In 1779 a group of independent fur traders from Montreal banded together to form the North West Company; this was a trading expedient and no one could have foreseen its brilliant and far-reaching results. Before the North West Company name disappeared in a merger with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821, it had spanned the continent, reached the Arctic, and traded round the Horn to China. Many of the great rivers and lakes of the North and West carry the names of the company's servants as the only memorial so far accorded them: Pond, Frobisher, Mackenzie, Thompson and Fraser are merely the best remembered of perhaps the most remarkable group of associates that Canada has seen.