Excerpt from Canada, an Encyclopedia of the Country, Vol. 2 of 5: The Canadian Dominion Considered in Its Historic Relations, Its Natural Resources, Its Material Progress, and Its National Development

HE Second Volume of Mr. Castell Hopkins' Encyclopedia is devoted to three subjects which must ever occupy a large and prominent place in any work on Canada - The Hudson's Bay Company, the Railways and the Churches.

Among the peasantry and gentry who left France in the seventeenth century to take up their abode in Canada, few were those who settled down as tillers of the soil. By far the greater number became hunters and trappers. All accounts of the early occupation of the continent by Europeans agree that the French were exceptionally endowed for that avocation. They, more than any other race from the Old World, readily adapted themselves to the manners and customs ofthe aboriginal tribes; they easily fell in with their mode of life and obtained their confidence and friendship where others only met with distrust and rebuke. It would also seem that the very wildness of the forest exercised a strange fascination over the men of the Gallic race, which made them cling to the adventurous life for the very love of it, when it had been first embraced for profit and lucre. They sprang into existence a class of men who became and have remained famous all over the continent under the names of Coureur; des bois; rovers of the forest, impatient of the restraints of civilization, delighting in the freedom ofthe Indian whose but they shared and whose garb they adoptedf - a garb under Which there often coursed the best and proudest blood of old France.

But while men of the Gallic race were roaming over the whole continent, whilst they were exploring lakes and rivers, forests and prairies, just for the love of sport and adventure; making but occasional and spasmodic efforts to plant settlements and to take permanent possession of the soil; men of anglo-saxon blood were quietly, silently, persistently and doggedly organizing a powerful association which by a vast, systematic, carefully prepared and carefully carried out arrangement gradually drew to itself the whole for trade of North America. The history of the Hudson's Bay Company is little known. Some day its annals will be unfolded to the inquisitive gaze of the world; then it will reveal itself as one of the most astonishingly perfect organizations ever devised by man. It gradually planted its posts in all that Northern part of the continent where the fur-bearingr animals were to be found - on the bleak shores of Labrador, on all the icy streams that flow into the Arctic Ocean, on the vast prairies of the interior, in the Rocky Mountains and beyond even to the waters of the Pacific. All these posts were working in unison. In every one of them was an agent, who had come as a lad from the Northern coasts or Islands of Scotland, toiling steadily, growing old, and ever faithful to the interests of the great corporation whose servant he was. Connecting all these posts was a vast, complete, sure system of communication Furs were collected from post to post, provisions and merchandise distributed, and mails conveyed and distributed, with less celerity, no doubt, but with as much security as in the most advanced times of our country in our own day. Dog trains were in constant motion during winter, flotillas of birch canoes during summer. For two hundred years or more a ship especially constructed for that hardy service and as regularly as the course of the planets, crossed and re-crossed between England and Hudson's Bay, bringing with it provisions and articles of exchange.

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