Finding that there was little hope of further promotion in the French army, since he had no influence in high quarters, Pierre returned to Canada. After several years' service in the colonial forces, he abandoned the army, and engaged in the fur trade. As a boy at Three Rivers, he had enjoyed many chances of meeting the fur-traders who came down to the little town on the St Lawrence with their packs of valuable peltry, and had shown an especial and fascinated interest in their stories of the boundless country that lay north and west of the string of settlements on the St Lawrence. This country was so vast in extent that even the most remote tribes yet visited by the white traders could state nothing definite as to its outer boundaries, though, in answer to the eager questions of the white men, they invented many untrue tales about it.
The fur-traders themselves were divided into two classes. The more staid and respectable class built trading forts in the interior on the borders of territories occupied by the Indians. Here they kept a supply of the things required by the natives: guns, powder and balls, tobacco, blankets, bright-coloured cotton, axes and small tools, flints and steels, vermilion for war-paint, and beads of every colour and { 10} description. The Indians brought their furs into the forts and bartered them for the goods that they needed. Sometimes, with no sense of real values, they traded beaver skins and other pelts of high worth for a piece of gaudy cotton, a little vermilion, or a handful of beads. The white men, of course, brought things which rapidly became indispensable to the Indians, whose native bows and arrows and hatchets of stone seemed almost useless compared with the muskets and the steel axes brought from Europe. To acquire these things became vital to the Indians, and the traders who now supplied them acquired each year thousands of beautiful furs. These were tied up securely into packs and carried in canoes down to Montreal or Three Rivers, where they were bought by the great merchants and sent by ship to France. The furs that had been bought from the Indian for a mere trifle fetched hundreds of francs when they finally reached Paris.