extent of lake Superior until the year 1820, when, on June 16th, Lewis Cass formally hoisted the United States flag at the entrance of the lake, and made the treaty by which the Indians ceded a tract of land four miles square adjoining the Sault Ste. Marie. A

treaty made six years later opened the south shore to commercial activity, and thenceforward a new life of trade and commerce was gradually developed upon our inland sea. These treaties, and two subsequent ones in 1842 and in 1854, completed the cession of the shores of the great lake, so far as they lie within the United States, and transferred the title from the former Chippewa possessors to our national government.

We can give no better illustration of the transportation in use during that early period than is related by the great Schoolcraft in describing the first advent of a body of United States troops along the shore, after one of the treaties; how they came, sixty men and officers, with a commissariat and a medical department, borne on three great twelve-oar barges, attended by four boats of subsistence and a fleet of canoes, with martial music and with flags flying. As the fleet stretched out in grand procession, Schoolcraft declares it "the most noble and imposing spectacle ever yet seen on the waters of lake Superior."

The advent of the first sail vessels is not yet lost in obscurity. Henry records that in the winter of 1770-71 he built at Pine point on lake Superior, nine miles from the Sault, “a barge fit for the navigation of the lake," and his narration shows it to have been rigged with sails. In August, 1772, he launched, from the same shipyard, a sloop of forty tons. These vessels, used in unremunerative mining operations, were the earliest sailing craft known in the history of lake Superior. Harmon mentioned, in 1800, a vessel of about ninety-five tons burden in use then by the Northwest Company, plying four or five trips each summer between Pine point and Grand Portage.

Schoolcraft relates that on the 9th day of November, 1833, "wheat in bulk, and flour in bags and barrels, were brought down for the first time." This is the earliest record of the shipping of any native products from lake Superior, other than pelts and the commodities exchanged for them.

TRANSPORTATION BY CANALS.

The rapids in the Ste. Marie river were the one great obstacle to good transportation on lake Superior, and in 1837 Gov. Mason, of Michigan, by authority of the legislature, au