236 T. C. Elliott. ment among the natives." Earlier fur traders (probably the Frobishers in 1775-6) had found the Indians there playing a game which afterward became the national game of Canada. Another explanation given is this : here the canoe routes divided or crossed, that north to the Athabasca District, and that west to the Rocky Mountains. Just where Peter Skene Ogden began to earn his thirty or forty pounds per year during his apprenticeship as clerk of the Northwest Company we do not know, but presumably he spent the entire seven years at and in the region of Fort Isle a la Crosse. This was a rather more pleasant fort than others because less isolated; and the Cree Indians thereabouts were a superior tribe. The rival fur companies were then opposing each other bitterly. That was the period of the Seven Oaks Massacre on Red River. Ogden had his hand in some of the acts of violence, which were not limited to the Red River neighbor- hood by any means, and he was of an age and disposition to be recklessly active in behalf of his own company. Hon. Donald Gunn, in his History of Manitoba, writing of the loss of two lives at Fort Isle a la Crosse in the Winter of 1814-15, says (pp. 121-126) : "The consequence was that the servants of the Northwest Company, among whom Samuel Black and Mr. Peter Ogden, acted a conspicuous part when at leisure, amused themselves by annoying and insulting their neigh- bors, at times encouraging if not commanding their men to set their nets adrift, and at other times cutting them into pieces — not forgetting to pay occasional visits to the Hudson's Bay Company's House, where their conduct was often highly improper and unjustifiable." And right here, for the sake of diversion, let us note a further companionship of Messrs. Ogden and Black, twenty- one years later, recorded in a letter of Archie McDonald's at Colvile in January, 1837, to John McLeod: "With your two friends of old, Ogden and Black, I made the trip to the sea last summer. There we found the usual bustle not at all diminished by the presence of a new transport ship from Eng-
