The most striking feature of the English period was the Northwest
Company.[193] From a study of it one may learn the character of the
English occupation of the Northwest.[194] It was formed in 1783 and
fully organized in 1787, with the design of contesting the field with
the Hudson Bay Company. Goods were brought from England to Montreal, the
headquarters of the company, and thence from the four emporiums,
Detroit, Mackinaw, Sault Ste. Marie, and Grand Portage, they were
scattered through the great Northwest, even to the Pacific ocean.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century ships[195] began to take part
in this commerce; a portion of the goods was sent from Montreal in
boats to Kingston, thence in vessels to Niagara, thence overland to Lake
Erie, to be reshipped in vessels to Mackinaw and to Sault Ste. Marie,
where another transfer was made to a Lake Superior vessel. These ships
were of about ninety-five tons burden and made four or five trips a
season. But in the year 1800 the primitive mode of trade was not
materially changed. From the traffic along the main artery of commerce
between Grand Portage and Montreal may be learned the kind of trade that
flowed along such branches as that between the island of Mackinaw and
the Wisconsin posts. The visitor at La Chine rapids, near Montreal,
might have seen a squadron of Northwestern trading canoes leaving for
the Grand Portage, at the west of Lake Superior.[196]
The boatmen, or "engagés," having spent their season's gains in
carousal, packed their blanket capotes and were ready for the wilderness
again. They made a picturesque crew in their gaudy turbans, or hats
adorned with plumes and tinsel, their brilliant handkerchiefs tied
sailor-fashion about swarthy necks, their calico shirts, and their
flaming worsted belts, which served to hold the knife and the tobacco
pouch. Rough trousers, leggings, and cowhide shoes or gaily-worked
moccasins completed the costume. The trading birch canoe measured forty
feet in length, with a depth of three and a width of five. It floated
four tons of freight, and yet could be carried by four men over
difficult portages. Its crew of eight men was engaged at a salary[197]
of from five to eight hundred livres, about $100 to $160 per annum,
each, with a yearly outfit of coarse clothing and a daily food allowance
of a quart of hulled corn, or peas, seasoned with two ounces of tallow.
The experienced voyageurs who spent the winters in the woods were called
_hivernans_, or winterers, or sometimes _hommes du nord_; while the
inexperienced, those who simply made the trip from Montreal to the
outlying depots and return, were contemptuously dubbed _mangeurs de
lard_,[198] "pork-eaters," because their pampered appetites demanded
peas and pork rather than hulled corn and tallow. Two of the crew, one
at the bow and the other at the stern, being especially skilled in the
craft of handling the paddle in the rapids, received higher wages than
the rest. Into the canoe was first placed the heavy freight, shot, axes,
powder; next the dry goods, and, crowning all, filling the canoe to
overflowing, came the provisions--pork, peas or corn, and sea biscuits,
sewed in canvas sacks.
The lading completed, the voyageur hung his votive offerings in the
chapel of Saint Anne, patron saint of voyageurs, the paddles struck the
waters of the St. Lawrence, and the fleet of canoes glided away on its
six weeks' journey to Grand Portage. There was the Ottawa to be
ascended, the rapids to be run, the portages where the canoe must be
emptied and where each voyageur must bear his two packs of ninety pounds
apiece, and there were the _décharges_, where the canoe was merely
lightened and where the voyageurs, now on the land, now into the rushing
waters, dragged it forward till the rapids were passed. There was no
stopping to dry, but on, until the time for the hasty meal, or the
evening camp-fire underneath the pines. Every two miles there was a stop
for a three minutes' smoke, or "pipe," and when a portage was made it
was reckoned in "pauses," by which is meant the number of times the men
must stop to rest. Whenever a burial cross appeared, or a stream was
left or entered, the voyageurs removed their hats, and made the sign of
the cross while one of their number said a short prayer; and again the
paddles beat time to some rollicking song.[199]
Dans mon chemin, j'ai rencontré
Trois cavalières, bien montées;
L'on, lon, laridon daine,
Lon, ton, laridon dai.
Trois cavalières, bien montées,
L'un à cheval, et l'autre à pied;
L'on, lon, laridon daine,
Lon, ton, laridon dai.
Arrived at Sault Ste. Marie, the fleet was often doubled by newcomers,
so that sometimes sixty canoes swept their way along the north shore,
the paddles marking sixty strokes a minute, while the rocks gave back
the echoes of Canadian songs rolling out from five hundred lusty
throats. And so they drew up at Grand Portage, near the present
northeast boundary of Minnesota, now a sleepy, squalid little village,
but then the general rendezvous where sometimes over a thousand men met;
for, at this time, the company had fifty clerks, seventy interpreters,
eighteen hundred and twenty canoe-men, and thirty-five guides. It sent
annually to Montreal 106,000 beaver-skins, to say nothing of other
peltries. When the proprietors from Montreal met the proprietors from
the northern posts, and with their clerks gathered at the banquet in
their large log hall to the number of a hundred, the walls hung with
spoils of the chase, the rough tables furnished with abundance of
venison, fish, bread, salt pork, butter, peas, corn, potatoes, tea,
milk, wine and _eau de vie_, while, outside, the motley crowd of engages
feasted on hulled corn and melted fat--was it not a truly baronial
scene? Clerks and engagés of this company, or its rival, the Hudson Bay
Company, might winter one season in Wisconsin and the next in the remote
north. For example, Amable Grignon, a Green Bay trader, wintered in 1818
at Lac qui Parle in Minnesota, the next year at Lake Athabasca, and the
third in the hyperborean regions of Great Slave Lake. In his engagement
he figures as Amable Grignon, _of the Parish of Green Bay, Upper
Canada_, and he receives $400 "and found in tobacco and shoes and two
doges," besides "the usual equipment given to clerks." He afterwards
returned to a post on the Wisconsin river. The attitude of Wisconsin
traders toward the Canadian authorities and the Northwestern wilds is
clearly shown in this document, which brings into a line Upper Canada,
"the parish of Green Bay," and the Hudson Bay Company's territories
about Great Slave Lake![200]
How widespread and how strong was the influence of these traders upon
the savages may be easily imagined, and this commercial control was
strengthened by the annual presents made to the Indians by the British
at their posts. At a time when our relations with Great Britain were
growing strained, such a power in the Northwest was a serious
menace.[201] In 1809 John Jacob Astor secured a charter from the State
of New York, incorporating the American Fur Company. He proposed to
consolidate the fur trade of the United States, plant an establishment
in the contested Oregon territory, and link it with Michillimackinac
(Mackinaw island) by way of the Missouri through a series of trading
posts. In 1810 two expeditions of his Pacific Fur Company set out for
the Columbia, the one around Cape Horn and the other by way of Green
bay and the Missouri. In 1811 he bought a half interest in the Mackinaw
Company, a rival of the Northwest Company and the one that had especial
power in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and this new organization he called
the Southwest Company. But the war of 1812 came; Astoria, the Pacific
post, fell into the hands of the Northwest Company, while the Southwest
Company's trade was ruined.