The earliest Europeans, or white men, to penetrate into the wilds of the Canadian backwoods were the _coureurs de bois_--that is, hunters and trappers of French, or mixed French and Indian, descent, who collected furs to sell to the trading companies of the French. These bodies had factories along the Lower St. Lawrence. In the early days--that is to say, for a couple of hundred years after the French settled colonists in Canada--the principal fair for the trade in furs was Montreal. There every spring a crowd of trappers and hunters brought the bales of furs which they had stripped off beaver, bear, or fox, musk-rat or racoon, and handed them over in barter to the agents of the autocratic fur-trading company; and at the same time large fleets of canoes came paddling down the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa rivers, bringing whole boatloads of furs which the Indians had collected all along the Great Lakes, and even from the distant Ohio River, and the great plains of the West.
Who does not know the haunting melody of the "Canadian Boat-Song"?--
"Faintly as tolls the evening chime, Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time. Soon as the woods on the shores grow dim, We'll sing at St. Anne's our parting hymn. Row, brothers, row! The stream runs fast; The rapids are near, and the daylight's past."
You can easily hear the swing of the oars, and catch the slight melancholy of the memory-haunting lilt as the singers keep time to the swaying of their bodies! And you can see the round rosy face of the big, burly, boyish-looking _coureur de bois_, or "runner of the woods," suddenly blanch, whilst his big black eyes grow bigger than ever, as he imagines he sees the weird flying canoe of some reckless woodsman who has sold his soul to the Evil One in return for the power of being able to make his fragile birch-bark canoe rise, as it were, on invisible wings into the air, and so speed along without paddle or punting-pole.
Now, whilst the French collected furs through the country of the Great Lakes, and from the wide regions to the west and south of them, the English, through the Hudson Bay Company, claimed a similar monopoly of the profitable fur trade farther north. And not only did they claim and maintain their supremacy as the sole fur-trading company in the North-West, they eventually grew so powerful that they carried on a regular system of government, administering the laws and punishing offenders.