whom the Government had appealed, all differences between the two great
fur-trading companies were adjusted, and in 1821 a coalition was formed.
At Ellice's suggestion the giant combination then got from Parliament
exclusive privileges beyond the waters that flow into Hudson Bay, over
the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific, for a term of twenty years.
These extra privileges were surrendered in 1838, and were renewed for
twenty-one years longer, to be revoked, so far as British Columbia
(then New Caledonia) was concerned, in 1858. That territory then became
a crown colony, and it and Vancouver Island, which had taken on a
colonial character at the time of the California gold fever (1849), were
united in 1866. The extra privileges of the fur-traders were therefore
not again renewed. In 1868, after the establishment of the Canadian
union, whatever presumptive rights the Hudson Bay Company got under
Charles II.'s charter were vacated in consideration of a payment by
Canada of $1,500,000 cash, one-twentieth of all surveyed lands within
the fertile belt, and 50,000 acres surrounding the company's posts. It
is estimated that the land grant amounts to 7,000,000 of acres, worth
$20,000,000, exclusive of all town sites.
Thus we reach the present condition of the company, more than 220 years
old, maintaining 200 central posts and unnumbered dependent ones, and
trading in Labrador on the Atlantic; at Massett, on Queen Charlotte
Island, in the Pacific; and deep within the Arctic Circle in the north.
The company was newly capitalized not long ago with 100,000 shares at
L20 ($10,000,000), but, in addition to its dividends, it has paid back
L7 in every L20, reducing its capital to L1,300,000. The stock, however,
is quoted at its original value. The supreme control of the company is
vested in a governor, deputy governor, and five directors, elected by
the stockholders in London. They delegate their powers to an executive
resident in this country, who was until lately called the "Governor of
Rupert's Land," but now is styled the chief commissioner, and is in
absolute charge of the company and all its operations. His term of
office is unlimited. The present head of the corporation, or governor,
is Sir Donald A. Smith, one of the foremost spirits in Canada, who
worked his way up from a clerkship in the company. The business of the
company is managed on the outfit system, the most old-fogyish, yet by
its officers declared to be the most perfect, plan in use by any
corporation. The method is to charge against each post all the supplies
that are sent to it between June 1st and June 1st each year, and then to
set against this the product of each post in furs and in cash received.
It used to take seven years to arrive at the figures for a given year,
but, owing to improved means of transportation, this is now done in two
years.
[Illustration: THE COUREUR DU BOIS AND THE SAVAGE]
Almost wherever you go in the newly settled parts of the Hudson Bay
territory you find at least one free-trader's shop set up in rivalry
with the old company's post. These are sometimes mere storehouses for
the furs, and sometimes they look like, and are partly, general country
stores. There can be no doubt that this rivalry is very detrimental to
the fur trade from the stand-point of the future. The great company can
afford to miss a dividend, and can lose at some points while gaining at
others, but the free-traders must profit in every district. The
consequence is such a reckless destruction of game that the plan adopted
by us for our seal-fisheries--the leasehold system--is envied and
advocated in Canada. A greater proportion of trapping and an utter
unconcern for the destruction of the game at all ages are now
ravaging the wilderness. Many districts return as many furs as they ever
yielded, but the quantity is kept up at fearful cost by the
extermination of the game. On the other hand, the fortified wall of
posts that opposed the development of Canada, and sent the surplus
population of Europe to the United States, is rid of its palisades and
field-pieces, and the main strongholds of the ancient company and its
rivals have become cities. The old fort on Vancouver Island is now
Victoria; Fort Edmonton is the seat of law and commerce in the Peace
River region; old Fort William has seen Port Arthur rise by its side;
Fort Garry is Winnipeg; Calgary, the chief city of Alberta, is on the
site of another fort; and Sault Ste. Marie was once a Northwest post.
But civilization is still so far off from most of the "factories," as
the company's posts are called, that the day when they shall become
cities is in no man's thought or ken. And the communication between the
centres and outposts is, like the life of the traders, more nearly like
what it was in the old, old days than most of my readers would imagine.
My Indian guides were battling with their paddles against the mad
current of the Nipigon, above Lake Superior, one day last summer, and I
was only a few hours away from Factor Flanagan's post near the great
lake, when we came to a portage, and might have imagined from what we
saw that time had pushed the hands back on the dial of eternity at least
a century.
Some rapids in the river had to be avoided by the brigade that was being
sent with supplies to a post far north at the head of Lake Nipigon. A
cumbrous, big-timbered little schooner, like a surf-boat with a sail,
and a square-cut bateau had brought the men and goods to the "carry."
The men were half-breeds as of old, and had brought along their women
and children to inhabit a camp of smoky tents that we espied on a bluff
close by; a typical camp, with the blankets hung on the bushes, the
slatternly women and half-naked children squatting or running about, and
smudge fires smoking between the tents to drive off mosquitoes and
flies. The men were in groups below on the trail, at the water-side end
of which were the boats' cargoes of shingles and flour and bacon and
shot and powder in kegs, wrapped, two at a time, in rawhide. They were
dark-skinned, short, spare men, without a surplus pound of flesh in the
crew, and with longish coarse black hair and straggling beards. Each man
carried a tump-line, or long stout strap, which he tied in such a way
around what he meant to carry that a broad part of the strap fitted over
the crown of his head. Thus they "packed" the goods over the portage,
their heads sustaining the loads, and their backs merely steadying them.
When one had thrown his burden into place, he trotted off up the trail
with springing feet, though the freight was packed so that 100 pounds
should form a load. For bravado one carried 200 pounds, and then all the
others tried to pack as much, and most succeeded. All agreed that one,
the smallest and least muscular-looking one among them, could pack 400
pounds.
As the men gathered around their "smudge" to talk with my party, it was
seen that of all the parts of the picturesque costume of the _voyageur_
or _bois-brule_ of old--the capote, the striped shirt, the
pipe-tomahawk, plumed hat, gay leggins, belt, and moccasins--only the
red worsted belt and the moccasins have been retained. These men could
recall the day when they had tallow and corn meal for rations, got no
tents, and were obliged to carry 200 pounds, lifting one package, and
then throwing a second one atop of it without assistance. Now they carry
only 100 pounds at a time, and have tents and good food given to them.
We will not follow them, nor meet, as they did, the York boat coming
down from the north with last winter's furs. Instead, I will endeavor to
lift the curtain from before the great fur country beyond them, to give
a glimpse of the habits and conditions that prevail throughout a
majestic territory where the rivers and lakes are the only roads, and
canoes and dog-sleds are the only vehicles.
[Footnote 2: I am indebted to Mr. Matthew Semple, of Philadelphia, a
grandnephew of the murdered Governor, for further facts about that hero.
He led a life of travel and adventure, spiced with almost romantic
happenings. He wrote ten books: records at travel and one novel. His
parents were passengers on an English vessel which was captured by the
Americans in 1776, and brought to Boston, Mass., where he was born on
February 26, 1777. He was therefore only 39 years of age when he was
slain. His portrait, now in Philadelphia, shows him to have been a man
of striking and handsome appearance.]
VII
"TALKING MUSQUASH"
Concluding the sketch of the history and work of the Hudson Bay Company
The most sensational bit of "musquash talk" in more than a quarter of a
century among the Hudson Bay Company's employes was started the other
day, when Sir Donald A. Smith, the governor of the great trading
company, sent a type-written letter to Winnipeg. If a Cree squaw had
gone to the trading-shop at Moose Factory and asked for a bustle and a
box of face-powder in exchange for a beaver-skin, the suggestion of
changing conditions in the fur trade would have been trifling compared
with the sense of instability to which this appearance of
machine-writing gave rise. The reader may imagine for himself what a
wrench civilization would have gotten if the world had laid down its
goose-quills and taken up the type-writer all in one day. And that is
precisely what Sir Donald Smith had done. The quill that had served to
convey the orders of Alexander Mackenzie had satisfied Sir George
Simpson; and, in our own time, while men like Lord Iddesleigh, Lord
Kimberley, and Mr. Goschen sat around the candle-lighted table in the
board-room of the company in London, quill pens were the only ones at
hand. But Sir Donald's letter was not only the product of a machine; it
contained instructions for the use of the type-writer in the offices at
Winnipeg, and there was in the letter a protest against illegible manual
chirography such as had been received from many factories in the
wilderness. Talking business in the fur trade has always been called
"talking musquash" (musk-rat), and after that letter came the turn taken
by that form of talk suggested a general fear that from the Arctic to
our border and from Labrador to Queen Charlotte's Islands the canvassers
for competing machines will be "racing" in all the posts, each to prove
that his instrument can pound out more words in a minute than any
other--in those posts where life has hitherto been taken so gently that
when one day a factor heard that the battle of Waterloo had been fought
and won by the English, he deliberately loaded the best trade gun in the
storehouse and went out and fired it into the pulseless woods, although
it was two years after the battle, and the disquieted Old World had long
known the greater news that Napoleon was caged in St. Helena. The only
reassuring note in the "musquash talk" to-day is sounded when the
subject of candles is reached. The Governor and committee in London
still pursue their deliberations by candlelight.
But rebellion against their fate is idle, and it is of no avail for the
old factors to make the point that Sir Donald found no greater trouble
in reading their writing than they encountered when one of his missives
had to be deciphered by them. The truth is that the tide of immigration
which their ancient monopoly first shunted into the United States is
now sweeping over their vast territory, and altering more than its
face. Not only are the factors aware that the new rule confining them to
share in the profits of the fur trade leaves to the mere stockholders
far greater returns from land sales and storekeeping, but a great many
of them now find village life around their old forts, and railroads
close at hand, and Law setting up its officers at their doors, so that
in a great part of the territory the romance of the old life, and their
authority as well, has fled.
[Illustration: TALKING MUSQUASH]
Less than four years ago I had passed by Qu'Appelle without visiting it,
but last summer I resolved not to make the mistake again, for it was the
last stockaded fort that could be studied without a tiresome and costly
journey into the far north. It is on the Fishing Lakes, just beyond
Manitoba. But on my way a Hudson Bay officer told me that they had just
taken down the stockade in the spring, and that he did not know of a
remaining "palisadoe" in all the company's system except one, which,
curiously enough, had just been ordered to be put up around Fort
Hazleton, on the Skeena River, in northern British Columbia, where some
turbulent Indians have been very troublesome, and where whatever
civilization there may be in Saturn seems nearer than our own. This one
example of the survival of original conditions is far more eloquent of
their endurance than the thoughtless reader would imagine. It is true
that there has come a tremendous change in the status and spirit of the
company. It is true that its officers are but newly bending to external
authority, and that settlers have poured into the south with such
demands for food, clothes, tools, and weapons as to create within the
old corporation one of the largest of shopkeeping companies. Yet to-day,
as two centuries ago, the Hudson Bay Company remains the greatest
fur-trading association that exists.
The zone in which Fort Hazleton is situated reaches from ocean to ocean
without suffering invasion by settlers, and far above it to the Arctic
Sea is a grand belt wherein time has made no impress since the first
factory was put up there. There and around it is a region, nearly
two-thirds the size of the United States, which is as if our country
were meagrely dotted with tiny villages at an average distance of five
days apart, with no other means of communication than canoe or dog
train, and with not above a thousand white men in it, and not as many
pure-blooded white women as you will find registered at a first-class
New York hotel on an ordinary day. The company employs between fifteen
hundred and two thousand white men, and I am assuming that half of them
are in the fur country.
We know that for nearly a century the company clung to the shores of
Hudson Bay. It will be interesting to peep into one of its forts as they
were at that time; it will be amazing to see what a country that
bay-shore territory was and is. There and over a vast territory three
seasons come in four months--spring in June, summer in July and August,
and autumn in September. During the long winter the earth is blanketed
deep in snow, and the water is locked beneath ice. Geese, ducks, and
smaller birds abound as probably they are not seen elsewhere in
America, but they either give place to or share the summer with
mosquitoes, black-flies, and "bull-dogs" (_tabanus_) without number,
rest, or mercy. For the land around Hudson Bay is a vast level marsh, so
wet that York Fort was built on piles, with elevated platforms around
the buildings for the men to walk upon. Infrequent bunches of small
pines and a litter of stunted swamp-willows dot the level waste, the
only considerable timber being found upon the banks of the rivers. There
is a wide belt called the Arctic Barrens all along the north, but below
that, at some distance west of the bay, the great forests of Canada
bridge across the region north of the prairie and the plains, and cross
the Rocky Mountains to reach the Pacific. In the far north the musk-ox
descends almost to meet the moose and deer, and on the near slope of the
Rockies the wood-buffalo--larger, darker, and fiercer than the bison of
the plains, but very like him--still roams as far south as where the
buffalo ran highest in the days when he existed.
Through all this northern country the cold in winter registers 40 deg., and
even 50 deg., below zero, and the travel is by dogs and sleds. There men in
camp may be said to dress to go to bed. They leave their winter's store
of dried meat and frozen fish out-of-doors on racks all winter (and so
they do down close to Lake Superior); they hear from civilization only
twice a year at the utmost; and when supplies have run out at the posts,
we have heard of their boiling the parchment sheets they use instead of
glass in their windows, and of their cooking the fat out of
beaver-skins to keep from starving, though beaver is so precious that
such recourse could only be had when the horses and dogs had been eaten.
As to the value of the beaver, the reader who never has purchased any
for his wife may judge what it must be by knowing that the company has
long imported buckskin from Labrador to sell to the Chippeways around
Lake Nipigon in order that they may not be tempted, as of old, to make
thongs and moccasins of the beaver; for their deer are poor, with skins
full of worm-holes, whereas beaver leather is very tough and fine.
But in spite of the severe cold winters, that are, in fact, common to
all the fur territory, winter is the delightful season for the traders;
around the bay it is the only endurable season. The winged pests of
which I have spoken are by no means confined to the tide-soaked region
close to the great inland sea. The whole country is as wet as that
orange of which geographers speak when they tell us that the water on
the earth's surface is proportioned as if we were to rub a rough orange
with a wet cloth. Up in what we used to call British America the
illustration is itself illustrated in the countless lakes of all sizes,
the innumerable small streams, and the many great rivers that make
waterways the roads, as canoes are the wagons, of the region. It is a
vast paradise for mosquitoes, and I have been hunted out of fishing and
hunting grounds by them as far south as the border. The "bull-dog" is a
terror reserved for especial districts. He is the Sioux of the insect
world, as pretty as a warrior in buckskin and beads, but carrying a
red-hot sword blade, which, when sheathed in human flesh, will make the
victim jump a foot from the ground, though there is no after-pain or
itching or swelling from the thrust.
[Illustration: INDIAN HUNTERS MOVING CAMP]
Having seen the country, let us turn to the forts. Some of them really
were forts, in so far as palisades and sentry towers and double doors
and guns can make a fort, and one twenty miles below Winnipeg was a
stone fort. It is still standing. When the company ruled the territory
as its landlord, the defended posts were on the plains among the bad
Indians, and on the Hudson Bay shore, where vessels of foreign nations
might be expected. In the forests, on the lakes and rivers, the
character and behavior of the fish-eating Indians did not warrant
armament. The stockaded forts were nearly all alike. The stockade was of
timber, of about such a height that a man might look over it on tiptoe.
It had towers at the corners, and York Fort had a great "lookout" tower
within the enclosure. Within the barricade were the company's buildings,
making altogether such a picture as New York presented when the Dutch
founded it and called it New Amsterdam, except that we had a church and
a stadt-house in our enclosure. The Hudson Bay buildings were sometimes
arranged in a hollow square, and sometimes in the shape of a letter H,
with the factor's house connecting the two other parts of the character.
The factor's house was the best dwelling, but there were many smaller
ones for the laborers, mechanics, hunters, and other non-commissioned
men. A long, low, whitewashed log-house was apt to be the clerks' house,
and other large buildings were the stores where merchandise was kept,
the fur-houses where the furs, skins, and pelts were stored, and the
Indian trading-house, in which all the bartering was done. A
powder-house, ice-house, oil-house, and either a stable or a boat-house
for canoes completed the post. All the houses had double doors and
windows, and wherever the men lived there was a tremendous stove set up
to battle with the cold.
The abode of jollity was the clerks' house, or bachelors' quarters.
Each man had a little bedroom containing his chest, a chair, and a bed,
with the walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated papers or not,
according to each man's taste. The big room or hall, where all met in
the long nights and on off days, was as bare as a baldpate so far as its
whitewashed or timbered walls went, but the table in the middle was
littered with pipes, tobacco, papers, books, and pens and ink, and all
around stood (or rested on hooks overhead) guns, foils, and
fishing-rods. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there was no work in at least
one big factory. Breakfast was served at nine o'clock, dinner at one
o'clock, and tea at six o'clock. The food varied in different places.
All over the prairie and plains great stores of pemmican were kept, and
men grew to like it very much, though it was nothing but dried buffalo
beef pounded and mixed with melted fat. But where they had pemmican they
also enjoyed buffalo hunch in the season, and that was the greatest
delicacy, except moose muffle (the nose of the moose), in all the
territory. In the woods and lake country there were venison and moose as
well as beaver--which is very good eating--and many sorts of birds, but
in that region dried fish (salmon in the west, and lake trout or
white-fish nearer the bay) was the staple. The young fellows hunted and
fished and smoked and drank and listened to the songs of the _voyageurs_
and the yarns of the "breeds" and Indians. For the rest there was plenty
of work to do.
They had a costume of their own, and, indeed, in that respect there has
been a sad change, for all the people, white, red, and crossed, dressed
picturesquely. You could always distinguish a Hudson Bay man by his
capote of light blue cloth with brass buttons. In winter they wore as
much as a Quebec carter. They wore leather coats lined with flannel,
edged with fur, and double-breasted. A scarlet worsted belt went around
their waists, their breeches were of smoked buckskin, reaching down to
three pairs of blanket socks and moose moccasins, with blue cloth
leggins up to the knee. Their buckskin mittens were hung from their
necks by a cord, and usually they wrapped a shawl of Scotch plaid around
their necks and shoulders, while on each one's head was a fur cap with
ear-pieces.
[Illustration: SETTING A MINK-TRAP]
The French Canadians and "breeds," who were the _voyageurs_ and hunters,
made a gay appearance. They used to wear the company's regulation light
blue capotes, or coats, in winter, with flannel shirts, either red or
blue, and corduroy trousers gartered at the knee with bead-work. They
all wore gaudy worsted belts, long, heavy woollen stockings--covered
with gayly-fringed leggins--fancy moccasins, and tuques, or
feather-decked hats or caps bound with tinsel bands. In mild weather
their costume was formed of a blue striped cotton shirt, corduroys, blue
cloth leggins bound with orange ribbons, the inevitable sash or worsted
belt, and moccasins. Every hunter carried a powder-horn slung from his
neck, and in his belt a tomahawk, which often served also as a pipe. As
late as 1862, Viscount Milton and W. B. Cheadle describe them in a book,
_The North-west Passage by Land_, in the following graphic language:
"The men appeared in gaudy array, with beaded fire-bag, gay
sash, blue or scarlet leggings, girt below the knee with beaded
garters, and moccasins elaborately embroidered. The (half-breed)
women were in short, bright-colored skirts, showing richly
embroidered leggings and white moccasins of cariboo-skin
beautifully worked with flowery patterns in beads, silk, and
moose hair."
The trading-room at an open post was--and is now--like a cross-roads
store, having its shelves laden with every imaginable article that
Indians like and hunters need--clothes, blankets, files, scalp-knives,
gun screws, flints, twine, fire-steels, awls, beads, needles, scissors,
knives, pins, kitchen ware, guns, powder, and shot. An Indian who came
in with furs threw them down, and when they were counted received the
right number of castors--little pieces of wood which served as
money--with which, after the hours of reflection an Indian spends at
such a time, he bought what he wanted.
But there was a wide difference between such a trading-room and one in
the plains country, or where there were dangerous Indians--such as some
of the Crees, and the Chippeways, Blackfeet, Bloods, Sarcis, Sioux,
Sicanies, Stonies, and others. In such places the Indians were let in
only one or two at a time, the goods were hidden so as not to excite
their cupidity, and through a square hole grated with a cross of iron,
whose spaces were only large enough to pass a blanket, what they wanted
was given to them. That is all done away with now, except it be in
northern British Columbia, where the Indians have been turbulent.