The Hudson Bay Explorers and the British Conquest of all Canada
In a general way the discovery of the main features of the vast
Canadian Dominion may be thus apportioned amongst the different
European nations. First came the British, led by an Italian pilot.
They discovered Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.
Then came the Portuguese, who discovered the north-east of
Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador, while a French expedition
under an Italian captain reached to Nova Scotia and southern
Newfoundland. A Spanish expedition under a Portuguese leader shortly
afterwards reached the coast of New Brunswick. After that the French
from Brittany, Normandy, and the west coast of France laid bare the
_west_ coast of Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the River St.
Lawrence, and the Great Lakes.
Sir Francis Drake led the way in the exploration of the north-west
coast of North America. He reached, in 1579, as far north on that side
as the country of Oregon, which he christened New Albion. This action
stirred up the Spaniards, who explored the coast of California, and in
1591-2 sent an Ionian Island pilot, Apostolos Valeriano (commonly
called Juan de Fuca), in charge of an expedition to discover the
imagined Straits of Anian. He gave strength to this idea of a
continuous water route across temperate North America by entering (in
1592) the straits, since called Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island
and the modern State of Washington, and passing thence into the
Straits of Georgia, which bear a striking resemblance in their
features to the Straits of Magellan.
French explorers and adventurers, as we have seen, penetrated from the
basin of the St. Lawrence to the north and west until they touched the
southern extension of Hudson Bay (James's Bay), discovered Lake
Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan Rivers, the upper Missouri and the whole
course of the Mississippi, and finally recorded the existence of the
Rocky Mountains.
Parallel with these movements the British discovered the broad belt of
sea between Greenland and North America and the whole area of Hudson
Bay. After the French had ceased to reign in North America, the
British were to reveal the great rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean,
the coasts and islands of the Arctic Ocean, the Yukon River, and the
coasts and islands of British Columbia and Alaska.
The first Europeans, however, to reach Alaska were Russians led by
Vitus Bering, a great Danish sea captain in the Russian service.
Bering was born in 1680 at Horsens, in the province of Aarhuus, E.
Denmark, and entered the service of Peter the Great, who was desirous
of knowing where Asia terminated and America began. Bering discovered
the straits which bear his name in 1728, and in 1741 was wrecked and
died on Bering's Island. Captain James Cook, the British discoverer of
Australia and of so many Pacific islands, completed the work of Bering
in 1788 in charting the north-west American coast right into the
Arctic Ocean.
It has already been related in Chapter III how the Hudson's Bay
Chartered Company came to be founded. Soon after their first pioneers
were established, in 1670, at Fort Nelson, on the west coast of Hudson
Bay, near where York Factory now stands, there was born--or brought
out from England as an infant--a little boy named Henry Kellsey, who
as a child took a great fancy to the Amerindians who came to trade at
Fort Nelson. As he played with them, and they returned his affection,
he learnt their language, and--for some inconceivable reason--this
gave great offence to the stupid governor of the fort (indeed, when
Kellsey as a grown man, some years afterwards, compiled a vocabulary
of the Kri language for the use of traders, the Hudson's Bay Company
ordered it to be suppressed). Stupid Governor Geyer not only objected
to Kellsey picking up the Kri language, but punished him most severely
for that and for his boyish tricks and jokes; so much so, that
Kellsey, when he was about ten years old, ran away with the returning
Indians, some of whom had grown very fond of him whilst they stayed at
Fort Nelson.
Six years afterwards an Indian brought to the governor of the fort a
letter written by Kellsey in charcoal on a piece of white birch bark.
In this he asked the governor's pardon for running away, and his
permission to return to the fort. As a kind reply was sent, Kellsey
appeared not long afterwards grown into a young man, accompanied by an
Indian wife and attended by a party of Indians. He was dressed exactly
like them, but differed from them in the respect which he showed to
his native wife. She attempted to accompany her husband into the
factory or place of business, and the governor stopped her; but
Kellsey at once told him in English that he would not enter himself if
his wife was not suffered to go with him, and so the governor
relented. After this Kellsey (who must then have been about seventeen)
seems to have regularly enrolled himself in 1688 in the service of the
Company, and he was employed as a kind of commercial traveller who
made long journeys to the north-west to beat up a fur trade for the
Company and induce tribes of Indians to make long journeys every
summer to the Company's factory with the skins they had secured
between the autumn and the spring. In this way Kellsey penetrated
into the country of the Assiniboines, and he finally reached a more
distant tribe or nation called by the long name of Néwátamipoet.[1]
Kellsey first of all made for Split Lake, up the Nelson River, and
thence paddled westwards in his canoe for a distance of 71 miles. Here
he abandoned the canoe, and, for what he estimated as 316 miles, he
tramped through a wooded country, first covered with fir and pine
trees, and farther on with poplar and birch. Apparently he then
reached a river flowing into Reindeer Lake. In a general way his steps
must have taken him in the direction of Lake Athapaska.
[Footnote 1: Spelt in the documents of the Hudson's Bay Company,
Naywatame-poet.]
On the way he had much trouble with the Assiniboin Indians and Kris,
with whom he had caught up, and with whom he was to travel in the
direction of these mysterious Néwátamipoets. The last-named tribe, who
were probably of the Athapaskan group, had killed, a few months
previously, three of the Kri women, and the Kri Indians who belonged
to Kellsey's party were bent, above all things, on attacking the
Néwátamipoets and punishing them for this outrage. Kellsey only wished
to open up peaceful relations with them and create a great trade in
furs with the Hudson's Bay Company, so he kept pleading with the
Indians not to go to war with the Néwátamipoets. On this journey,
however, one of the Kri Indians fell ill and died. The next day the
body was burnt with much ceremony--first the flesh, and then the
bones--and after this funeral the companions of the dead man began to
reason as to the cause of his death, and suddenly blamed Kellsey.
Kellsey had obstructed them from their purpose of avenging their slain
women, therefore the gods of the tribe were angry and claimed this
victim in the man who had died. Kellsey was very near being sent to
the other world to complete the sacrifice; but he arranged for "a
feast of tobacco"--in other words, a calm deliberation and the smoking
of the pipe of peace. He explained to the angry Indians that his
Company had not supplied him with guns and ammunition with which to go
to war, but to induce them to embark on the fur trade and to kill wild
animals for their skins. If, instead of this, they went to war, or
injured him, they need never again go down to Fort Nelson for any
further trade or supplies. Four days afterwards, however, the
attention of the whole party was concentrated on bison.
Bison could now be seen in abundance. Kellsey was already acquainted
with the musk ox, which he had seen in the colder regions near to
Hudson Bay; but the bison seemed to him quite different, with horns
growing like those of an English ox, black and short. In the middle of
September he reached the country of the Néwátamipoets, and presented
to their chief, on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company, a present of
clothes, knives, awls, tobacco, and a gun, gunpowder, and shot. On
this journey Kellsey encountered the grizzly bear, a more common
denizen of the western regions of North America. According to his own
account, he and one of the Indians with him were attacked by two
grizzly bears and obliged to climb into the branches of trees. The
bears followed them; but Kellsey fired and killed one, and later on
the other also. For this feat he was greatly reverenced by the
Indians, and received the name of Mistopashish, or "little giant".
Kellsey afterwards rose to be governor of York Fort, on the west coast
of Hudson Bay.
The next great explorer ranging westward from Hudson Bay was Anthony
Hendry.[2] Anthony Hendry left York factory in 1754, with a company of
Kri Indians, to make a great journey of exploration to the west, and
with the deliberate intention of wintering with the natives and not
returning for that purpose to Hudson Bay. By means of canoe travel and
portages he reached Oxford Lake. From here he gained Moose Lake, and
soon afterwards "the broad waters of the Saskatchewan--the first
Englishman to see this great river of the western plains".[3]
Twenty-two miles upstream from the point where it reached the
Saskatchewan he came to a French fort which had only been standing for
a year, and which represented probably the farthest advance northwards
of the French Canadians.
[Footnote 2: The young or old reader of this and other books dealing
with the exploration of the Canadian Dominion will be indeed puzzled
between the various Hendrys and Henrys. The last-named was a prolific
stock, from which several notable explorers and servants of the
fur-trading companies were drawn. In this book a careful distinction
must be made between the _Anthony_ Hendrey or Hendey, who commenced
his exploration of the west in 1754; the unrelated _Alexander_ Henry
the Elder, who journeyed between 1761 and 1776; and the nephew of the
last-named, Alexander Henry the Younger, whose pioneering explorations
occurred between 1799 and 1814.]
[Footnote 3: _The Search for the Western Sea_, by Lawrence J. Burpee.]
[Illustration: Map of EASTERN CANADA and NEWFOUNDLAND]
The situation was a rather delicate one, for the Hudson's Bay Company
was a thorn in the side of French Canada. However, in this
year--1754--the two nations were not actually at war, and the two
Frenchmen in charge of the fort received him "in a very genteel
manner", and invited him into their home, where he readily accepted
their hospitality. At first they spoke of detaining him till the
commandant of the fort returned, but abandoned this idea after
reflection, and Hendry continued his journey up the Saskatchewan. He
then left the river and marched on foot over the plains which separate
the North and the South Saskatchewan Rivers. The South Saskatchewan
was found to be a high stream covered with birch, poplar, elder, and
fir. He and his Indian guides were searching for the horse-riding
Blackfeet Indians.[4] All the Amerindians known to the Hudson's Bay
Company hitherto travelled on foot, using snowshoes in the winter; but
vague rumours had reached the Company that in the far south-west there
were great nations of Indians which did all their hunting on
horseback.
[Footnote 4: See p. 159.]
Hendry had now found them, and he also met a small tribe of
Assiniboins--the Mekesue or Eagle Indians--who differed from the
surrounding tribes by going about, at any rate in the summertime,
absolutely naked. Here, too, between the two Saskatchewans, they saw
herds of bison on the plains grazing like English cattle. But they
also found elk (moose), wapiti or red deer, hares, grouse, geese, and
ducks. He records in his journal: "I went with the young men
a-buffalo-hunting, all armed with bows and arrows; killed several;
fine sport. We beat them about, lodging twenty arrows in one beast. So
expert were the natives that they will take the arrows out of the
buffalo when they are foaming and raging with pain and tearing up the
ground with their feet and horns until they fall down." The
Amerindians killed far more of these splendid beasts than they could
eat, and from these carcasses they merely took the tongues and a few
choice pieces, leaving the remainder to the wolves and the grizzly
bears.
At last they arrived at the temporary village of the Blackfeet. Two
hundred tents or _tipis_ were pitched in two parallel rows, and down
this avenue marched Anthony Hendry, gazed at silently by many
Blackfeet Indians until he reached the large house or lodge of their
great chief, at the end of the avenue of tents. This lodge was large
enough to contain fifty persons. The chief received him seated on the
sacred skin of a white buffalo. The pipe of peace was then produced
and passed round in silence, each person taking a ceremonial puff.
Boiled bison beef was then brought to the guests in baskets made of
willow branches. Hendry told the great chief of the Blackfeet that he
had been sent by the great leader of the white men at Hudson Bay to
invite the Blackfeet Indians to come to these eastern waters in the
summertime, and bring with them beaver and wolf skins, for which they
would get, in return, guns, ammunition, cloth, beads, and other trade
goods. But this chief, though he listened patiently, pointed out that
this fort on Hudson Bay was situated at a very great distance, that
his men only knew how to ride horses, and not how to paddle canoes.
Moreover, they could not live without bison beef, and disliked fish.
After leaving the headquarters of the Blackfeet, Hendry rambled over
the beautiful country of fir woods and pine woods until he must have
got within sight of the Rocky Mountains, though these are not
mentioned in his journal. Then, after passing the winter (which did
not begin as regards cold weather till the 2nd of December, and was
over at the end of March) he returned to the French fort on the
Saskatchewan, where he was received by the Commandant, de La Corne,
with great kindness and hospitality. These Frenchmen, he found, were
able to speak in great perfection several Indian languages; they were
well dressed, and courtly in manners, and led a civilized life in
these distant wilds. They had excellent trade goods and were sincerely
liked by the Indians, but for some reason or other they lacked
Brazilian tobacco, which seems to have been a commodity much in favour
amongst the Indians. With this the Hudson's Bay Company were kept well
supplied, and that alone enabled them in any degree to compete with
the French. But in ten years more this French fort would be abandoned
owing to the cession of Canada to Britain.
The British, in fact, all through the first half of the eighteenth
century, by their superiority in sea power, were steadily strangling
the French empire in North America. Acadia, or Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick had been, as we have seen, recognized as British in 1713,
and Newfoundland, also, subject to certain conditions, giving France
the exclusive right to fish on the _western_ and _northern_ coasts of
Newfoundland. The result was that when "New France", or Canada and
Louisiana combined, was at its greatest extent of conquered and
administered territory, France held but a very limited seacoast from
which to approach it--just the mouth of the Mississippi, and a little
bit of Alabama on the south and Cape Breton Island on the east. Cape
Breton Island was commanded by the immensely strong fortress of
Louisburg, and the possession of this place gave the French some
security in entering the Gulf of St. Lawrence through Cabot Straits.
But Louisburg was captured by the British colonists of New England
(United States) in 1745; and although it was given back to France
again, it was reoccupied in 1758, and served as a basis for the
armaments which were directed against Quebec in 1759, and which
resulted at the close of that year in the surrender of that important
city. In 1763 all Canada was ceded to the British, and Louisiana
(which had become the western barrier of the about-to-be-born United
States) was ceded to Spain; the French flag flew no more on the
Continent of North America, save in the two little islands of St.
Pierre and Miquelon adjoining Newfoundland, wherein it still remains
as a reminder of the splendid achievements of Frenchmen in America.