The wily Scot soon had his revenge. One of the messages he had smuggled out of his evil-smelling confinement bore a message for William Williams, a high-level Bay Company official, alerting Williams that top Nor’Wester officers and a harvest of furs were returning to Montreal by way of Grand Rapids, where the Saskatchewan River joined Lake Winnipeg. Acting on this priceless nugget of intelligence, Williams surprised the Nor’Westers at Grand Rapids with a schooner armed with cannons and an assault team of 20 men. The partners were apprehended and the furs confiscated.Williams’ audacious coup-he had even arrested Benjamin Frobisher, a son of one of the North West Company’s founders put an effective end to the war in the Athabasca country.

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Ironically, it was not the struggle in the woods and marshes of the beaver country that ultimately forced the North West Company to give up the fight. In the end, the Nor’Westers were defeated by the access of Bay Company governors to the corridors of power across the ocean in London. Hudson’s Bay could count on loans from the Bank of England to finance its fight against the Nor’Westers in Canada. And it was the Bay Company that still held the never-broken Royal Charter. There seemed no hope for the Nor’Westers but to form an alliance with their old enemies.

On March 26, 1821, the North West Fur Company officially merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The name of the new fur trade monopoly? The Hudson’s Bay Company. The toughminded business administrators of the Bay Company were now united with the dynamic Scots and voyageurs of the old Nor’Westers. It was not a moment too soon, for the new company would soon be confronting the greatest challenge in its history: the seemingly irresistible flood tide of American empire surging up the Pacific Coast and the Mississippi Valley. The Hudson’s Bay Company was the power down in Oregon; for example, until mountain man-turned-cattle driver Ewing Young and other Americans asserted their independence beginning in the late 1830s).

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