Retrospective--The North-west Passage--The Bay of Hudson--Rival
Claims--The Old French Fur Trade--The North-west Company--How the
Half-breeds came--The Highlanders defeated-Progress--Old Feuds.
WE who have seen in our times the solution of the long-hidden secret
worked out amidst the icy solitudes of the Polar Seas cannot realize the
excitement which for nigh 400 years vexed the minds of European kings and
peoples--how they thought and toiled over this northern passage to wild
realms of Cathay and Hindostan--how from every port, from the Adriatic to
the Baltic, ships had sailed out in quest of this ocean strait, to find
in succession portions of the great world which Columbus had given to the
human race.
Adventurous spirits were these early navigators who thus fearlessly
entered the great unknown oceans of the North in craft scarce larger
than canal-boats. And how long and how tenaciously did they hold that
some passage must exist by which the Indies could be reached! Not a
creek, not a bay, but seemed to promise the long-sought-for opening to
the Pacific.
Hudson and Frobisher, Fox, Baffin, Davis, and James, how little thought
they of that vast continent whose presence was but an obstacle in the
path of their discovery! Hudson had long perished in the ocean which
bears his name before it was known to be a cul-de-sac. Two hundred years
had passed away from the time of Columbus ere his dream of an open sea to
the city of Quinsay in Cathay had ceased to find believers. This immense
inlet of Hudson Bay must lead to the Western Ocean. So, at least, thought
a host of bold navigators who steered their way through fog and ice into
the great Sea of Hudson, giving those names to strait and bay and island,
which we read in our school-days upon great wall-hung maps and never
think or care about again. Nor were these anticipations of reaching the
East held only by the sailors.
La Salle, when he fitted out his expeditions from the Island of Montreal
for the West, named his point of departure La Chine, so certain was he
that his canoes would eventually reach Cathay. And La Chine still exists
to attest his object. But those who went on into the great continent,
reaching the shores of vast lakes and the banks of mighty rivers, learnt
another and a truer story. They saw these rivers flowing with vast
volumes of water from the north-west; and, standing on the brink of their
unknown waves, they rightly judged that such rolling volumes of water
must have their sources far away in distant mountain ranges. Well might
the great heart of De Soto sink within him when, after long months of
arduous toil through swamp and forest, he stood at last on the low shores
of the Mississippi and beheld in thought the enormous space which lay
between him and the spot where such a river had its birth.
The East--it was always the East. Columbus had said the world was not so
large as the common herd believed it, and yet when he had increased it by
a continent he tried to make it smaller than it really was. So fixed were
men's minds upon the East, that it was long before they would think of
turning to account the discoveries of those early navigators. But in time
there came to the markets of Europe the products of the New World. The
gold and the silver of Mexico and the rich sables of the frozen North
found their way into the marts of Western Europe. And while Drake
plundered galleons from the Spanish Main, England and France commenced
their career of rivalry for the possession of that trade in furs and
peltries which had its sources round the icy shores of the Bay of Hudson.
It was reserved however for the fiery Prince Rupert to carry into effect
the idea of opening up the North-west. Through the ocean of Hudson Bay.
Somewhere about 200 years ago a ship sailed away from England bearing in
it a company of adventurers sent out to form a colony upon the southern
shores of James's Bay. These men named the new land after the Prince who
sent them forth, and were the pioneers of that "Hon. Company of
Adventurers from England trading into Hudson Bay."
More than forty years previous to the date of the charter by which
Charles II. conferred the territory of Rupert's Land upon the London
company, a similar grant had been made by the French monarch, Louis
XIII, to "La Compagnie de la Nouvelle France." Thus there had arisen
rival claims to the possession of this sterile region, and although
treaties had at various times attempted to rectify boundaries or to
rearrange watersheds, the question of the right of Canada or of the
Company to hold a portion of the vast territory draining into Hudson Bay
had never been legally solved.
For some eighty years after this settlement on James's Bay, the
Company held a precarious tenure of their forts and factories. Wild-looking
men, more Indian than French, marched from Canada over the height of
land and raided upon the posts of Moose and Albany, burning the stockades
and carrying off the little brass howitzers mounted thereon. The same
wild-looking men, pushing on into the interior from Lake Superior, made
their way into Lake Winnipeg, up the great Saskatchewan River, and
across to the valley of the Red River; building their forts for war
and trade by distant lake-shore and confluence of river current, and
drawing off the valued trade in furs to France; until all of a sudden
there came the great blow struck by Wolfe under the walls of Quebec, and
every little far-away post and distant fort throughout the vast interior
continent felt the echoes of the guns of Abraham. It might have been
imagined that now, when the power of France was crushed in the Canadas,
the trade which she had carried on with the Indian tribes of the Far West
would lapse to the English company trading Into Hudson Bay; but such was
not the case.
Immediately upon the capitulation of Montreal, fur traders from the
English cities of Boston and Albany appeared in Montreal and Quebec, and
pushed their way along the old French route to Lake Winnipeg and into the
valley of the Saskatchewan. There they, in turn, erected their little
posts and trading-stations, laid out their beads and blankets, their
strouds and cottons, and exchanged their long-carried goods for the
beaver and marten and fisher skins of the Nadow, Sioux, Kinistineau, and
Osinipoilles. Old maps of the North-west still mark spots along the
shores of Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan with names of Henry's House,
Finlay's House, and Mackay's House. These "houses" were the
Trading-posts of the first English free-traders, whose combination in
1783 gave rise to the great North-west Fur Company, so long the fierce
rival of the Hudson Bay. To picture here the jealous rivalry which during
forty years raged throughout these immense territories would be to fill a
volume with tales of adventure and discovery.
The zeal with which the North-west Company pursued the trade in furs
quickly led to the exploration of the entire country. A Mackenzie
penetrated to the Arctic Ocean down the immense river which bears his
name--a Frazer and a Thompson pierced the tremendous masses of the Rocky
Mountains and beheld the Pacific rolling its waters against the rocks of
New Caledonia. Based upon a system which rewarded the efforts of its
employees by giving them a share in the profits of the trade, making them
partners as well as servants, the North-west Company soon put to sore
straits the older organization of the Hudson Bay. While the heads of both
companies were of the same nation, the working men and voyageurs were of
totally different races, the Hudson Bay employing Highlanders and Orkney
men from Scotland, and the North-west Company drawing its recruits from
the hardy French inhabitants of Lower Canada. This difference of
nationality deepened the strife between them, and many a deed of cruelty
and bloodshed lies buried amidst the oblivion of that time in those
distant regions. The men who went out to the North-west as voyageurs and
servants in the employment of the rival companies from Canada and from
Scotland hardly ever returned to their native lands. The wild roving life
in the great prairie or the trackless pine forest, the vast solitudes of
inland lakes and rivers, the chase, and the camp-fire had too much of
excitement in them to allow the voyageur to return again to the narrow
limits of civilization. Besides, he had taken to himself an Indian wife,
and although the ceremony by which that was effected was frequently
wanting in those accessories of bell, book, and candle so essential to
its proper well-being, nevertheless the voyageur and his squaw got on
pretty well together, and little ones, who jabbered the smallest amount
of English or French, and a great deal of Ojibbeway, or Cree, or
Assineboine, began to multiply around them.
Matters were in this state when, in 1812, as we have already seen in an
earlier chapter, the Earl of Selkirk, a large proprietor of the Hudson
Bay Company, conceived the idea of planting a colony of Highlanders on
the banks of the Red River near the lake called Winnipeg.
Some great magnate was intent on making a deer forest in Scotland about
the period that this country was holding its own with difficulty against
Napoleon. So, leaving their native parish of Kildonan in Sutherlandshire,
these people established another Kildonan in the very heart of North
America, in the midst of an immense and apparently boundless prairie.
Poor people! they had a hard time of it-inundation and North-west Company
hostility nearly sweeping them off their prairie lands. Before long
matters reached a climax. The North-west Canadians and half-breeds
sallied forth one day and attacked the settlers; the settlers had a small
guard in whose prowess they placed much credence; the guard turned out
after the usual manner of soldiers, the half-breeds and Indians lay in
the long grass after the method of savages. For once the Indian tactics
prevailed. The Governor of the Hudson Bay Company and the guard were shot
down, the fort at Point Douglas on the Red River was taken, and the
Scotch settlers driven out to the shores of Lake Winnipeg.
To keep the peace between the rival companies and the two nationalities
was no easy matter, but at last Lord Selkirk came to the rescue; they
were disbanding regiments after the great peace of 1815, and portions of
two foreign corps, called De Muiron's and De Watteville's Regiments,
were induced to attempt an expedition to the Red River.
Starting in winter from the shores of Lake Superior, these hardy fellows
traversed the forests and frozen lakes upon snow-shoes, and, entering
from the Lake of the Woods, suddenly appeared in the Selkirk Settlement,
and took possession of Fort Douglas.
A few years later the great Fur Companies became amalgamated, or rather
the North-west ceased to exist, and henceforth the Hudson Bay Company
ruled supreme from the shores of the Atlantic to the frontiers of Russian
America.
From that date, 1822, the progress of the little colony had been gradual
but sure. Its numbers were constantly increased by the retired servants
of the Hudson Bay Company, who selected it as a place of settlement when
their period of active service had expired. Thither came the voyageur and
the trader to spend the winter of their lives in the little world of
Assineboine. Thus the Selkirk Settlement grew and flourished, caring
little for the outside earth-"the world forgetting, by the world forgot."
But the old feelings which had their rise in earlier years never wholly
died out. National rivalry still existed, and it required no violent
effort to fan the embers into flame again. The descendants of the two
nationalities dwelt apart; there were the French parishes and the Scotch
and English parishes, and, although each nationality spoke the same
mother tongue, still the spread of schools and churches fostered the
different languages of the fatherland, and perpetuated the distinction of
race which otherwise would have disappeared by lapsing into savagery. In
an earlier chapter I have traced the events immediately pre ceding the
breaking out of the insurrectionary movement among the French
half-breeds, and in the foregoing pages I have tried to sketch the early
life and history of the country into which I am about to ask the reader
to follow me. Into the immediate sectional disputes and religious
animosities of the present movement it is not my intention to enter; as I
journey on an occasional arrow may be shot to the right or to the left at
men and things; but I will leave to others the details of a petty
provincial quarrel, while-I have before me, stretching far and wide, the
vast solitudes which await in silence the footfall of the future.