Note 15 — Chapter II

Franchère, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from Franchère, says Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all accounts—Franchère's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's—are from the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him on account of his race. Franchère became prominent in Montreal, Cox in British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.