160 Sir ALEXANDER MACKENZIE

A has pledged himself so decidedly
opposed to this project that he will try every
means in his power to thwart it’; and he
added later that Mackenzie had threatened
him with the Assiniboine Indians.

These were petty tactics, unworthy of a
man of Mackenzie’s stature. Yet the North-
Westers need not be blamed for their opposi-
tion to Selkirk’s colony. Selkirk had secured
from the Hudson’s Bay Company the legal
ownership of a rich territory, including the
best part of modern Manitoba, which lay
athwart the North West Company’s com-
munications from Lake Superior to their
western posts. It was the area from which
they drew a large part of their supply of pro-
visions, and it had been in their undisputed
occupation for many years. Because a king
of England in 1670, without knowing what
he was doing, had given to the Hudson’s Bay
Company an empire in the new world, an
empire which the Company had never been
able or even anxious to develop, now, one
hundred and forty years later, the North-
Westers, who had entered into that empire