FUR TRADERS AND VOYAGEURS

Lachine soon regained her former rank of first village on the whole island of Montreal. In the winter of i783-84, Benjanin Frobisher and Simon MceTavish, merchants of Montreal (1) started an opposition to the Hudson Bay Company under the name of the North West Company. Up to that period, the Hudson's Bay Company had been doing the greater bu'k of their

(1) “A little more than a quarter of a mile to the northward, most conspicuously situated beneath the abrupt part of the mountain, is a mansion erected by the late Simon McTavish, Esq., in a style of much elegance: this gentleman had projected great improvements in the neighbourhood of this agreable and favourite spot; had he lived to superintend the completion of them, the place would have been made an ornament to the island. Mr, McTavish, during his life time, was highly respected by all who enjoyed the pleasure of his acquaintance, and as much lamented by them at his decease ; his remains were deposited in a tomb placed at a short distance from the house, surrounded by a shrubbery ; on a rocky eminence above it his friends have erected a monumental pillar, as a tribute to his worth and a memento of their regret. Both the house and the pillar are very prominent objects, that disclose themselves in almost every direction.” Bouchette, 1815, p. 161.

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North West business by way of Hudson’s Bay. The bourgeois of the new concern on the contrary chose the route of Ottawa and the lakes, the old road of the missionaries and the coureurs des bois. They penetrated to the Indian nations of the interior, and the Hudson's Bay Company were soon obliged to follow suit. Lachine became the principal warehouse of the merchandise and skins of nearly all the North West traders. Every spring they launched a fleet of seven or eight hundred voyigeurs. About 1854, st-amboats and railroads put an end to the career of Canadian voyageurs. Should the reader desire to learn the names and the number of the Canadians who made yearly engagements for the North West, becoming the ancestors of the North West Métis or Half breeds, he may satisfy himself by examining the records of contemporaneous notaries, among others Gray, Griffin and Mailloux. A list of some of these names collected from Gray and Griffin, from 1807 to 1824, will be found in the appendix. It will suffice to convey an idea of the bustle created at Lachine by the arrival and departure of these voyageurs every season of navigation. The memory of several bourgeois and their employees is still preserved in Lachine. Without speaking of the small army of voyageurs that lumbermen such as John Chester, of La Petite Nation, William Hamilton, of Hawkesbury, Jacob Heick, of Prescott, Clark and Street of Niagara (1), despatched every spring to Upper Canada, there were others sent out every spring by individual fur traders, from Lachine to the west, the trading posts of the Ottawa River, Lake Superior, Illinois, and the North West, from Lake of Two Mountains to Detroit, Sault St Marie and the Rocky Mountains. François Antoine Larocque, J. Bte. Perreault, Charles Racette, W. W. Matthews, Chs. O. Ermating:r, Dominique Rousseau, Louis Pinsonneault, Captain John Franklin of the Royal Navy, and others, engaged almost as

(1) The Upper Canadian lumbermen, on the Ottawa river, La Petite Nation, and the St. Lawrence, and as far as the Bay of Quinte, were considerable in nuinber at the beginning of the century. Every year they engaged in the district of Montreal, hundreds of Canadian voyageurs, handy alike with the woodman's axe, the canoe paddle, or the raftman's oar. The following names are all to be found in the Greffe of Gray, 1809 to 1812: Robert Fletcher, John Colman, Forsyth, Richardson and Co., James Cascallion, Wm Wells, Wm Johnson, J. Cumming and McDonnell, Moses Carnalion, Martin Moore, R. C. Wilkins, Wm. Oviatt, Alex. Allison, Archibald McMillan, Thomas Ritchie, Parker, Gerrard, Ogilvy and Co, Donald McLennan, Samuel D. Fleming, Robert Martin, Angus McLachlan, Richard Mears and Artemus Jackson, Duncan Cameron, Esra Graves, Bradlish Billing, John Ker and Benjamin Moir,