THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD
In the history of the world only one corporate company has maintained
empire over an area as large as Europe. Only one corporate company has
lived up to its constitution for nearly three centuries. Only one
corporate company's sway has been so beneficent that its profits have
stood in exact proportion to the well-being of its subjects. Indeed, few
armies can boast a rank and file of men who never once retreated in
three hundred years, whose lives, generation after generation, were one
long bivouac of hardship, of danger, of ambushed death, of grim purpose,
of silent achievement.
Such was the company of "Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's
Bay," as the charter of 1670 designated them.[39] Such is the Hudson's
Bay Company to-day still trading with savages in the white wilderness of
the north as it was when Charles II granted a royal charter for the fur
trade to his cousin Prince Rupert.
Governors and chief factors have changed with the changing centuries;
but the character of the company's personnel has never changed. Prince
Rupert, the first governor, was succeeded by the Duke of York (James
II); and the royal governor by a long line of distinguished public men
down to Lord Strathcona, the present governor, and C. C. Chipman, the
chief commissioner or executive officer. All have been men of noted
achievement, often in touch with the Crown, always with that passion for
executive and mastery of difficulty which exults most when the conflict
is keenest.
Pioneers face the unknown when circumstances push them into it.
Adventurers rush into the unknown for the zest of conquering it. It has
been to the adventuring class that fur traders have belonged.
Radisson and Groseillers, the two Frenchmen who first brought back word
of the great wealth in furs round the far northern sea, had been
gentlemen adventurers--"rascals" their enemies called them. Prince
Rupert, who leagued himself with the Frenchmen to obtain a charter for
his fur trade, had been an adventurer of the high seas--"pirate" we
would say--long before he became first governor of the Hudson's Bay
Company. And the Duke of Marlborough, the company's third governor, was
as great an adventurer as he was a general.
Latterly the word "adventurer" has fallen in such evil repute, it may
scarcely be applied to living actors. But using it in the old-time sense
of militant hero, what cavalier of gold braid and spurs could be more of
an adventurer than young Donald Smith who traded in the desolate wastes
of Labrador, spending seventeen years in the hardest field of the fur
company, tramping on snow-shoes half the width of a continent, camping
where night overtook him under blanketing of snow-drifts, who rose step
by step from trader on the east coast to commissioner in the west? And
this Donald Smith became Lord Strathcona, the governor of the Hudson's
Bay Company.
Men bold in action and conservative in traditions have ruled the
company. The governor resident in England is now represented by the
chief commissioner, who in turn is represented at each of the many
inland forts by a chief factor of the district. Nominally, the
fur-trader's northern realm is governed by the Parliament of Canada.
Virtually, the chief factor rules as autocratically to-day as he did
before the Canadian Government took over the proprietary rights of the
fur company.
How did these rulers of the wilds, these princes of the fur trade, live
in lonely forts and mountain fastnesses? Visit one of the northern forts
as it exists to-day.
The colder the climate, the finer the fur. The farther north the fort,
the more typical it is of the fur-trader's realm.
For six, seven, eight months of the year, the fur-trader's world is a
white wilderness of snow; snow water-waved by winds that sweep from the
pole; snow drifted into ramparts round the fort stockades till the
highest picket sinks beneath the white flood and the corner bastions are
almost submerged and the entrance to the central gate resembles the
cutting of a railway tunnel; snow that billows to the unbroken reaches
of the circling sky-line like a white sea. East, frost-mist hides the
low horizon in clouds of smoke, for the sun which rises from the east in
other climes rises from the south-east here; and until the spring
equinox, bringing summer with a flood-tide of thaw, gray darkness hangs
in the east like a fog. South, the sun moves across the snowy levels in
a wheel of fire, for it has scarcely risen full sphered above the
sky-line before it sinks again etching drift and tip of half-buried
brush in long lonely fading shadows. The west shimmers in warm purplish
grays, for the moist Chinook winds come over the mountains melting the
snow by magic. North, is the cold steel of ice by day; and at night
Northern Lights darting through the polar dark like burnished spears.
Christmas day is welcomed at the northern fur posts by a firing of
cannon from the snow-muffled bastions. Before the stars have faded,
chapel services begin. Frequently on either Christmas or New Year's day,
a grand feast is given the tawny-skinned _habitues_ of the fort, who
come shuffling to the main mess-room with no other announcement than the
lifting of the latch, and billet themselves on the hospitality of a host
that has never turned hungry Indians from its doors.
For reasons well-known to the woodcraftsman, a sudden lull falls on
winter hunting in December, and all the trappers within a week's journey
from the fort, all the half-breed guides who add to the instinct of
native craft the reasoning of the white, all the Indian hunters ranging
river-course and mountain have come by snow-shoes and dog train to spend
festive days at the fort. A great jangling of bells announces the
huskies (dog trains) scampering over the crusted snow-drifts. A babel of
barks and curses follows, for the huskies celebrate their arrival by
tangling themselves up in their harness and enjoying a free fight.
Dogs unharnessed, in troop the trappers to the banquet-hall, flinging
packs of tightly roped peltries down promiscuously, to be sorted next
day. One Indian enters just as he has left the hunting-field, clad from
head to heel in white caribou with the antlers left on the capote as a
decoy. His squaw has togged out for the occasion in a comical medley of
brass bracelets and finger-rings, with a bear's claw necklace and ermine
ruff which no city connoisseur could possibly mistake for rabbit. If a
daughter yet remain unappropriated she will display the gayest
attire--red flannel galore, red shawl, red scarf, with perhaps an apron
of white fox-skin and moccasins garnished in coloured grasses. The
braves outdo even a vain young squaw. Whole fox, mink, or otter skins
have been braided to the end of their hair, and hang down in two plaits
to the floor. Whitest of buckskin has been ornamented with brightest of
beads, and over all hangs the gaudiest of blankets, it may be a
musk-ox-skin with the feats of the warrior set forth in rude drawings on
the smooth side.
Children and old people, too, come to the feast, for the Indian's
stomach is the magnet that draws his soul. Grotesque little figures the
children are, with men's trousers shambling past their heels,
rabbit-skin coats with the fur turned in, and on top of all some old
stovepipe hat or discarded busby coming half-way down to the urchin's
neck. The old people have more resemblance to parchment on gnarled
sticks than to human beings. They shiver under dirty blankets with every
sort of cast-off rag tied about their limbs, hobbling lame from frozen
feet or rheumatism, mumbling toothless requests for something to eat or
something to wear, for tobacco, the solace of Indian woes, or what is
next best--tea.
Among so many guests are many needs. One half-breed from a far wintering
outpost, where perhaps a white man and this guide are living in a
chinked shack awaiting a hunting party's return, arrives at the fort
with frozen feet. Little Labree's feet must be thawed out, and sometimes
little Labree dies under the process, leaving as a legacy to the chief
factor the death-bed pledge that the corpse be taken to a distant tribal
burying-ground. And no matter how inclement the winter, the chief factor
keeps his pledge, for the integrity of a promise is the only law in the
fur-trader's realm. Special attentions, too, must be paid those old
retainers who have acted as mentors of the fort in times of trouble.
A few years ago it would not have been safe to give this treat inside
the fort walls. Rations would have been served through loop-holes and
the feast held outside the gates; but so faithfully have the Indians
become bound to the Hudson's Bay Company there are not three forts in
the fur territory where Indians must be excluded.
Of the feast little need be said. Like the camel, the Indian lays up
store for the morrow, judging from his capacity for weeks of morrows.
His benefactor no more dines with him than a plantation master of the
South would have dined with feasting slaves. Elsewhere a bell calls the
company officers to breakfast at 7.30, dinner at 1, supper at 7.
Officers dine first, white hunters and trappers second, that difference
between master and servant being maintained which is part of the
company's almost military discipline. In the large forts are libraries,
whither resort the officers for the long winter nights. But over the
feast wild hilarity reigns.
A French-Canadian fiddler strikes up a tuneless jig that sets the
Indians pounding the floor in figureless dances with moccasined heels
till midday glides into midnight and midnight to morning. I remember
hearing of one such midday feast in Red River settlement that prolonged
itself past four of the second morning. Against the walls sit old folks
spinning yarns of the past. There is a print of Sir George Simpson
behind one _raconteur's_ head. Ah! yes, the oldest guides all remember
Sir George, though half a century has passed since his day. He was the
governor who travelled with flags flying from every prow, and cannon
firing when he left the forts, and men drawn up in procession like
soldiers guarding an emperor when he entered the fur posts with
_coureurs_ and all the flourish of royal state. Then some story-teller
recalls how he has heard the old guides tell of the imperious governor
once provoking personal conflict with an equally imperious steersman,
who first ducked the governor into a lake they were traversing and then
ducked into the lake himself to rescue the governor.
And there is a crucifix high on the wall left by Pere Lacomb the last
time the famous missionary to the red men of the Far North passed this
way; and every Indian calls up some kindness done, some sacrifice by
Father Lacomb. On the gun-rack are old muskets and Indian masks and
scalp-locks, bringing back the days when Russian traders instigated a
massacre at this fort and when white traders flew at each other's
throats as Nor' Westers struggled with Hudson's Bay for supremacy in the
fur trade.
"Ah, oui, those white men, they were brave fighters, they did not know
how to stop. Mais, sacre, they were fools, those white men after all!
Instead of hiding in ambush to catch the foe, those white men measured
off paces, stood up face to face and fired blank--oui--fired blank! Ugh!
Of course, one fool he was kill' and the other fool, most like, he was
wound'! Ugh, by Gar! What Indian would have so little sense?"[40]
Of hunting tales, the Indian store is exhaustless. That enormous
bear-skin stretched to four pegs on the wall brings up Montagnais, the
Noseless One, who still lives on Peace River and once slew the largest
bear ever killed in the Rockies, returning to this very fort with one
hand dragging the enormous skin and the other holding the place which
his nose no longer graced.
"Montagnais? Ah, bien messieur! Montagnais, he brave man! Venez
ici--bien--so--I tole you 'bout heem," begins some French-Canadian
trapper with a strong tinge of Indian blood in his swarthy skin.
"Bigosh! He brave man! I tole you 'bout dat happen! Montagnais, he go
stumble t'rough snow--how you call dat?--hill, steep--steep! Oui, by
Gar! dat vas steep hill! de snow, she go slide, slide, lak' de--de gran'
rapeed, see?" emphasizing the snow-slide with illustrative gesture.
"Bien, donc! Mais, Montagnais, he stick gun-stock in de snow stop heem
fall--so--see? Tonnerre! Bigosh! for sure she go off wan beeg bang!
Sacre! She make so much noise she wake wan beeg ol' bear sleep in snow.
Montagnais, he tumble on hees back! Mais, messieur, de bear--diable!
'fore Montagnais wink hees eye de bear jump on top lak' wan beeg
loup-garou! Montagnais, he brave man--he not scare--he say wan leetle
prayer, wan han' he cover his eyes! Odder han'--sacre--dat grab hees
knife out hees belt--sz-sz-sz, messieur. For sure he feel her
breat'--diable!--for sure he fin' de place her heart beat--Tonnerre!
Vite! he stick dat knife in straight up hees wrist, into de heart dat
bear! Dat bes' t'ing do--for sure de leetle prayer dat tole him best
t'ing do! De bear she roll over--over--dead's wan stone--c'est vrai! she
no mor' jump top Montagnais! Bien, ma frien'! Montagnais, he roll over
too--leetle bit scare! Mais, hees nose! Ah! bigosh! de bear she got dat;
dat all nose he ever haf no mor'! C'est vrai messieur, bien!"
And with a finishing flourish the story-teller takes to himself all the
credit of Montagnais's heroism.
But in all the feasting, trade has not been forgotten; and as soon as
the Indians recover from post-prandial torpor bartering begins. In one
of the warehouses stands a trader. An Indian approaches with a pack of
peltries weighing from eighty to a hundred pounds. Throwing it down, he
spreads out the contents. Of otter and mink and pekan there will be
plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter
frost has frozen the streams solid. In recent years there have been few
beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents
a chance to multiply. By treaty the Indian may hunt all creatures of the
chase as long as "the sun rises and the rivers flow"; but the fur-trader
can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts. Of
musk-rat-skins, hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every
season. The little haycock houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy
prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and
heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter home.
The trading is done in several ways. Among the Eskimo, whose
arithmetical powers seldom exceed a few units, the trader holds up his
hand with one, two, three fingers raised, signifying that he offers for
the skin before him equivalents in value to one, two, three prime
beaver. If satisfied, the Indian passes over the furs and the trader
gives flannel, beads, powder, knives, tea, or tobacco to the value of
the beaver-skins indicated by the raised fingers. If the Indian demands
more, hunter and trader wrangle in pantomime till compromise is
effected.
But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin. Beaver are the Indian's
dollars and cents, his shillings and pence, his tokens of currency.
South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the
beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of
shell, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down,
stamped on one side with the company arms, on the other with the figures
1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver.
First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth
five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and white worth
from ten dollars down, according to quality, and from common red fox
worth less. Twenty years ago it was no unusual thing for the Hudson's
Bay Company to send to England yearly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000
blue, 100,000 red, half a dozen silver. Few wolf-skins are in the
trapper's pack unless particularly fine specimens of brown arctic and
white arctic, bought as a curiosity and not for value as skins. Against
the wolf, the trapper wages war as against a pest that destroys other
game, and not for its skin. Next to musk-rat the most plentiful fur
taken by the Indian, though not highly esteemed by the trader, will be
that of the rabbit or varying hare. Buffalo was once the staple of the
hunter. What the buffalo was the white rabbit is to-day. From it the
Indian gets clothing, tepee, covers, blankets, thongs, food. From it the
white man who is a manufacturer of furs gets gray fox and chinchilla and
seal in imitation. Except one year in seven, when a rabbit plague spares
the land by cutting down their prolific numbers, the varying hare is
plentiful enough to sustain the Indian.
Having received so many bits of lead for his furs, the Indian goes to
the store counter where begins interminable dickering. Montagnais's
squaw has only fifty "beaver" coin, and her desires are a hundredfold
what those will buy. Besides, the copper-skinned lady enjoys beating
down prices and driving a bargain so well that she would think the clerk
a cheat if he asked a fixed price from the first. She expects him to
have a sliding scale of prices for his goods as she has for her furs. At
the termination of each bargain, so many coins pass across the counter.
Frequently an Indian presents himself at the counter without beaver
enough to buy necessaries. What then? I doubt if in all the years of
Hudson's Bay Company rule one needy Indian has ever been turned away.
The trader advances what the Indian needs and chalks up so many "beaver"
against the trapper's next hunt.
Long ago, when rival traders strove for the furs, whisky played a
disgracefully prominent part in all bartering, the drunk Indian being an
easier victim than the sober, and the Indian mad with thirst for liquor
the most easily cajoled of all. But to-day when there is no competition,
whisky plays no part whatever. Whisky is in the fort, so is pain killer,
for which the Indian has as keen an appetite, both for the exigencies of
hazardous life in an unsparing climate beyond medical aid; but the first
thing Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded
the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol.
The second thing was to bury ammunition--showing which influence they
considered the more dangerous.
Ermine is at its best when the cold is most intense, the tawny weasel
coat turning from fawn to yellow, from yellow to cream and snow-white,
according to the latitude north and the season. Unless it is the pelt of
the baby ermine, soft as swan's down, tail-tip jet as onyx, the best
ermine is not likely to be in a pack brought to the fort as early as
Christmas.
Fox, lynx, mink, marten, otter, and bear, the trapper can take with
steel-traps of a size varying with the game, or even with the clumsily
constructed deadfall, the log suspended above the bait being heavy or
light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or small intruder;
but the ermine with fur as easily damaged as finest gauze must be
handled differently.
Going the rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks
like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code. Here are little prints
slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the
quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for snowbird or
rabbit. Here, again, a clear blank on the snow where the crafty little
forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a
snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the
unwary snow-bunting. From the length of the leaps, the trapper judges
the age of the ermine; fourteen inches from nose to tail-tip means a
full-grown ermine with hair too coarse to be damaged by a snare. The man
suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway from a twig bent
down so that the weight of the ermine on the string sends the twig
springing back with a jerk that lifts the ermine off the ground,
strangling it instantly. Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left
bait--smeared grease, or a bit of meat.
If the tracks are like the prints of a baby's fingers, close and small,
the trapper hopes to capture a pelt fit for a throne cloak, the skin for
which the Louis of France used to pay, in modern money, from a hundred
dollars to a hundred and fifty dollars. The full-grown ermines will be
worth only some few "beaver" at the fort. Perfect fur would be marred by
the twine snare, so the trapper devises as cunning a death for the
ermine as the ermine devises when it darts up through the snow with its
spear-teeth clutched in the throat of a poor rabbit. Smearing his
hunting-knife with grease, he lays it across the track. The little
ermine comes trotting in dots and dashes and gallops and dives to the
knife. It smells the grease, and all the curiosity which has been
teaching it to forage for food since it was born urges it to put out its
tongue and taste. That greasy smell of meat it knows; but that
frost-silvered bit of steel is something new. The knife is frosted like
ice. Ice the ermine has licked, so he licks the knife. But alas for the
resemblance between ice and steel! Ice turns to water under the warm
tongue; steel turns to fire that blisters and holds the foolish little
stoat by his inquisitive tongue a hopeless prisoner till the trapper
comes. And lest marauding wolverine or lynx should come first and gobble
up priceless ermine, the trapper comes soon. And that is the end for the
ermine.
Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at
a leading fort would amount to:
Bear of all varieties 400
Ermine, medium 200
Blue fox 4
Red fox 91
Silver fox 3
Marten 2,000
Musk-rat 200,000
Mink 8,000
Otter 500
Skunk 6
Wolf 100
Beaver 5,000
Pekan (fisher) 50
Cross fox 30
White fox 400
Lynx 400
Wolverine 200
The value of these furs in "beaver" currency varied with the fashions of
the civilized world, with the scarcity or plenty of the furs, with the
locality of the fort. Before beaver became so scarce, 100 beaver
equalled 40 marten or 10 otter or 300 musk-rat; 25 beaver equalled 500
rabbit; 1 beaver equalled 2 white fox; and so on down the scale. But no
set table of values can be given other than the prices realized at the
annual sale of Hudson's Bay furs, held publicly in London.
To understand the values of these furs to the Indian, "beaver" currency
must be compared to merchandise, one beaver buying such a red
handkerchief as trappers wear around their brows to notify other hunters
not to shoot; one beaver buys a hunting-knife, two an axe, from eight to
twenty a gun or rifle, according to its quality. And in one old trading
list I found--vanity of vanities--"one beaver equals looking-glass."
Trading over, the trappers disperse to their winter hunting-grounds,
which the main body of hunters never leaves from October, when they go
on the fall hunt, to June, when the long straggling brigades of canoes
and keel boats and pack horses and jolting ox-carts come back to the
fort with the harvest of winter furs.
Signs unnoted by the denizens of city serve to guide the trappers over
trackless wastes of illimitable snow. A whitish haze of frost may hide
the sun, or continuous snow-fall-blur every land-mark. What heeds the
trapper? The slope of the rolling hills, the lie of the frozen
river-beds, the branches of underbrush protruding through billowed
drifts are hands that point the trapper's compass. For those hunters who
have gone westward to the mountains, the task of threading pathless
forest stillness is more difficult. At a certain altitude in the
mountains, much frequented by game because undisturbed by storms, snow
falls--falls--falls, without ceasing, heaping the pines with snow
mushrooms, blotting out the sun, cloaking in heavy white flakes the
notched bark blazed as a trail, transforming the rustling green forests
to a silent spectral world without a mark to direct the hunter. Here the
woodcraftsman's lore comes to his aid. He looks to the snow-coned tops
of the pine trees. The tops of pine trees lean ever so slightly towards
the rising sun. With his snow-shoes he digs away the snow at the roots
of trees to get down to the moss. Moss grows from the roots of trees on
the shady side--that is, the north. And simplest of all, demanding only
that a wanderer use his eyes--which the white man seldom does--the limbs
of the northern trees are most numerous on the south. The trapper may
be waylaid by storms, or starved by sudden migration of game from the
grounds to which he has come, or run to earth by the ravenous
timber-wolves that pursue the dog teams for leagues; but the trapper
with Indian blood in his veins will not be lost.
One imminent danger is of accident beyond aid. A young Indian hunter of
Moose Factory set out with his wife and two children for the winter
hunting-grounds in the forest south of James Bay. To save the daily
allowance of a fish for each dog, they did not take the dog teams. When
chopping, the hunter injured his leg. The wound proved stubborn. Game
was scarce, and they had not enough food to remain in the lodge.
Wrapping her husband in robes on the long toboggan sleigh, the squaw
placed the younger child beside him and with the other began tramping
through the forest drawing the sleigh behind. The drifts were not deep
enough for swift snow-shoeing over underbrush, and their speed was not
half so speedy as the hunger that pursues northern hunters like the
Fenris Wolf of Norse myth. The woman sank exhausted on the snow and the
older boy, nerved with fear, pushed on to Moose Factory for help. Guided
by the boy back through the forests, the fort people found the hunter
dead in the sleigh, the mother crouched forward unconscious from cold,
stripped of the clothing which she had wrapped round the child taken in
her arms to warm with her own body. The child was alive and well. The
fur traders nursed the woman back to life, though she looked more like a
withered creature of eighty than a woman barely in her twenties. She
explained with a simple unconsciousness of heroism that the ground had
been too hard for her to bury her husband, and she was afraid to leave
the body and go on to the fort lest the wolves should molest the
dead.[41]
The arrival of the mail packet is one of the most welcome breaks in the
monotony of life at the fur post. When the mail comes, all white
habitants of the fort take a week's holidays to read letters and news of
the outside world.
Railways run from Lake Superior to the Pacific; but off the line of
railways mail is carried as of old. In summer-time overland runners,
canoe, and company steamers bear the mail to the forts of Hudson Bay, of
the Saskatchewan, of the Rockies, and the MacKenzie. In winter,
scampering huskies with a running postman winged with snow-shoes dash
across the snowy wastes through silent forests to the lonely forts of
the bay, or slide over the prairie drifts with the music of tinkling
bells and soft crunch-crunch of sleigh runners through the snow crust to
the leagueless world of the Far North.
Forty miles a day, a couch of spruce boughs where the racquets have dug
a hole in the snow, sleighs placed on edge as a wind break, dogs
crouched on the buffalo-robes snarling over the frozen fish, deep
bayings from the running wolf-pack, and before the stars have faded from
the frosty sky, the mail-carrier has risen and is coasting away fast as
the huskies can gallop.
Another picturesque feature of the fur trade was the long caravan of
ox-carts that used to screech and creak and jolt over the rutted prairie
roads between Winnipeg and St. Paul. More than 1,500 Hudson's Bay
Company carts manned by 500 traders with tawny spouses and black-eyed
impish children, squatted on top of the load, left Canada for St. Paul
in August and returned in October. The carts were made without a rivet
of iron. Bent wood formed the tires of the two wheels. Hardwood axles
told their woes to the world in the scream of shrill bagpipes. Wooden
racks took the place of cart box. In the shafts trod a staid old ox
guided from the horns or with a halter, drawing the load with collar
instead of a yoke. The harness was of skin thongs. In place of the ox
sometimes was a "shagganippy" pony, raw and unkempt, which the imps
lashed without mercy or the slightest inconvenience to the horse.
A red flag with the letters H. B. C. in white decorated the leading
cart. During the Sioux massacres the fur caravans were unmolested, for
the Indians recognised the flags and wished to remain on good terms with
the fur traders.
Ox-carts still bring furs to Hudson's Bay Company posts, and screech
over the corduroyed swamps of the MacKenzie; but the railway has
replaced the caravan as a carrier of freight.
[Illustration: Carrying goods over long _portage_ in MacKenzie River
region with the old-fashioned Red River ox-carts.]
Hudson's Bay Company steamers now ply on the largest of the inland
rivers with long lines of fur-laden barges in tow; but the canoe
brigades still bring the winter's hunt to the forts in spring. Five to
eight craft make a brigade, each manned by eight paddlers with an
experienced steersman, who is usually also guide. But the one ranking
first in importance is the bowman, whose quick eye must detect signs of
nearing rapids, whose steel-shod pole gives the cue to the other
paddlers and steers the craft past foamy reefs. The bowman it is who
leaps out first when there is "tracking"--pulling the craft up-stream by
tow-line--who stands waist high in ice water steadying the rocking bark
lest a sudden swirl spill furs to the bottom, who hands out the packs to
the others when the waters are too turbulent for "tracking" and there
must be a "_portage_," and who leads the brigade on a run--half trot,
half amble--overland to the calmer currents. "Pipes" are the measure of
a _portage_--that is, the pipes smoked while the _voyageurs_ are on the
run. The bowman it is who can thread a network of water-ways by day or
dark, past rapids or whirlpools, with the certainty of an arrow to the
mark. On all long trips by dog train or canoe, pemmican made of buffalo
meat and marrow put in air-tight bags was the standard food. The
pemmican now used is of moose or caribou beef.
The only way to get an accurate idea of the size of the kingdom ruled by
these monarchs of the lonely wastes is by comparison.
Take a map of North America. On the east is Labrador, a peninsula as
vast as Germany and Holland and Belgium and half of France. On the coast
and across the unknown interior are the magical letters H. B. C.,
meaning Hudson's Bay Company fort (past or present), a little
whitewashed square with eighteen-foot posts planted picket-wise for a
wall, match-box bastions loopholed for musketry, a barracks-like
structure across the court-yard with a high lookout of some sort near
the gate. Here some trader with wife and children and staff of Indian
servants has held his own against savagery and desolating loneliness. In
one of these forts Lord Strathcona passed his youth.
Once more to the map. With one prong of a compass in the centre of
Hudson Bay, describe a circle. The northern half embraces the baffling
arctics; but on the line of the southern circumference like beads on a
string are Churchill high on the left, York below in black capitals as
befits the importance of the great fur emporium of the bay, Severn and
Albany and Moose and Rupert and Fort George round the south, and to the
right, larger and more strongly built forts than in Labrador, with the
ruins of stone walls at Churchill that have a depth of fifteen feet.
Six-pounders once mounted these bastions. The remnants of galleries for
soldiery run round the inside walls. A flag floats over each fort with
the letters H. B. C.[42] Officers' dwellings occupy the centre of the
court-yard. Banked against the walls are the men's quarters, fur
presses, stables, storerooms. Always there is a chapel, at one fort a
hospital, at others the relics of stoutly built old powder magazines
made to withstand the siege of hand grenades tossed in by French
assailants from the bay, who knew that the loot of a fur post was better
harvest than a treasure ship. Elsewhere two small bastions situated
diagonally across from each other were sufficient to protect the fur
post by sending a raking fire along the walls; but here there was danger
of the French fleet, and the walls were built with bastion and trench
and rampart.
Again to the map. Between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains stretches
an American Siberia--the Barren Lands. Here, too, on every important
waterway, Athabasca and the Liard and the MacKenzie into the land of
winter night and midnight sun, extend Hudson's Bay Company posts. We
think of these northern streams as ice-jammed, sluggish currents, with
mean log villages on their banks. The fur posts of the sub-arctics are
not imposing with picket fences in place of stockades, for no French foe
was feared here. But the MacKenzie River is one of the longest in the
world, with two tributaries each more than 1,000 miles in length. It has
a width of a mile, and a succession of rapids that rival the St.
Lawrence, and palisaded banks higher than the Hudson River's, and half a
dozen lakes into one of which you could drop two New England States
without raising a sand bar.
The map again. Between the prairie and the Pacific Ocean is a wilderness
of peaks, a Switzerland stretched into half the length of a continent.
Here, too, like eagle nests in rocky fastnesses are fur posts.
Such is the realm of the Hudson's Bay Company to-day.
Before 1812 there was no international boundary in the fur trade. But
after the war Congress barred out Canadian companies. The next
curtailment of hunting-ground came in 1869-'70, when the company
surrendered proprietary rights to the Canadian Government, retaining
only the right to trade in the vast north land. The formation of new
Canadian provinces took place south of the Saskatchewan; but north the
company barters pelts undisturbed as of old. Yearly the staffs are
shifted from post to post as the fortunes of the hunt vary; but the
principal posts not including winter quarters for a special hunt have
probably not exceeded two hundred in number, nor fallen below one
hundred for the last century. Of these the greater numbers are of course
in the Far North. When the Hudson's Bay Company was fighting rivals,
Nor' Westers from Montreal, Americans from St. Louis, it must have
employed as traders, packers, _coureurs_, canoe men, hunters, and
guides, at least 5,000 men; for its rival employed that number, and "The
Old Lady," as the enemy called it, always held her own. Over this
wilderness army were from 250 to 300 officers, each with the power of
life and death in his hands. To the honour of the company, be it said,
this power was seldom abused.[43] Occasionally a brutal sea-captain
might use lash and triangle and branding along the northern coast; but
officers defenceless among savage hordes must of necessity have lived on
terms of justice with their men.
The Canadian Government now exercises judicial functions; but where less
than 700 mounted police patrol a territory as large as Siberia, the
company's factor is still the chief representative of the law's power.
Times without number under the old _regime_ has a Hudson's Bay officer
set out alone and tracked an Indian murderer to hidden fastness, there
to arrest him or shoot him dead on the spot; because if murder went
unpunished that mysterious impulse to kill which is as rife in the
savage heart as in the wolf's would work its havoc unchecked.
Just as surely as "the sun rises and the rivers flow" the savage knows
when the hunt fails he will receive help from the Hudson's Bay officer.
But just as surely he knows if he commits any crime that same
unbending, fearless white man will pursue--and pursue--and pursue guilt
to the death. One case is on record of a trader thrashing an Indian
within an inch of his life for impudence to officers two or three years
before. Of course, the vendetta may cut both ways, the Indian treasuring
vengeance in his heart till he can wreak it. That is an added reason why
the white man's justice must be unimpeachable. "_Pro pelle cutem_," says
the motto of the company arms. Without flippancy it might be said "An
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," as well as "A skin for a
skin"--which explains the freedom from crime among northern Indians.
And who are the subjects living under this Mosaic paternalism?
Stunted Eskimo of the Far North, creatures as amphibious as the seals
whose coats they wear, with the lustreless eyes of dwarfed intelligence
and the agility of seal flippers as they whisk double-bladed paddles
from side to side of the darting kyacks; wandering Montagnais from the
domed hills of Labrador, lonely and sad and silent as the naked
desolation of their rugged land; Ojibways soft-voiced as the forest
glooms in that vast land of spruce tangle north of the Great Lakes;
Crees and Sioux from the plains, cunning with the stealth of creatures
that have hunted and been hunted on the shelterless prairie; Blackfeet
and Crows, game birds of the foothills that have harried all other
tribes for tribute, keen-eyed as the eagles on the mountains behind
them, glorying in war as the finest kind of hunting; mountain
tribes--Stonies, Kootenais, Shoshonies--splendid types of manhood
because only the fittest can survive the hardships of the mountains;
coast Indians, Chinook and Chilcoot--low and lazy because the great
rivers feed them with salmon and they have no need to work.
Over these lawless Arabs of the New World wilderness the Hudson's Bay
Company has ruled for two and a half centuries with smaller loss of life
in the aggregate than the railways of the United States cause in a
single year.
Hunters have been lost in the wilds. White trappers have been
assassinated by Indians. Forts have been wiped out of existence. Ten,
twenty, thirty traders have been massacred at different times. But,
then, the loss of life on railways totals up to thousands in a single
year.
When fighting rivals long ago, it is true that the Hudson's Bay Company
recognised neither human nor divine law. Grant the charge and weigh it
against the benefits of the company's rule. When Hearne visited
Chippewyans two centuries ago he found the Indians in a state
uncontaminated by the trader; and that state will give the ordinary
reader cold shivers of horror at the details of massacre and
degradation. Every visitor since has reported the same tribe improved in
standard of living under Hudson's Bay rule. Recently a well-known
Canadian governor making an itinerary of the territory round the bay
found the Indians such devout Christians that they put his white retinue
to shame. Returning to civilization, the governor was observed attending
the services of his own denomination with a greater fury than was his
wont. Asked the reason, he confided to a club friend that he would be
_blanked_ if he could allow heathen Indians to be better Christians than
he was.
Some of the shiftless Indians may be hopelessly in debt to the company
for advanced provisions, but if the company had not made these advances
the Indians would have starved, and the debt is never exacted by seizure
of the hunt that should go to feed a family.
Of how many other creditors may that be said? Of how many companies that
it has cared for the sick, sought the lost, fed the starving, housed the
homeless? With all its faults, that is the record of the Hudson's Bay
Company.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 39: The spelling of the name with an apostrophe in the charter
seems to be the only reason for the company's name always having the
apostrophe, whereas the waters are now known simply as Hudson Bay.]
[Footnote 40: To the Indian mind the hand-to-hand duels between white
traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly.]
[Footnote 41: It need hardly be explained that it is the prairie Indian
and not the forest Ojibway who places the body on high scaffolding above
the ground; hence the woman's dilemma.]
[Footnote 42: The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians
there would be no trade.]
[Footnote 43: Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most
conspicuous for his brutality.]