having given any proofs of special fitness, and knowing less
about the fur trade than many a raw youth
who had served
the first week of his indenture at a third-rate outpost in
the Indian country.

To those who know what the fur trade was in the days
of the Old Régime, the stern and rugged characters it
evolved, the scenes of violence and bloodshed it witnessed,
who recall the giant forms of Alexander Mackenzie, William
Macgillivray, John George McTavish, John McLoughlin,
and the rest, to such as have read the epic of Astoria, is
there not something ludicrous in the dispatch of such a
youth as Simpson to quell a storm which had been raging
for two decades, and allay the fierce passions of men who
knew no law save their own strength or cunning? Yet
Simpson, one of those men "whom the blind goddess
delighteth to honour," succeeded. He succeeded simply as
a small pin of sound metal, artfully introduced, becomes
a pivot around which an unwieldy engine, otherwise
threatened by dislocation and disintegration, performs its
functions.

In the language of a contemporary trader who had many
opportunities of knowing him well, he "combined with
the prepossessing manners of a gentleman all the craft and
subtlety of an intriguing courtier; while his cold and callous
heart was incapable of sympathising with the woes and
pains of his fellow-men. On his first arrival he carefully
concealed from those whom he was about to supersede the
powers with which he was invested; he studied the characters
of individuals, scrutinised in secret their mode of managing
affairs, and when he had made himself fully acquainted
with every particular he desired to know, he produced his
commission - a circumstance that proved as unexpected
as it was unsatisfactory to those whose interests it affected." ¹

The jealousies and resentments engendered by the long
strife made his position at first difficult. He lavished

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