Coureurs de Bois.%--There soon grew up in this way a class of half-civilized vagrants, who ranged the woods in true Indian style, and gained a living by guiding the canoes of fur traders along the rivers and lakes of the interior.

Stimulated by the profits of the fur trade, these men pushed their traffic to the most distant tribes, spreading French guns, French hatchets, beads, cloth, tobacco and brandy, and French influence over the whole Northwest.

Where the trader and the _coureur de bois_ went, the priest and the soldier followed, and soon mission houses and forts were established at all the chief passes and places suited to control the Indian trade.
%65.

The English and the Indians.%--How, meantime, did the English act toward the Indians?
In the first place, nothing led them to form close relationship with the tribes.

The fur trade--the source of Canadian prosperity--and the zeal of priests eager for the conversion of the heathen, which sent the traders, the _coureurs de bois_, and the priests from tribe to tribe and from the Atlantic halfway to the Pacific, did not appeal to the English colonists.