There is another feature to be examined in
the operations of this Company, which to the
philanthropist must be of greater importance
than the growth of corn, the trade in tallow,
or the raising of minerals. The exclusive
trade and territorial rights, assumed in the
rigid and unflinching spirit which they ever
have been by these dealers in beaver skins,
involve something more than appears on
the surface. In handing over millions of
square miles of territory to the iron custody
of commercial speculators it seemed to have
been overlooked that the act involved the
future weal or woe of the many tribes of
Indians inhabiting those regions: natives
who certainly possessed a better claim to
the lordship of the forest and the prairie
than Charles the Second, who presumed to
will them and their soil away to pay his
private debts; whose only forfeiture of
ancient rights lay in their utter inability
to defend their hunting ground against the
aggressions of the swarthy king and his
white subjects.

So little was known of the original tribes of
Indians inhabiting the distant districts of
those territories, during the first century of
the Company's establishment, that it is
scarcely possible to form any close calculation
as to the decimation of these unfortunate
people. We can but make a guess at it
from the process of annihilation that has been
going on during the past fifty years, when
better data have been at hand.

When Europeans were but as strangers
in that land, there were upwards of fifty
numerous and powerful races of Indians
inhabiting those vast hunting grounds.
Amongst these were the Crees, the Yellow
Knives, the Chippewayans, the Hares, the
Dahotonies, the Dogribs, the Nihanies, the
Loncheaux, the Blackfeet, the Assiniboines,
the Blood Indians, the Sarcees, the Copper
Indians, and many others. Not a few of
these numbered ten thousand souls each,
early in the present century. Doubtless their
lives were spent pretty much as savage
tribes usually pass their days. Hunting
buffaloes, spearing salmon, trapping deer
were occasionally varied with skirmishes
into the neighbouring territory, when the
fish-spear and the wooden-trap would be laid
aside for the tomahawk and the scalping-knife.
Still they were happy after a fashion,
and were at any rate not demoralised as at
present.

Living in rude tents, subsisting on kammas
or preserved bulbs, pemmican, and dried
fruits, they had little desire for civilised
luxuries. Of athletic form, and taking abundant
exercise, they enjoyed robust health, and
the calling of the "medicine-man" amongst
them was entirely confined to the healing of
wounds obtained in the chase or war. Their
weapons for slaughtering the buffaloes or
deer were bone-point arrows and spears,
which latter were formidable instruments of
destruction in their hands. These animals
being found in great numbers, often in thousands
at a time, it was seldom they ran short
of a good store of dried pemmican for the
long winter months.

For upwards of a century the fate of these
once happy races was hidden from Europe.
All within that great "Beaver preserve" was
a sealed book in this country. But in the
course of time the truth oozed out slowly but
sadly. Tales reached England of the extermination
of entire tribes and races by starvation,
intemperance, and disease introduced
from Europe. Stories were listened to, but
scarcely credited, of cannibalism from sheer
starvation, of wholesale murders in the
madness of intoxication, and it was said that at
the then rate of human destruction, the footprint
of a native would not be seen on the
wastes of the Indian territories by the end
of the present century.

It was doubtless the recital of some of
these horrors which induced the government
of the year eighteen hundred and
twenty-one, and again in eighteen hundred
and thirty-eight—when granting exclusive
trading privileges to the Company over the
entire northern part of this continent—to
stipulate that they should take effectual steps
for gradually diminishing and ultimately
preventing the sale or distribution of
spirituous liquors to the Indians, as also for
promoting their moral and religious improvement.

In eighteen hundred and twenty, the very
year in which the Company were seeking
for a license of exclusive trade, and just
one hundred and fifty years after their
establishment, they sent out the first minister
of religion that has been permitted
to enter the country. On making their
second application for a trading license in
eighteen hundred and thirty-eight a few
missionaries were sent out; but, the license
once obtained, the number of these was
gradually reduced.

With regard to the Company's undertaking
to stop the distribution of spirits amongst the
Indians, nothing could be more readily effected,
seeing that liquor, not less than any other
imported article, can only be introduced into
the country by the Company's ships. The
Company stop the way against every useful
requirement of more civilised life; but open
it wide for the passage of ardent spirits;
which so utterly demoralise the natives, that
amongst them the rise of drunkenness annually
increases, leading to crime, to poverty
and death by hundreds. The Indians are
fully sensible of the deadly consequences
attending the free use of spirituous drinks;
yet are unable to withstand the temptation.
The results are fearful. During a
parliamentary discussion upon Hudson's Bay
affairs in eighteen hundred and forty-eight,
it was significantly remarked by Mr. Gladstone
that, in the year eighteen hundred