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LORDS
OF THE
NORTH
BY
A. C. LAUT
TORONTO
WILLIAM BRIGGS
Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one
thousand nine hundred, by WILLIAM BRIGGS, at the Department of
Agriculture.
[Illustration:
LORDS
of the
NORTH
by A. C. LAUT]
TO THE
Pioneers and their Descendants
WHOSE
HEROISM WON THE LAND,
THIS WORK
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
The author desires to express thanks to pioneers and fur traders of the
West for information, details and anecdotes bearing on the old life,
which are herein embodied; and would also acknowledge the assistance of
the history of the North-West Company and manuscripts of the
_Bourgeois_, compiled by Senator L. R. Masson; and the value of such
early works as those of Dr. George Bryce, Gunn, Hargraves, Ross and
others.
THE TRAPPER'S DEFIANCE.
"The adventurous spirits, who haunted the forest and plain, grew fond of
their wild life and affected a great contempt for civilization."
You boxed-up, mewed-up artificials,
Pent in your piles of mortar and stone,
Hugging your finely spun judicials,
Adorning externals, externals alone,
Vaunting in prideful ostentation
Of the Juggernaut car, called Civilization--
What know ye of freedom and life and God?
Monkeys, that follow a showman's string,
Know more of freedom and less of care,
Cage birds, that flutter from perch to ring,
Have less of worry and surer fare.
Cursing the burdens, yourselves have bound,
In a maze of wants, running round and round--
Are ye free men, or manniken slaves?
Costly patches, adorning your walls,
Are all of earth's beauty ye care to know;
But ye strut about in soul-stifled halls
To play moth-life by a candle-glow--
What soul has space for upward fling,
What manhood room for shoulder-swing,
Coffined and cramped from the vasts of God?
The Spirit of Life, O atrophied soul,
In trappings of ease is not confined;
That touch from Infinite Will 'neath the Whole
In Nature's temple, not man's, is shrined!
From hovel-shed come out and be strong!
Be ye free! Be redeemed from the wrong,
Of soul-guilt, I charge you as sons of God!
INTRODUCTION.
I, Rufus Gillespie, trader and clerk for the North-West Company, which
ruled over an empire broader than Europe in the beginning of this
century, and with Indian allies and its own riotous _Bois-Brulés_,
carried war into the very heart of the vast territory claimed by its
rivals, the Honorable Hudson's Bay Company, have briefly related a few
stirring events of those boisterous days. Should the account here set
down be questioned, I appeal for confirmation to that missionary among
northern tribes, the famous priest, who is the son of the ill-fated girl
stolen by the wandering Iroquois. Lord Selkirk's narration of lawless
conflict with the Nor'-Westers and the verbal testimony of Red River
settlers, who are still living, will also substantiate what I have
stated; though allowance must be made for the violent partisan leaning
of witnesses, and from that, I--as a Nor'-Wester--do not claim to be
free.
On the charges and counter-charges of cruelty bandied between white men
and red, I have nothing to say. Remembering how white soldiers from
eastern cities took the skin of a native chief for a trophy of victory,
and recalling the fiendish glee of Mandanes over a victim, I can only
conclude that neither race may blamelessly point the finger of reproach
at the other.
Any variations in detail from actual occurrences as seen by my own eyes
are solely for the purpose of screening living descendants of those
whose lives are here portrayed from prying curiosity; but, in truth,
many experiences during the thrilling days of the fur companies were far
too harrowing for recital. I would fain have tempered some of the
incidents herein related to suit the sentiments of a milk-and-water age;
but that could be done only at the cost of truth.
There is no French strain in my blood, so I have not that passionate
devotion to the wild daring of _l'ancien régime_, in which many of my
rugged companions under _Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest_
gloried; but he would be very sluggish, indeed, who could not look back
with some degree of enthusiasm to the days of gentlemen adventurers in
no-man's-land, in a word, to the workings of the great fur trading
companies. Theirs were the trappers and runners, the _Coureurs des Bois_
and _Bois-Brulés_, who traversed the immense solitudes of the pathless
west; theirs, the brigades of gay _voyageurs_ chanting hilarious
refrains in unison with the rhythmic sweep of paddle blades and
following unknown streams until they had explored from St. Lawrence to
MacKenzie River; and theirs, the merry lads of the north, blazing a
track through the wilderness and leaving from Atlantic to Pacific lonely
stockaded fur posts--footprints for the pioneers' guidance. The
whitewashed palisades of many little settlements on the rivers and lakes
of the far north are poor relics of the fur companies' ancient grandeur.
That broad domain stretching from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean,
reclaimed from savagery for civilization, is the best monument to the
unheralded forerunners of empire.
RUFUS GILLESPIE.
WINNIPEG--ONE TIME FORT GARRY
FORMERLY RED RIVER SETTLEMENT,
_19th June, 18--_
Transcriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
WHEREIN A LAD SEES MAKERS OF HISTORY 9
CHAPTER II.
A STRONG MAN IS BOWED 23
CHAPTER III.
NOVICE AND EXPERT 38
CHAPTER IV.
LAUNCHED INTO THE UNKNOWN 55
CHAPTER V.
CIVILIZATION'S VENEER RUBS OFF 70
CHAPTER VI.
A GIRDLE OF AGATES RECALLED 92
CHAPTER VII.
THE LORDS OF THE NORTH IN COUNCIL 99
CHAPTER VIII.
THE LITTLE STATUE ANIMATE 118
CHAPTER IX.
DECORATING A BIT OF STATUARY 131
CHAPTER X.
MORE STUDIES IN STATUARY 144
CHAPTER XI.
A SHUFFLING OF ALLEGIANCE 163
CHAPTER XII.
HOW A YOUTH BECAME A KING 181
CHAPTER XIII.
THE BUFFALO HUNT 200
CHAPTER XIV.
IN SLIPPERY PLACES 220
CHAPTER XV.
THE GOOD WHITE FATHER 234
CHAPTER XVI.
LE GRAND DIABLE SENDS BACK OUR MESSENGER 246
CHAPTER XVII.
THE PRICE OF BLOOD 253
CHAPTER XVIII.
LAPLANTE AND I RENEW ACQUAINTANCE 266
CHAPTER XIX.
WHEREIN LOUIS INTRIGUES 281
CHAPTER XX.
PLOTS AND COUNTER-PLOTS 297
CHAPTER XXI.
LOUIS PAYS ME BACK 313
CHAPTER XXII.
A DAY OF RECKONING 327
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE IROQUOIS PLAYS HIS LAST CARD 341
CHAPTER XXIV.
FORT DOUGLAS CHANGES MASTERS 350
CHAPTER XXV.
HIS LORDSHIP TO THE RESCUE 368
CHAPTER XXVI.
FATHER HOLLAND AND I IN THE TOILS 378
CHAPTER XXVII.
UNDER ONE ROOF 389
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE LAST OF LOUIS' ADVENTURES 409
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE PRIEST JOURNEYS TO A FAR COUNTRY 433
LORDS OF THE NORTH
CHAPTER I
WHEREIN A LAD SEES MAKERS OF HISTORY
"Has any one seen Eric Hamilton?" I asked.
For an hour, or more, I had been lounging about the sitting-room of a
club in Quebec City, waiting for my friend, who had promised to join me
at dinner that night. I threw aside a news-sheet, which I had exhausted
down to minutest advertisements, stretched myself and strolled across to
a group of old fur-traders, retired partners of the North-West Company,
who were engaged in heated discussion with some officers from the
Citadel.
"Has any one seen Eric Hamilton?" I repeated, indifferent to the merits
of their dispute.
"That's the tenth time you've asked that question," said my Uncle Jack
MacKenzie, looking up sharply, "the tenth time, Sir, by actual count,"
and he puckered his brows at the interruption, just as he used to when I
was a little lad on his knee and chanced to break into one of his
hunting stories with a question at the wrong place.
"Hang it," drawled Colonel Adderly, a squatty man with an over-fed look
on his bulging, red cheeks, "hang it, you don't expect Hamilton? The
baby must be teething," and he added more chaff at the expense of my
friend, who had been the subject of good-natured banter among club
members for devotion to his first-born.
I saw Adderly's object was more to get away from the traders' arguments
than to answer me; and I returned the insolent challenge of his
unconcealed yawn in the faces of the elder men by drawing a chair up to
the company of McTavishes and Frobishers and McGillivrays and MacKenzies
and other retired veterans of the north country.
"I beg your pardon, gentlemen," said I, "what were you saying to Colonel
Adderly?"
"Talk of your military conquests, Sir," my uncle continued, "Why, Sir,
our men have transformed a wilderness into an empire. They have blazed a
path from Labrador on the Atlantic to that rock on the Pacific, where my
esteemed kinsman, Sir Alexander MacKenzie, left his inscription of
discovery. Mark my words, Sir, the day will come when the names of David
Thompson and Simon Fraser and Sir Alexander MacKenzie will rank higher
in English annals than Braddock's and----"
"Egad!" laughed the officer, amused at my uncle, who had been a leading
spirit in the North-West Company and whose enthusiasm knew no bounds,
"Egad! You gentlemen adventurers wouldn't need to have accomplished much
to eclipse Braddock." And he paused with a questioning supercilious
smile. "Sir Alexander was a first cousin of yours, was he not?"
My uncle flushed hotly. That slighting reference to gentlemen
adventurers, with just a perceptible emphasis of the _adventurers_, was
not to his taste.
"Pardon me, Sir," said he stiffly, "you forget that by the terms of
their charter, the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company have the
privilege of being known as gentlemen adventurers. And by the Lord, Sir,
'tis a gentleman adventurer and nothing else, that stock-jobbing
scoundrel of a Selkirk has proved himself! And he, sir, was neither
Nor'-Wester, nor Canadian, but an Englishman, like the commander of the
Citadel." My uncle puffed out these last words in the nature of a
defiance to the English officer, whose cheeks took on a deeper purplish
shade; but he returned the charge good-humoredly enough.
"Nonsense, MacKenzie, my good friend," laughed he patronizingly, "if the
Right Honorable, the Earl of Selkirk, were such an adventurer, why the
deuce did the Beaver Club down at Montreal receive him with open mouths
and open arms and----"
"And open hearts, Sir, you may say," interrupted my Uncle MacKenzie.
"And I'd thank you not to 'good-friend' me," he added tartly.
Now, the Beaver Club was an organization at Nor'-Westers renowned for
its hospitality. Founded in 1785, originally composed of but nineteen
members and afterwards extended only to men who had served in the _Pays
d'En Haut_, it soon acquired a reputation for entertaining in regal
style. Why the vertebrae of colonial gentlemen should sometimes lose the
independent, upright rigidity of self-respect on contact with old world
nobility, I know not. But instantly, Colonel Adderly's reference to Lord
Selkirk and the Beaver Club called up the picture of a banquet in
Montreal, when I was a lad of seven, or thereabouts. I had been tricked
out in some Highland costume especially pleasing to the Earl--cap,
kilts, dirk and all--and was taken by my Uncle Jack MacKenzie to the
Beaver Club. Here, in a room, that glittered with lights, was a table
steaming with things, which caught and held my boyish eyes; and all
about were crowds of guests, gentlemen, who had been invited in the
quaint language of the club, "To discuss the merits of bear, beaver and
venison." The great Sir Alexander MacKenzie, with his title fresh from
the king, and his feat of exploring the river now known by his name and
pushing through the mountain fastnesses to the Pacific on all men's
lips--was to my Uncle Jack's right. Simon Fraser and David Thompson and
other famous explorers, who were heroes to my imagination, were there
too. In these men and what they said of their wonderful voyages I was
far more interested than in the young, keen-faced man with a tie, that
came up in ruffles to his ears, and with an imperial decoration on his
breast, which told me he was Lord Selkirk.
I remember when the huge salvers and platters were cleared away, I was
placed on the table to execute the sword dance. I must have acquitted
myself with some credit; for the gentlemen set up a prodigious clapping,
though I recall nothing but a snapping of my fingers, a wave of my cap
and a whirl of lights and faces around my dizzy head. Then my uncle took
me between his knees, promising to let me sit up to the end if I were
good, and more wine was passed.
"That's enough for you, you young cub," says my kinsman, promptly
inverting the wine-glass before me.
"O Uncle MacKenzie," said I with a wry face, "do you measure your own
wine so?"
Whereat, the noble Earl shouted, "Bravo! here's for you, Mr. MacKenzie."
And all the gentlemen set up a laugh and my uncle smiled and called to
the butler, "Here, Johnson, toddy for one, glass of hot water, pure, for
other."
But when Johnson brought back the glasses, I observed Uncle MacKenzie
kept the toddy. "There, my boy, there's Adam's ale for you," said he,
and into the glass of hot water he popped a peppermint lozenge.
"Fie!" laughed Sir Alexander to my uncle's right, "Fie to cheat the
little man!"
"His is the best wine of the cellar," vowed His Lordship; and I drank my
peppermint with as much gusto and self-importance as any man of them.
Then followed toasts, such a list of toasts as only men inured to tests
of strength could take. Ironical toasts to the North-West Passage, whose
myth Sir Alexander had dispelled; toasts to the discoverer of the
MacKenzie River, which brought storms of applause that shook the house;
toasts to "our distinguished guest," whose suave response disarmed all
suspicion; toasts to the "Northern winterers," poor devils, who were
serving the cause by undergoing a life-long term of Arctic exile; toasts
to "the merry lads of the north," who only served in the ranks without
attaining to the honor of partnership; toasts enough, in all conscience,
to drown the memory of every man present. Thanks to my Uncle Jack
MacKenzie, all my toasts were taken in peppermint, and the picture in my
mind of that banquet is as clear to-day as it was when I sat at the
table. What would I not give to be back at the Beaver Club, living it
all over again and hearing Sir Alexander MacKenzie with his flashing
hero-eyes and quick, passionate gestures, recounting that wonderful
voyage of his with a sulky crew into a region of hostiles; telling of
those long interminable winters of Arctic night, when the great explorer
sounded the depths of utter despair in service for the company and knew
not whether he faced madness or starvation; and thrilling the whole
assembly with a description of his first glimpse of the Pacific! Perhaps
it was what I heard that night--who can tell--that drew me to the wild
life of after years. But I was too young, then, to recognize fully the
greatness of those men. Indeed, my country was then and is yet too
young; for if their greatness be recognized, it is forgotten and
unhonored.
I think I must have fallen asleep on my uncle's knee; for I next
remember sleepily looking about and noticing that many of the gentlemen
had slid down in their chairs and with closed eyes were breathing
heavily. Others had slipped to the floor and were sound asleep. This
shocked me and I was at once wide awake. My uncle was sitting very erect
and his arm around my waist had the tight grasp that usually preceded
some sharp rebuke. I looked up and found his face grown suddenly so hard
and stern, I was all affright lest my sleeping had offended him. His
eyes were fastened on Lord Selkirk with a piercing, angry gaze. His
Lordship was not nodding, not a bit of it. How brilliant he seemed to my
childish fancy! He was leaning forward, questioning those Nor'-Westers,
who had received him with open arms, and open hearts. And the wine had
mounted to the head of the good Nor'-Westers and they were now also
receiving the strange nobleman with open mouths, pouring out to him a
full account of their profits, the extent of the vast, unknown game
preserve, and how their methods so far surpassed those of the Hudson's
Bay, their rival's stock had fallen in value from 250 to 50 per cent.
The more information they gave, the more His Lordship plied them with
questions.
"I must say," whispered Uncle Jack to Sir Alexander MacKenzie, "if any
Hudson's Bay man asked such pointed questions on North-West business,
I'd give myself the pleasure of ejecting him from this room."
Then, I knew his anger was against Lord Selkirk and not against me for
sleeping.
"Nonsense," retorted Sir Alexander, who had cut active connection with
the Nor'-Westers some years before, "there's no ground for suspicion."
But he seemed uneasy at the turn things had taken.
"Has your Lordship some colonization scheme that you ask such pointed
questions?" demanded my uncle, addressing the Earl. The nobleman turned
quickly to him and said something about the Highlanders and Prince
Edward's Island, which I did not understand. The rest of that evening
fades from my thoughts; for I was carried home in Mr. Jack MacKenzie's
arms.
And all these things happened some ten or twelve years before that wordy
sword-play between this same uncle of mine and the English colonel from
the Citadel.
"We erred, Sir, through too great hospitality," my uncle was saying to
the colonel. "How could we know that Selkirk would purchase controlling
interest in Hudson's Bay stock? How could we know he'd secure a land
grant in the very heart of our domain?"
"I don't object to his land, nor to his colonists, nor to his dower of
ponies and muskets and bayonets to every mother's son of them," broke in
another of the retired traders, "but I do object to his drilling those
same colonists, to his importing a field battery and bringing out that
little ram of a McDonell from the Army to egg the settlers on! It's bad
enough to pillage our fort; but this proclamation to expel Nor'-Westers
from what is claimed as Hudson's Bay Territory----"
"Just listen to this," cries my uncle pulling out a copy of the
obnoxious proclamation and reading aloud an order for the expulsion of
all rivals to the Hudson's Bay Company from the northern territory.
"Where can Hamilton be?" said I, losing interest in the traders' quarrel
as soon as they went into details.
"Home with his wifie," half sneered the officer in a nagging way, that
irritated me, though the remark was, doubtless, true. "Home with his
wifie," he repeated in a sing-song, paying no attention to the
elucidation of a subject he had raised. "Good old man, Hamilton, but
since marriage, utterly gone to the bad!"
"To the what?" I queried, taking him up short. This officer, with the
pudding cheeks and patronizing insolence, had a provoking trick of
always keeping just inside the bounds of what one might resent. "To the
what, did you say Hamilton had gone?"
"To the domestics," says he laughing, then to the others, as if he had
listened to every word of the explanations, "and if His Little
Excellency, Governor MacDonell, by the grace of Lord Selkirk, ruler over
gentlemen adventurers in no-man's-land, expels the good Nor'-Westers
from nowhere to somewhere else, what do the good Nor'-Westers intend
doing to the Little Tyrant?"
"Charles the First him," responds a wag of the club.
"Where's your Cromwell?" laughs the colonel.
"Our Cromwell's a Cameron, temper of a Lucifer, oaths before action,"
answers the wag.
"Tuts!" exclaims Uncle Jack testily. "We'll settle His Lordship's little
martinet of the plains. Warrant for his arrest! Fetch him out!"
"Warrant 43rd King George III. will do it," added one of the partners
who had looked the matter up.
"43rd King George III. doesn't give jurisdiction for trial in Lower
Canada, if offense be committed elsewhere," interjects a lawyer with
show of importance.
"A Daniel come to judgment," laughs the colonel, winking as my uncle's
wrath rose.
"Pah!" says Mr. Jack MacKenzie in disgust, stamping on the floor with
both feet. "You lawyers needn't think you'll have your pickings when fur
companies quarrel. We'll ship him out, that's all. Neither of the
companies wants to advertise its profits--"
"Or its methods--ahem!" interjects the colonel.
"And its private business," adds my uncle, looking daggers at Adderly,
"by going to court."
Then they all rose to go to the dining-room; and as I stepped out to
have a look down the street for Hamilton, I heard Colonel Adderly's last
fling--"Pretty rascals, you gentlemen adventurers are, so shy and coy
about law courts."
It was a dark night, with a few lonely stars in mid-heaven, a sickle
moon cutting the horizon cloud-rim and a noisy March wind that boded
snow from The Labrador, or sleet from the Gulf.
When Eric Hamilton left the Hudson's Bay Company's service at York
Factory on Hudson Bay and came to live in Quebec, I was but a student at
Laval. It was at my Uncle MacKenzie's that I met the tall, dark, sinewy,
taciturn man, whose influence was to play such a strange part in my
life; and when these two talked of their adventures in the far, lone
land of the north, I could no more conceal my awe-struck admiration than
a girl could on first discovering her own charms in a looking-glass. I
think he must have noticed my boyish reverence, for once he condescended
to ask about the velvet cap and green sash and long blue coat which made
up the Laval costume, and in a moment I was talking to him as volubly as
if he were the boy and I, the great Hudson's Bay trader.
"It makes me feel quite like a boy again," he had said on resuming
conversation with Mr. MacKenzie. "By Jove! Sir, I can hardly realize I
went into that country a lad of fifteen, like your nephew, and here I
am, out of it, an old man."
"Pah, Eric man," says my uncle, "you'll be finding a wife one of these
days and renewing your youth."
"Uncle," I broke out when the Hudson's Bay man had gone home, "how old
is Mr. Hamilton?"
"Fifteen years older than you are, boy, and I pray Heaven you may have
half as much of the man in you at thirty as he has," returns my uncle
mentally measuring me with that stern eye of his. At that information,
my heart gave a curious, jubilant thud. Henceforth, I no longer looked
upon Mr. Hamilton with the same awe that a choir boy entertains for a
bishop. Something of comradeship sprang up between us, and before that
year had passed we were as boon companions as man and boy could be. But
Hamilton presently spoiled it all by fulfilling my uncle's prediction
and finding a wife, a beautiful, fair-haired, frail slip of a girl, near
enough the twenties to patronize me and too much of the young lady to
find pleasure in an awkward lad. That meant an end to our rides and
walks and sails down the St. Lawrence and long evening talks; but I took
my revenge by assuming the airs of a man of forty, at which Hamilton
quizzed me not a little and his wife, Miriam, laughed. When I surprised
them all by jumping suddenly from boyhood to manhood--"like a tadpole
into a mosquito," as my Uncle Jack facetiously remarked. Meanwhile, a
son and heir came to my friend's home and I had to be thankful for a
humble third place.
And so it came that I was waiting for Eric's arrival at the Quebec Club
that night, peering from the porch for sight of him and calculating how
long it would take to ride from the Chateau Bigot above Charlesbourg,
where he was staying. Stepping outside, I was surprised to see the form
of a horse beneath the lantern of the arched gateway; and my surprise
increased on nearer inspection. As I walked up, the creature gave a
whinny and I recognized Hamilton's horse, lathered with sweat,
unblanketed and shivering. The possibility of an accident hardly
suggested itself before I observed the bridle-rein had been slung over
the hitching-post and heard steps hurrying to the side door of the
club-house.
"Is that you, Eric?" I called.
There was no answer; so I led the horse to the stable boy and hurried
back to see if Hamilton were inside. The sitting room was deserted; but
Eric's well-known, tall figure was entering the dining-room. And a
curious figure he presented to the questioning looks of the club men. In
one hand was his riding whip, in the other, his gloves. He wore the
buckskin coat of a trapper and in the belt were two pistols. One sleeve
was torn from wrist to elbow and his boots were scratched as if they had
been combed by an iron rake. His broad-brimmed hat was still on,
slouched down over his eyes like that of a scout.
"Gad! Hamilton," exclaimed Uncle Jack MacKenzie, who was facing Eric as
I came up behind, "have you been in a race or a fight?" and he gave him
the look of suspicion one might give an intoxicated man.
"Is it a cold night?" asked the colonel punctiliously, gazing hard at
the still-strapped hat.
Not a word came from Hamilton.
"How's the cold in your head?" continued Adderly, pompously trying to
stare Hamilton's hat off.
"Here I am, old man! What's kept you?" and I rushed forward but quickly
checked myself; for Hamilton turned slowly towards me and instead of
erect bearing, clear glance, firm mouth, I saw a head that was bowed,
eyes that burned like fire, and parched, parted, wordless lips.
If the colonel had not been stuffing himself like the turkey guzzler
that he was, he would have seen something unspeakably terrible written
on Hamilton's silent face.
"Did the little wifie let him off for a night's play?" sneered Adderly.
Barely were the words out, when Hamilton's teeth clenched behind the
open lips, giving him an ugly, furious expression, strange to his face.
He took a quick stride towards the officer, raised his whip and brought
it down with the full strength of his shoulder in one cutting blow
across the baggy, purplish cheeks of the insolent speaker.