Like a fever in the blood, the rivalry between the North West Fur Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company for control of the Canadian fur trade, the golden treasure of the kingdom of the North, had been rising in intensity for months. In early June 1816, the Hudson’s Bay leader, Robert Semple, razed Fort Gibraltar, recently captured from the rival ‘Nor’Westers.’ To the Meacutetis, the fiery Canadian woodsmen of mixed Indian, French and Highland Scots blood, this was the final blow. Appointing Cuthbert Grant, a Canadian veteran of the recent War of 1812, their captain general, the Métis daubed on war paint (red for blood and black for death) and rode off to make war on the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company.

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In the early twilight hours of June 19, 1816, just a year and a day after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Meacutetis and their Indian relatives met up with a party of Hudson’s Bay men, led by Semple himself, in a copse of trees called the Seven Oaks, now in the heart of modern-day Winnipeg. After a hot exchange of words, Semple grabbed for the gun of a Meacutetis named Franccedilois Boucher. Protecting Boucher, Grant emptied his rifle into Semple’s thigh.

During a frenzied melee that only lasted for 15 minutes, the Hudson’s Bay traders were mowed down before the Nor’Westers’ accurate fire like winter wheat before a sharp scythe. Twenty of them lay dead with the imperious Semple, killed when one of the Meacutetis pushed the muzzle of his rifle into Semple’s chest and blasted him into eternity. The Meacutetis then stripped and mutilated the dead in an orgy of revenge.

Once again, the struggle for monopoly of the fur trade, as vital to the trappers of the North as it was to American mountain men like Jeb Smith, Kit Carson, Jim Bridget and Joe Meek further south in the United States, had led to murder on the green Canadian prairie. In a rage of blood lust, the hunger for beaver had claimed its latest victims.

The search for the precious beaver began with the discovery of Canada itself by French mariner Jacques Cartier in the summer of 1534. Coming upon a group of Micmac Indians on the shore of the Baie de Chaleur, a narrow inlet between the modern provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick, Cartier recorded in his ship’s log that the Micmacs ‘made frequent signs to us to come on shore, holding up some furs on sticks.’ After Cartier fired off his ship’s cannons and muskets to show that he was someone to be reckoned with, the Indians literally traded the furs off their backs for French-made bibelots, or trinkets. Thus ended, to the satisfaction of both parties, Canada’s first recorded fur trade.

Soon, beaver fur was highly sought after in Europe. Beaver hats became the height of fashion. The humble, bucktoothed beaver was also the source of a medical cure-all called castoreum, a potent remedy for everything from adult headaches to children’s fevers. (Modern chemistry has shown castoreurn to be chemically related to that modern wonder drug aspirin.) Beaver was even used like fish, because of its scaly fishlike tail, as a substitute for meat in Catholic Europe.

Ironically, it was two Frenchmen who eventually would lure the English into the fur trade, and thus begin the struggle between France and England for possession of Canada that would not end until the victory of British General James Wolfe au Quebec City in 1759.

Pierre-Esprit Radisson (for whom the modern hotel chain is named) and Medard Chouart virtually saved the fragile economy of New France with their fur trade bonanza of 1659. But the incredibly small-minded governor, the Marquis d’Argenson, not only confiscated most of the duo’s hoard of beaver skins but also briefly jailed the enterprising Chouart for trading with the Indians. Thumbing their noses at the myopic d’Argenson, the two disgruntled trappers struck out across the forests to New England, where canny, far-sighted Yankee businessmen saw the fortune to be made in la pelletrie, the fur trade with the Indians of the woods and plains. By autumn 1665, Radisson and Chouart were in London, telling King Charles 11 their story of the riches that lay beyond the setting sun.

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