As New France grew, French colonists, first known as coureurs de bois and later voyageurs, travelled north and west from Montreal in search of new supplies while their British rivals set up northern trading posts run by the Hudson's Bay Company. The commercial rivalry continued after the British Conquest of New France in 1759, with the establishment of the North West Company by a group of bilingual Scottish Gaelic/English-speaking Montreal merchants who had come to British North America from the Scottish Highlands in the wake of the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden and the incipient beginnings of the Highland Clearances. The two companies built trading posts far west of Lake Superior and Hudson Bay, but the Nor'Westers were more aggressive as they travelled north to the Arctic Ocean via the Mackenzie River and west to the Pacific. The fierce competition ended in 1821 with the amalgamation of the companies into a Hudson's Bay Company monopoly. The Company finally surrendered its northwestern empire when it sold its land to Canada in 1869 following the decrease in profits and demand for furs.