at a post. Their custom is to wait until the first signs of spring, and
then to pack up their winter's store of furs, and take advantage of the
last of the snow and ice for the journey. They hunt from November to
May; but the trapping and shooting of bears go on until the 15th of
June, for those animals do not come from their winter dens until May
begins. They come to the posts in their best attire, and in the old days
that formed as strong a contrast to their present dress as their leather
tepees of old did to the cotton ones of to-day. Ballantyne, who wrote a
book about his service with the great fur company, says merely that they
were painted, and with scalp-locks fringing their clothes; but in Lewis
and Clarke's journal we read description after description of the brave
costuming of these color-and-ornament-loving people. Take the Sioux, for
instance. Their heads were shaved of all but a tuft of hair, and
feathers hung from that. Instead of the universal blanket of to-day,
their main garment was a robe of buffalo-skin with the fur left on, and
the inner surface dressed white, painted gaudily with figures of beasts
and queer designs, and fringed with porcupine quills. They wore the fur
side out only in wet weather. Beneath the robe they wore a shirt of
dressed skin, and under that a leather belt, under which the ends of a
breech-clout of cloth, blanket stuff, or skin were tucked. They wore
leggins of dressed antelope hide with scalp-locks fringing the seams,
and prettily beaded moccasins for their feet. They had necklaces of the
teeth or claws of wild beasts, and each carried a fire-bag, a quiver,
and a brightly painted shield, giving up the quiver and shield when guns
came into use.
The Indians who came to trade were admitted to the store precisely as
voters are to the polls under the Australian system--one by one. They
had to leave their guns outside. When rum was given out, each Indian had
to surrender his knife before he got his tin cup.
[Illustration: WOOD INDIANS COME TO TRADE]
The company made great use of the Iroquois, and considered them the best
boatmen in Canada. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of the Northwest Company,
employed eight of them to paddle him to the Pacific Ocean by way of the
Peace and Fraser rivers, and when the greatest of Hudson Bay
executives, Sir George Simpson, travelled, Iroquois always propelled
him. The company had a uniform for all its Indian employes--a blue,
gray, or blanket capote, very loose, and reaching below the knee, with a
red worsted belt around the waist, a cotton shirt, no trousers, but
artfully beaded leggins with wide flaps at the seams, and moccasins over
blanket socks. In winter they wore buckskin coats lined with flannel,
and mittens were given to them. We have seen how the half-breeds were
dressed. They were long employed at women's work in the forts, at making
clothing and at mending. All the mittens, moccasins, fur caps, deer-skin
coats, etc., were made by them. They were also the washer-women.
Perhaps the factor had a good time in the old days, or thought he did.
He had a wife and servants and babies, and when a visitor came, which
was not as often as snow-drifts blew over the stockade, he entertained
like a lord. At first the factors used to send to London, to the head
office, for a wife, to be added to the annual consignment of goods, and
there must have been a few who sent to the Orkneys for the sweethearts
they left there. But in time the rule came to be that they married
Indian squaws. In doing this, not even the first among them acted
blindly, for their old rivals and subsequent companions of the Northwest
and X. Y. companies began the custom, and the French _voyageurs_ and
_coureurs du bois_ had mated with Indian women before there was a Hudson
Bay Company. These rough and hardy woodsmen, and a large number of
half-breeds born of just such alliances, began at an early day to
settle near the trading-posts. Sometimes they established what might be
called villages, but were really close imitations of Indian camps,
composed of a cluster of skin tepees, racks of fish or meat, and a swarm
of dogs, women, and children. In each tepee was the fireplace, beneath
the flue formed by the open top of the habitation, and around it were
the beds of brush, covered with soft hides, the inevitable copper
kettle, the babies swaddled in blankets or moss bags, the women and
dogs, the gun and paddle, and the junks and strips of raw meat hanging
overhead in the smoke. This has not changed to-day; indeed, very little
that I shall speak of has altered in the true or far fur country. The
camps exist yet. They are not so clean (or, rather, they are more
dirty), and the clothes and food are poorer and harder to get; that is
all.
[Illustration: A VOYAGEUR OR CANOE-MAN OF GREAT SLAVE LAKE]
The Europeans saw that these women were docile, or were kept in order
easily by floggings with the tent poles; that they were faithful and
industrious, as a rule, and that they were not all unprepossessing--from
their point of view, of course. Therefore it came to pass that these
were the most frequent alliances in and out of the posts in all that
country. The consequences of this custom were so peculiar and important
that I must ask leave to pause and consider them. In Canada we see that
the white man thus made his bow to the redskin as a brother in the
truest sense. The old _coureurs_ of Norman and Breton stock, loving a
wild, free life, and in complete sympathy with the Indian, bought or
took the squaws to wife, learned the Indian dialects, and shared their
food and adventures with the tribes. As more and more entered the
wilderness, and at last came to be supported, in camps and at posts and
as _voyageurs_, by the competing fur companies, there grew up a class of
half-breeds who spoke English and French, married Indians, and were as
much at home with the savages as with the whites. From this stock the
Hudson Bay men have had a better choice of wives for more than a
century. But when these "breeds" were turbulent and murderous--first in
the attacks on Selkirk's colony, and next during the Riel rebellion--the
Indians remained quiet. They defined their position when, in 1819, they
were tempted with great bribes to massacre the Red River colonists.
"No," said they; "the colonists are our friends." The men who sought to
excite them to murder were the officers of the Northwest Company, who
bought furs of them, to be sure, but the colonists had shared with the
Indians in poverty and plenty, giving now and taking then. All were
alike to the red men--friends, white men, and of the race that had taken
so many of their women to wife. Therefore they went to the colonists to
tell them what was being planned against them, and not from that day to
this has an Indian band taken the war-path against the Canadians. I have
read General Custer's theory that the United States had to do with
meat-eating Indians, whereas the Canadian tribes are largely
fish-eaters, and I have seen 10,000 references to the better Indian
policy of Canada; but I can see no difference in the two policies, and
between the Rockies and the Great Lakes I find that Canada had the
Stonies, Blackfeet, and many other fierce tribes of buffalo-hunters. It
is in the slow, close-growing acquaintance between the two races, and in
the just policy of the Hudson Bay men towards the Indians, that I see
the reason for Canada's enviable experience with her red men.
[Illustration: IN A STIFF CURRENT]
But even the Hudson Bay men have had trouble with the Indians in recent
years, and one serious affair grew out of the relations between the
company's servants and the squaws. There is etiquette even among
savages, and this was ignored up at old Fort St. Johns, on the Peace
River, with the result that the Indians slaughtered the people there and
burned the fort. They were Sicanie Indians of that region, and after
they had massacred the men in charge, they met a boat-load of white men
coming up the river with goods. To them they turned their guns also, and
only four escaped. It was up in that country likewise--just this side
of the Rocky Mountains, where the plains begin to be forested--that a
silly clerk in a post quarrelled with an Indian, and said to him,
"Before you come back to this post again, your wife and child will be
dead." He spoke hastily, and meant nothing, but squaw and pappoose
happened to die that winter, and the Indian walked into the fort the
next spring and shot the clerk without a word.
To-day the posts are little village-like collections of buildings,
usually showing white against a green background in the prettiest way
imaginable; for, as a rule, they cluster on the lower bank of a river,
or the lower near shore of a lake. There are not clerks enough in most
of them to render a clerks' house necessary, for at the little posts
half-breeds are seen to do as good service as Europeans. As a rule,
there is now a store or trading-house and a fur-house and the factor's
house, the canoe-house and the stable, with a barn where gardening is
done, as is often the case when soil and climate permit. Often the
fur-house and store are combined, the furs being laid in the upper story
over the shop. There is always a flag-staff, of course. This and the
flag, with the letters "H. B. C." on its field, led to the old hunters'
saying that the initials stood for "Here before Christ," because, no
matter how far away from the frontier a man might go, in regions he
fancied no white man had been, that flag and those letters stared him in
the face. You will often find that the factor, rid of all the ancient
timidity that called for "palisadoes and swivels," lives on the high
upper bank above the store. The usual half-breed or Indian village is
seldom farther than a couple of miles away, on the same water. The
factor is still, as he always has been, responsible only to himself for
the discipline and management of his post, and therefore among the
factories we will find all sorts of homes--homes where a piano and the
magazines are prized, and daughters educated abroad shed the lustre of
refinement upon their surroundings, homes where no woman rules, and
homes of the French half-breed type, which we shall see is a very
different mould from that of the two sorts of British half-breed that
are numerous. There never was a rule by which to gauge a post. In one
you found religion valued and missionaries welcomed, while in others
there never was sermon or hymn. In some, Hudson Bay rum met the rum of
the free-traders, and in others no rum was bartered away. To-day, in
this latter respect, the Dominion law prevails, and rum may not be given
or sold to the red man.
When one thinks of the lives of these factors, hidden away in forest,
mountain chain, or plain, or arctic barren, seeing the same very few
faces year in and year out, with breaches of the monotonous routine once
a year when the winter's furs are brought in, and once a year when the
mail-packet arrives--when one thinks of their isolation, and lack of
most of those influences which we in our walks prize the highest, the
reason for their choosing that company's service seems almost
mysterious. Yet they will tell you there is a fascination in it. This
could be understood so far as the half-breeds and French Canadians were
concerned, for they inherited the liking; and, after all, though most of
them are only laborers, no other laborers are so free, and none spice
life with so much of adventure. But the factors are mainly men of
ability and good origin, well fitted to occupy responsible positions,
and at better salaries. However, from the outset the rule has been that
they have become as enamoured of the trader's life as soldiers and
sailors always have of theirs. They have usually retired from it
reluctantly, and some, having gone home to Europe, have begged leave to
return.
The company has always been managed upon something like a military
basis. Perhaps the original necessity for forts and men trained to the
use of arms suggested this. The uniforms were in keeping with the rest.
The lowest rank in the service is that of the laborer, who may happen to
fish or hunt at times, but is employed--or enlisted, as the fact is, for
a term of years--to cut wood, shovel snow, act as a porter or gardener,
and labor generally about the post. The interpreter was usually a
promoted laborer, but long ago the men in the trade, Indians and whites
alike, met each other half-way in the matter of language. The highest
non-commissioned rank in early days was that of the postmaster at large
posts. Men of that rank often got charge of small outposts, and we read
that they were "on terms of equality with gentlemen." To-day the service
has lost these fine points, and the laborers and commissioned officers
are sharply separated. The so-called "gentleman" begins as a prentice
clerk, and after a few years becomes a clerk. His next elevation is to
the rank of a junior chief trader, and so on through the grades of chief
trader, factor, and chief factor, to the office of chief commissioner,
or resident American manager, chosen by the London board, and having
full powers delegated to him. A clerk--or "clark," as the rank is
called--may never touch a pen. He may be a trader. Then again he may be
truly an accountant. With the rank he gets a commission, and that
entitles him to a minimum guarantee, with a conditional extra income
based on the profits of the fur trade. Men get promotions through the
chief commissioner, and he has always made fitness, rather than
seniority, the criterion. Retiring officers are salaried for a term of
years, the original pension fund and system having been broken up.
Sir Donald A. Smith, the present governor of the company, made his way
to the highest post from the place of a prentice clerk. He came from
Scotland as a youth, and after a time was so unfortunate as to be sent
to the coast of Labrador, where a man is as much out of both the world
and contact with the heart of the company as it is possible to be. The
military system was felt in that instance; but every man who accepts a
commission engages to hold himself in readiness to go cheerfully to the
north pole, or anywhere between Labrador and the Queen Charlotte
Islands. However, to a man of Sir Donald's parts no obstacle is more
than a temporary impediment. Though he stayed something like seventeen
years in Labrador, he worked faithfully when there was work to do, and
in his own time he read and studied voraciously. When the Riel
rebellion--the first one--disturbed the country's peace, he appeared on
the scene as commissioner for the Government. Next he became chief
commissioner for the Hudson Bay Company. After a time he resigned that
office to go on the board in London, and thence he stepped easily to the
governorship. His parents, whose home was in Morayshire, Scotland, gave
him at his birth, in 1821, not only a constitution of iron, but that
shrewdness which is only Scotch, and he afterwards developed remarkable
fore-sight, and such a grasp of affairs and of complex situations as to
amaze his associates.
[Illustration: VOYAGEUR WITH TUMPLINE]
Of course his career is almost as singular as his gifts, and the
governorship can scarcely be said to be the goal of the general
ambition, for it has been most apt to go to a London man. Even ordinary
promotion in the company is very slow, and it follows that most men live
out their existence between the rank of clerk and that of chief factor.
There are 200 central posts, and innumerable dependent posts, and the
officers are continually travelling from one to another, some in their
districts, and the chief or supervising ones over vast reaches of
country. In winter, when dogs and sleds are used, the men walk, as a
rule, and it has been nothing for a man to trudge 1000 miles in that way
on a winter's journey. Roderick Macfarlane, who was cut off from the
world up in the Mackenzie district, became an indefatigable explorer,
and made most of his journeys on snow-shoes. He explored the Peel, the
Liard, and the Mackenzie, and their surrounding regions, and went far
within the Arctic Circle, where he founded the most northerly post of
the company. By the regular packet from Calgary, near our border, to the
northernmost post is a 3000-mile journey. Macfarlane was fond of the
study of ornithology, and classified and catalogued all the birds that
reach the frozen regions.
I heard of a factor far up on the east side of Hudson Bay who reads his
daily newspaper every morning with his coffee--but of course such an
instance is a rare one. He manages it by having a complete set of the
London _Times_ sent to him by each winter's packet, and each morning the
paper of that date in the preceding year is taken from the bundle by his
servant and dampened, as it had been when it left the press, and spread
by the factor's plate. Thus he gets for half an hour each day a taste of
his old habit and life at home.
There was another factor who developed artistic capacity, and spent his
leisure at drawing and painting. He did so well that he ventured many
sketches for the illustrated papers of London, some of which were
published.
The half-breed has developed with the age and growth of Canada. There
are now half-breeds and half-breeds, and some of them are titled, and
others hold high official places. It occurred to an English lord not
long ago, while he was being entertained in a Government house in one of
the parts of newer Canada, to inquire of his host, "What are these
half-breeds I hear about? I should like to see what one looks like." His
host took the nobleman's breath away by his reply. "I am one," said he.
There is no one who has travelled much in western Canada who has not now
and then been entertained in homes where either the man or woman of the
household was of mixed blood, and in such homes I have found a high
degree of refinement and the most polished manners. Usually one needs
the information that such persons possess such blood. After that the
peculiar black hair and certain facial features in the subject of such
gossip attest the truthfulness of the assertion. There is no rule for
measuring the character and quality of this plastic, receptive, and
often very ambitious element in Canadian society, yet one may say
broadly that the social position and attainments of these people have
been greatly influenced by the nationality of their fathers. For
instance, the French _habitants_ and woodsmen far, far too often sank to
the level of their wives when they married Indian women. Light-hearted,
careless, unambitious, and drifting to the wilderness because of the
absence of restraint there; illiterate, of coarse origin, fond of
whiskey and gambling--they threw off superiority to the Indian, and
evaded responsibility and concern in home management. Of course this is
not a rule, but a tendency. On the other hand, the Scotch and English
forced their wives up to their own standards. Their own home training,
respect for more than the forms of religion, their love of home and of a
permanent patch of ground of their own--all these had their effect, and
that has been to rear half-breed children in proud and comfortable
homes, to send them to mix with the children of cultivated persons in
old communities, and to fit them with pride and ambition and cultivation
for an equal start in the journey of life. Possessing such foundation
for it, the equality has happily never been denied to them in Canada.
[Illustration: VOYAGEURS IN CAMP FOR THE NIGHT]
To-day the service is very little more inviting than in the olden time.
The loneliness and removal from the touch of civilization remain
throughout a vast region; the arduous journeys by sled and canoe remain;
the dangers of flood and frost are undiminished. Unfortunately, among
the changes made by time, one is that which robs the present factor's
surroundings of a great part of that which was most picturesque. Of all
the prettinesses of the Indian costuming one sees now only a trace here
and there in a few tribes, while in many the moccasin and tepee, and in
some only the moccasin, remain. The birch-bark canoe and the snow-shoe
are the main reliance of both races, but the steamboat has been
impressed into parts of the service, and most of the descendants of the
old-time _voyageur_ preserve only his worsted belt, his knife, and his
cap and moccasins at the utmost. In places the _engage_ has become a
mere deck-hand. His scarlet paddle has rotted away; he no longer awakens
the echoes of forest or canyon with _chansons_ that died in the throats
of a generation that has gone. In return, the horrors of intertribal war
and of a precarious foothold among fierce and turbulent bands have
nearly vanished; but there was a spice in them that added to the
fascination of the service.
The dogs and sleds form a very interesting part of the Hudson Bay
outfit. One does not need to go very deep into western Canada to meet
with them. As close to our centre of population as Nipigon, on Lake
Superior, the only roads into the north are the rivers and lakes,
traversed by canoes in summer and sleds in winter. The dogs are of a
peculiar breed, and are called "huskies"--undoubtedly a corruption of
the word Esquimaux. They preserve a closer resemblance to the wolf than
any of our domesticated dogs, and exhibit their kinship with that
scavenger of the wilderness in their nature as well as their looks.
To-day their females, if tied and left in the forest, will often attest
companionship with its denizens by bringing forth litters of wolfish
progeny. Moreover, it will not be necessary to feed all with whom the
experiment is tried, for the wolves will be apt to bring food to them as
long as they are thus neglected by man. They are often as large as the
ordinary Newfoundland dog, but their legs are shorter, and even more
hairy, and the hair along their necks, from their shoulders to their
skulls, stands erect in a thick, bristling mass. They have the long
snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves, and their cry is a
yelp rather than a bark. Like wolves they are apt to yelp in chorus at
sunrise and at sunset. They delight in worrying peaceful animals,
setting their own numbers against one, and they will kill cows, or even
children, if they get the chance. They are disciplined only when at
work, and are then so surprisingly obedient, tractable, and industrious
as to plainly show that though their nature is savage and wolfish, they
could be reclaimed by domestication. In isolated cases plenty of them
are. As it is, in their packs, their battles among themselves are
terrible, and they are dangerous when loose. In some districts it is the
custom to turn them loose in summer on little islands in the lakes,
leaving them to hunger or feast according as the supply of dead fish
thrown upon the shore is small or plentiful. When they are kept in dog
quarters they are simply penned up and fed during the summer, so that
the savage side of their nature gets full play during long periods. Fish
is their principal diet, and stores of dried fish are kept for their
winter food. Corn meal is often fed to them also. Like a wolf or an
Indian, a "husky" gets along without food when there is not any, and
will eat his own weight of it when it is plenty.