on hunting and fishing, and procuring the few necessaries of civilized commerce with peltries, the spoils of their guns and traps. With the advance of settlement these men and their descendants, frontier life having become a passion with them, pushed on to new frontiers. Though such a life produced a race of men with some prominent virtues, among them great courage and self-reliance, yet it tended to a mode of living not much above barbarism. Such a life appeared to Ralph Morton very undesirable, and he labored to keep his people out of it and in a state of civilization even superior to that of Europe. Therefore he labored to keep the settlements compact and prevent straggling in the march of empire. The few in whom the desire to plunge into barbarism seemed irrepressible were selected to man the distant trading-posts. Most of these men took Indian wives; and their children, although having some undesirable characteristics, formed a medium between the two races by no means without its value to the colony.
With a view to facilitate as much as possible communication and commerce between the transmontane country and the sea, the governor bravely undertook the work of construct-
