and Dobbs need not be taken seriously. They were for the time maniacs
on the subject of a passage that had no existence except in their own
fancy. Robson is different.
Having been a builder at Churchill, he knew the ground, yet we find
him uttering such absurd charges as that the Company purposely sent
Governor Knight to his death and were glad “that the troublesome fellow
was out of the way.” This is both malicious and ignorant, for as Robson
knew, the Northwest Passage played a very secondary part in Knight’s
fatal voyage. The Company just as much as Knight was infatuated with
the lure of gold-dust. Perhaps, it will some day prove not so foolish
an infatuation. Gold placers have been found in Klondike. Indian legend
says they also exist in the ices of the East.
* * * * *
The Parliamentary Report for 1749 is an excellent example of
investigating “off the beat.” The only thing of value in the report is
Joseph La France’s Journal. It is valuable not as a voyage—for this
trip was well tracked from the days of Radisson and Iberville—but as
a description of the French posts on the Saskatchewan, which Hendry
visited—Pachegoia or Pasquia or the Pas and Bourbon—and as helping to
identify the Indians, whom Hendry met.
* * * * *
La Vérendrye voyages are not given here, because not relative to the
subject. His life will be found in “Pathfinders of the West.”
* * * * *
The Canadian Archives give Hendry’s name as Hendey. It is spelt Hendry
in the H. B. C. minutes.
* * * * *
In 1746 the warehouse on Lime Street was purchased for £550. This
year, too, comes a letter to the Company from Captain Lee of Virginia,
warning that a French pirate of two hundred and fifty men, which
captured him, is on the lookout for the fur ships.
* * * * *
Sharpe was the lawyer who engineered the Parliamentary Inquiry of 1749.
I find his charges in the Minutes £250 and £505.
* * * * *
John Potts was the trader of Richmond, when Coates was captain.
* * * * *
In 1766, Samuel Hearne’s name appears as on the pay roll of _The Prince
Rupert_.
* * * * *
Whale fisheries were now flourishing on the bay, for which each captain
received a bounty of 25 per cent. on net proceeds.
* * * * *
In 1769, the Company issued as standard of trade 3 marten, 1 beaver;
2 fox, 3 beaver; gray fox, 4 beaver; white fox, ½ beaver; 1 otter, 1
beaver.
CHAPTER XVIII
1754-1755
THE MARCH ACROSS THE CONTINENT BEGINS—THE COMPANY SENDS A MAN TO
THE BLACKFEET OF THE SOUTH SASKATCHEWAN—ANTHONY HENDRY IS THE FIRST
ENGLISHMAN TO PENETRATE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN—THE FIRST ENGLISHMAN TO
WINTER WEST OF LAKE WINNIPEG—HE MEETS THE SIOUX AND THE BLACKFEET AND
INVITES THEM TO THE BAY
Nothing lends more romantic coloring to the operations of the fur
traders on Hudson Bay than the character of the men in the service.
They were adventurers, pure and simple, in the best and the worst
sense of that term. Peter Romulus, the foreign surgeon, rubbed elbows
with Radisson, the Frenchman. A nephew of Sir Stephen Evance—come out
under the plain name, Evans—is under the same roof as a niece of the
same governor of the Company, who has come to the bay as the doweried
wife of an apprentice. Younger sons of the English gentry entered the
service on the same level as the Cockney apprentice. Rough Orkney
fishermen—with the thick burr of the North in their accent, the iron
strength of the North in their blood, and a periphery of Calvinistic
self-righteousness, which a modern gatling gun could not shoot
through—had as bedfellows in the fort barracks soft-voiced English
youths from the south counties, who had been outlawed for smuggling,
or sent to the bay to expiate early dissipations. And sometimes this
curious conglomeration of human beings was ruled in the fort—ruled with
the absolute despotism of the _little_ king, of course—by a drunken
half-breed brute like Governor Moses Norton, whose one qualification
was that he could pile up the beaver returns and hold the Indians’
friendship by being baser and more uncivilized than they. The theme is
one for song and story as well as for history.
Among the flotsam and jetsam cast on Hudson Bay in the seventeen
hundred and fifties was one Anthony Hendry, a boy from the Isle of
Wight. He had been outlawed for smuggling and sought escape from
punishment by service on the bay. He came as bookkeeper. Other
servants could scarcely be driven or bribed to go inland with the
Indians. Hendry asked permission to go back to their country with the
Assiniboines, in 1754. James Isham was governor of York Fort at the
time. He was only too glad to give Hendry permission.
Four hundred Assiniboines had come in canoes with their furs to the
fort. Leather wigwams spread back from the Hayes River like a town of
mushrooms. Canoes lay in hundreds bottom-up on the beach, and where
the reddish blue of the campfire curled up from the sands filling
the evening air with the pungent smell of burning bark, Assiniboine
voyageurs could be seen melting resin and tar to gum the splits in the
birch canoes. Hunters had exchanged their furs for guns and ammunition.
Squaws had bartered their store of pemmican (buffalo) meat for gay
gewgaws—red flannels and prints, colored beads, hand mirrors of
tin—given at the wicket gate of the fort.
Young Hendry joined the encampment, became acquainted with different
leaders of the brigades, and finally secured an Assiniboine called
Little Bear as a guide to the country of the Great Unknown River,
where the French sent traders—the Saskatchewan. It was the end of June
before the Indians were ready to break camp for the homeward voyage.
By looking at the map, it will be seen that Nelson and Hayes rivers
flow northeast from the same prairie region to a point at the bay
called Port Nelson, or Fort York. One could ascend to the country of
the Assiniboines by either Hayes River or Nelson. York Fort was on
Hayes River. The Indians at that time usually ascended the Hayes River
halfway, then crossed westward to the Nelson by a chain of rivers and
lakes and portages, and advanced to the prairie by a branch of the
Nelson River known as Katchawan to Playgreen Lake. Playgreen Lake is
really a northern arm of Lake Winnipeg. Instead of coming on down to
Lake Winnipeg, the Assiniboines struck westward overland from Playgreen
Lake to the Saskatchewan at Pasquia, variously known as Basquia and
Pachegoia and the Pas. By cutting across westward from Playgreen Lake
to the main Saskatchewan, three detours were avoided: (1) the long
detour round the north shore of Lake Winnipeg; (2) the southern bend
of Saskatchewan, where it enters the lake; (3) the portage of Grand
Rapids in the Saskatchewan between Lake Winnipeg and Cedar Lake. It is
necessary to give these somewhat tedious details as this route was to
become the highway of commerce for a hundred years.
Up these waters paddled the gay Indian voyageurs, the foam rippling
on the wake of their bark canoes not half so light as the sparkling
foam of laugh and song and story from the paddlers. Over these long
lonely portages, silent but for the wind through the trees, or the hoot
of the owl, or flapping of a loon, or a far weird call of the meadow
lark—a mote in an ocean of sky—the first colonists were to trudge,
men and women and children, who came to the West seeking that freedom
and room for the shoulder-swing of uncramped manhood, which home lands
had denied. Plymouth Rock, they call the landing place of the Pilgrim
Fathers. Every portage up Hayes River was a Plymouth Rock to these
first colonists of the West.
On June 26, then, 1754, Hendry set out with the Assiniboines for the
voyage up Hayes River. At Amista-Asinee or Great Stone Rock they
camped for the first night, twenty-four miles from York—good progress
considering it was against stream at the full flood of summer rains.
Fire Steel River, Wood Partridge River, Pine Reach—marked the camps for
sixty miles from York. Four Falls compelled portage beyond Pine Reach,
and shoal water for another twenty-five miles set the men tracking, the
crews jumping out to wade and draw the lightened canoes up stream.
July 1, Hendry was one hundred and thirteen miles from York. Terrific
rains, hot and thundery, deluged the whole flotilla, and Hendry learned
for the first time what clouds of huge inland mosquitoes can do.
Mosquito Point, he called the camp. Here, the Hayes broke into three or
four branches. Hendry’s brigade of Assiniboines began to work up one of
the northwestward branches toward the Nelson. The land seemed to be
barren rock. At camping places was neither fish nor fowl. The voyageurs
took a reef in their belts and pressed on. Three beaver afforded some
food on Steel River but “we are greatly fatigued,” records Hendry,
“with carrying and hauling our canoes, and we are not well fed; but the
natives are continually smoking, which I find allays hunger.” Pikes and
ducks replenished the provision bags on Duck Lake beyond Steel River.
Twenty canoes of Inland Indians were met at Shad Falls beyond Cree
Lake, on their way to York. With these Hendry sent a letter to Governor
Isham. It was July 20 before Hendry realized that the labyrinth of
willow swamps had led into Nelson River. It must have been high up
Nelson River, in some of its western sources east of Playgreen Lake,
for one day later, on Sunday the 21st, he records: “We paddled two
miles up the Nelson and then came to Keiskatchewan River, on which the
French have two houses which we expect to see to-morrow.” He was now
exactly five hundred miles from York. “The mosquitoes are intolerable,
giving us peace neither day nor night. We paddled fourteen miles up the
Keiskatchewan west, when we came to a French house. On our arrival, two
Frenchmen came to the waterside and in a very genteel manner invited
me into their house, which I readily accepted. One asked if I had
any letter from my master and why I was going inland. I answered I
had no letter and was out to view the country; that I meant to return
this way in spring. He told me his master and men were gone down to
Montreal with the furs, and that they must detain me until his return.
However, they were very kind, and at night I went to my tent and told
Little Bear my leader. He only smiled and said: “They dare not detain
you.” Hendry was at the Pas on the Saskatchewan. If he had come up the
Saskatchewan from Lake Winnipeg, he would have found that the French
had another fort at the mouth of the river—Bourbon.
From now on, he describes the region which he crossed as Mosquito
Plains. White men alone in the wilderness become friends quickly. In
spite of rivalry, the English trader presented the French with tobacco;
the French in turn gave him pemmican of moose meat. On Wednesday, July
24, he left the fort. Sixteen miles up the Saskatchewan, Hendry passed
Peotago River, heavily timbered with birch trees. Up this region the
canoes of the four hundred Assiniboines ascended southward, toward the
western corner of the modern province of Manitoba. As the river became
shoal, canoes were abandoned seventy miles south of the Saskatchewan.
Packs strapped on backs, the Indians starving for food, a dreary march
began across country southwest over the Mosquito Plains. “Neither bird
nor beast is to be seen. We have nothing to eat,” records Hendry after
a twenty-six miles tramp. At last, seventy miles from where they had
left the canoes, one hundred and forty from the Saskatchewan, they came
on a huge patch of ripe raspberries and wild cherries, and luckily in
the brushwood killed two moose. This relieved the famine. Wandering
Assiniboines chanced to be encamped here. Hendry held solemn conference
with the leaders, whiffed pipes to the four corners of the universe—by
which the deities of North, South, East and West were called to witness
the sincerity of the sentiments—and invited these tribes down to York;
but they only answered, “we are already supplied by the French at
Pasquia.”
One hundred miles south of Pas—or just where the Canadian Northern
Railroad strikes west from Manitoba across Saskatchewan—a delightful
change came over the face of the country. Instead of brackish swamp
water or salt sloughs, were clear-water lakes. Red deer—called by the
Assiniboines _waskesaw_—were in myriads. “I am now,” writes Hendry as
he entered what is now the Province of Saskatchewan, “entering a most
pleasant and plentiful country of hills and dales with little woods.”
Many Indians were met, but all were strong partisans of the French.
An average of ten miles a day was made by the marchers, hunting red
deer as they tramped. On August 8, somewhere near what is now Red Deer
River, along the line of the Canada Northern, pause was made for a
festival of rejoicing on safe return from the long voyage and relief
from famine. For a day and a night, all hands feasted and smoked and
danced and drank and conjured in gladness; the smoking of the pipe
corresponding to our modern grace before meals, the dancing a way of
evincing thanks in rhythmic motion instead of music, the drinking
and conjuring not so far different from our ancestors’ way of giving
thanks. The lakes were becoming alkali swamps, and camp had to be
made where there was fresh water. Sometimes the day’s march did not
average four miles. Again, there would be a forced march of fifteen.
For the first time, an English fur trader saw Indians on horseback.
Where did they get the horses? As we now know, the horses came from
the Spaniards, but we must not wonder that when Hendry reported having
seen whole tribes on horseback, he was laughed out of the service as a
romancer, and the whole report of his trip discredited. The Indians’
object was to reach the buffalo grounds and lay up store of meat for
the winter. They told Hendry he would presently see whole tribes of
Indians on horseback—Archithinues, the famous Blackfoot Confederacy of
Bloods, Blackfeet, Piegans and Sarcees.
On the 15th of August, they were among the buffalo, where to-day the
great grooves and ruts left by the marching herds can still be seen
between the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine Rivers toward Qu’ Appelle.
For the most part, the Indians hunted the buffalo with bow and arrow,
and at night there was often a casualty list like the wounded after a
battle. “_Sunday—dressed a lame man’s leg and he gave me for my trouble
a moose nose, which is considered a great delicacy among the Indians._”
“_I killed a bull buffalo_,” he writes on September 8, “_he was nothing
but skin and bones. I took out his tongue and left his remains to the
wolves, which were waiting around in great numbers. We cannot afford
to expend ammunition on them. My feet are swelled with marching, but
otherwise I am in perfect health. So expert are the natives buffalo
hunting, they will take an arrow out of the buffalo when the beasts are
foaming and raging and tearing the ground up with their feet and horns.
The buffalo are so numerous, like herds of English cattle that we are
obliged to make them sheer out of our way._”
Sometimes more dangerous game than buffalo was encountered. On
September 17, Hendry writes: “_Two young men were miserably wounded by
a grizzly bear that they were hunting to-day. One may recover but the
other never can. His arm is torn from his body, one eye gouged out and
his stomach ripped open._” The next day the Indian died.
The Assiniboines were marching southwest from the Pas toward the land
of the Blackfeet. They were now three hundred miles southwest of the
French House. To Hendry’s surprise they came to a large river with
high banks that looked exactly like the Saskatchewan. It was the South
Branch of the Saskatchewan, where it takes the great bend south of
Prince Albert. Canoes had been left far behind. What were the four
hundred Assiniboines to do? But the Indians solved the difficulty
in less than half a day. Making boats of willow branches and moose
parchment skin—like the bull-boats of the Missouri—the Assiniboines
rafted safely across. The march now turned west toward the Eagle River
and Eagle Hills and North Saskatchewan. The Eagle Indians are met and
persuaded to bring their furs to York Fort.
As winter approached, the women began dressing the skins for moccasins
and clothes. A fire of punk in an earth-hole smoked the skins. Beating
and pounding and stretching pelts, the squaws then softened the skin.
For winter wear, moccasins were left with the fur inside. Hendry
remarks how in the fall of the year, the women sat in the doors of
their wigwams “knitting moose leather into snow shoes” made of seasoned
wood. It was October before the Indians of the far Western plains were
met. These were the famous Blackfeet for the first time now seen by an
English trader. They approached the Assiniboines mounted and armed with
bows and spears. Hendry gave them presents to carry to their chief.
Hendry notes the signs of mines along the banks of the Saskatchewan. He
thought the mineral iron. What he saw was probably an outcropping of
coal. The jumping deer he describes as a new kind of goat. As soon as
ice formed on the swamps, the hunters began trenching for beaver—which
were plentiful beyond the fur trader’s hopes. When, on October the
11th, the marchers for the third time came on the Saskatchewan, which
the Indians called Waskesaw, Hendry recognized that all the branches
were forks of one and the same great river—the Saskatchewan, or as the
French called it, Christinaux. The Indian names for the two branches
were Keskatchew and Waskesaw.
For several days the far smoke of an encampment had been visible
southwest. On October the 14th, four riders came out to conduct Hendry
to an encampment of three hundred and twenty-two tents of Blackfeet
Indians “_pitched in two rows with an opening in the middle, where we
were conducted to the leader’s tent_.” This was the main tribe of which
Hendry had already met the outrunners. “_The leader’s tent was large
enough to contain fifty persons. He received us seated on a buffalo
skin attended by twenty elderly men. He made signs for me to sit down
on his right hand, which I did. Our leaders (the Assiniboines) set
several great pipes going the rounds and we smoked according to their
custom. Not one word was spoken. Smoking over, boiled buffalo flesh
was served in baskets of bent wood. I was presented with ten buffalo
tongues. My guide informed the leader I was sent by the grand leader
who lives on the Great Waters to invite his young men down with their
furs. They would receive in return, powder, shot, guns and cloth.
He made little answer: said it was far off and his people could not
paddle. We were then ordered to depart to our tents which we pitched a
quarter of a mile outside their lines._” Again invited to the leader’s
tent the next morning, Hendry heard some remarkable philosophy from
the Indian. “_The chief told me his tribe never wanted food as they
followed the buffalo, but he was informed the natives who frequented
the settlements often starved on their journey, which was exceedingly
true_,” added Hendry. Reciprocal presents closed the interview. The
present to the Assiniboine chief was a couple of girl slaves, one of
whom was murdered at York ten years afterward by an Indian in a fit of
jealousy.
Later, Hendry learned that the Assiniboines did not want these
Blackfeet of the far West to come down to the bay. Neither would the
Assiniboines hunt except for food. Putting the two facts together,
Hendry rightly judged that the Assiniboines acted as middlemen between
the traders and the Blackfeet.
By the end of October, Hendry had left the plains and was in a rolling
wooded land northwest of the North Saskatchewan. Here, with occasional
moves as the hunting shifted, the Indians wintered; his journal says,
“eight hundred and ten miles west of York,” moving back and forward
north and south of the river; but a comment added by Andrew Graham on
the margin of the journal, says he was in latitude 59°. This is plainly
a mistake, as latitude 59° is six degrees away from the Saskatchewan;
but eight hundred and ten miles from York along the Saskatchewan would
bring Hendry in the region between the modern Edmonton and Battleford.
It is to Hendry’s credit that he remained on good terms with the
Assiniboines. If he had been a weakling, he would easily have become
the butt of the children who infested the tents like imps; but he
hunted with the hunters, trapped with the trappers, and could outmarch
the best of them. Consequently, there is not a note in his journal of
that doleful whine which comes from the weakling run amuck of hard life
in a savage land.
When he met Indians hunting for the French forts, with true trader
instinct he bribed them with gifts to bring their furs down to Hudson
Bay. Almost the entire winter, camp moved from bend to bend or branch
to branch of the North Saskatchewan, heading gradually eastward. Toward
spring, different tribes joined the Assiniboines to go down to York.
Among these were “green scalps” and many women captives from those
Blackfeet Indians Hendry had met. Each night the scalps hung like flags
from the tent poles. The captives were given around camp as presents.
One hears much twaddle of the red man’s noble state before he was
contaminated by the white man. Hendry saw these tribes of the Far West
before they had met any white men but himself, and the disposal of
those captives is a criterion of the red man’s noble state. Whenever
one was not wanted—the present of a girl, for instance, resented by a
warrior’s jealous wives—she was summarily hacked to pieces, and not a
passing thought given to the matter. The killing of a dog or a beaver
caused more comment. On the value of life as a thing of worth in
itself, the Indian had absolutely no conception, not so much conception
as a domestic dog trained not to destroy life.
By spring, Hendry’s camp had dwindled down to a party of twelve. He now
had only two pounds of powder in his possession, but his party were
rich in furs. As the time approached to build canoes, the Assiniboines
began gathering at the river banks. Young men searched the woods for
bark. Old men whittled out the gun’els. Women pounded pemmican into
bags for the long voyage to the bay. The nights passed in riotous feast
and revel, with the tom-tom pounding, the conjurers performing tricks,
the hunters dancing, the women peeping shyly into the dance tent. At
such times, one may guess, Hendry did not spare of his scant supplies
to lure the Indians to York Fort, but he did not count on the effects
of French brandy when the canoes would pass the French posts.
Ice was driving in the river like a mill race all the month of April.
Swans and geese and pigeons and bluejays came winging north. There was
that sudden and wondrous leap to life of a dormant world—and lo!—it was
summer, with the ducks on the river in flocks, and the long prairie
grass waving like a green sea, and the trees bleak and bare against
the vaporous sky now clothing themselves in foliage as in a bridal veil
shot with sunlight.
The great dog feast was solemnly held. The old men conjured the powers
of the air to bless them a God-speed. Canoes were launched on April 28,
and out swung the Assiniboines’ brigade for Fort York. It was easier
going down stream than up. Thirty and forty miles a day they made,
passing multitudes of Indians still building their canoes on the river
banks. At every camp, more fur-laden canoes joined them. Hendry’s heart
must have been very happy. He was bringing wealth untold to York.
Four hundred miles down stream, the Blackfeet Indians were met and
with great pow-wow of trading turned their furs over to the crafty
Assiniboines to be taken down to York. There were now sixty canoes in
the flotilla and says Hendry “not a pot or kettle among us.” Everything
had been bartered to the Blackfeet for furs. Six hundred miles from
their launching place, they came to the first French post. This
distance given by Hendry is another pretty effective proof that he had
wintered near Edmonton, if not beyond it, for this post was not the
Pas. It was subordinate to Basquia or Pasquia.
Hendry was invited into the French post as the guest of the master.
If he had been as crafty as he was brave, he would have hurried his
Indians past the rival post, but he had to live and learn. While he was
having supper, the French distributed ten gallons of brandy among the
Assiniboines. By morning, the French had obtained the pick of the furs,
one thousand of the best pelts, and it was three days before the amazed
Hendry could coax the Indians away from his polite hosts. Two hundred
miles more, brought the brigade to the main French post—the Pas. Nine
Frenchmen were in possession, and the trick was repeated. “The Indians
are all drunk,” deplores Hendry, “but the master was very kind to me.
He is dressed very genteel but his men wear nothing but drawers and
striped cotton shirts ruffled at the hand and breast. This house has
been long a place of trade and is named Basquia. It is twenty-six feet
long, twelve wide, nine high, having a sloping roof, the walls log on
log, the top covered with willows, and divided into three rooms, one
for trade, one for storing furs, and one for a dwelling.”
Four days passed before the Indians had sobered sufficiently to go on,
and they now had only the heavy furs that the French would not take. On
June 1, the brigade again set out for York. Canoes were lighter now.
Seventy miles a day was made. Hendry does not give any distances on his
return voyage, but he followed the same course by which he had come,
through Deer Lake and Steel River to Hayes River and York, where all
arrived on the 20th of June.
To Hendry’s profound disgust, he was not again permitted to go inland.
In fact, discredit was cast on his report. “Indians on horseback!” The
factors of the bay ridiculed the idea. They had never heard of such a
thing. All the Indians they knew came to the fort in canoes. Indeed,
it was that spirit of little-minded narrowness that more than anything
else lost to the Company the magnificent domain of its charter. If the
men governing the Company had realized the empire of their ruling as
fully as did the humble servants fighting the battles on the field,
the Hudson’s Bay Company might have ruled from Atlantic to Pacific in
the North, and in the West as far south as Mexico. But they objected
to being told what they did not know. Hendry was “frozen” out of the
service. The occasion of his leaving was even more contemptible than
the real cause. On one of his trading journeys, he was offered very
badly mixed brandies, probably drugged. Being a fairly good judge of
brandies from his smuggling days, Hendry refused to take what Andrew
Graham calls “such slops from such gentry.” He quit the service in
disgust.
The Company, as the minutes show, voted him £20 gratuity for his
voyage. Why, then, did the factors cast ridicule on his report?
Supposing they had accepted it, what would have been entailed? They
must capture the furs of that vast inland country for their Company. To
do that, there must be forts built inland. Some factor would be ordered
inland. Then, there would be the dangers of French competition—very
real danger in the light of that brandy incident. The factors on the
bay—Norton and Isham—were not brave enough men to undertake such
a campaign. It was easier sitting snugly inside the forts with a
multitude of slave Indians to wait on their least want. So the trade of
the interior was left to take care of itself.
_Notes on Chapter XVIII._—Hendry’s Journal is in Hudson’s Bay Company’s
House, London. A copy is also in the Canadian Archives. Andrew Graham
of Severn has written various notes along the margin. If it had not
been for Graham, it looks much as if Hendry’s Journal would have
been lost to the Company. Hendry gives the distances of each day’s
travel so minutely, that his course can easily be followed first to
Basquia, then from Basquia to the North Saskatchewan region. Graham’s
comment that Hendry was at 59° north is simply a slip. It is out of
the question to accept it for the simple reason Hendry could not
have gone eight hundred and ten miles _southwest_ from York, as his
journal daily records, and have been within 6° of 59°. Besides his own
discovery that he had been crossing branches of the Saskatchewan all
the time and his account of his voyage down the Saskatchewan to the
Pas, are unmistakable proofs of his whereabouts. Also he mentions the
Eagle Indians repeatedly. These Indians dwelt between the north and
south branches of the Saskatchewan. Whether the other rivers that he
crossed were the Assiniboine or the Qu’ Appelle or the Red Deer of Lake
Winnipegosis—I do not know.
I had great trouble in identifying the Archithinue Indians of Hendry’s
Journal till I came on Matthew Cocking’s Journal over the same ground.
Dec. 1, 1772, Cocking says: “This tribe is named Powestic Athinuewuck,
Waterfall Indians. There are four tribes or nations which are all
Equestrian Indians, viz:
(1) Mithco Athinuewuck, or Bloody Indians.
(2) Koskiton Wathesitock, or Black Footed Indians.
(3) Pegonow, or Muddy Water Indians.
(4) Sassewuck, or Woody Country Indians.”
CHAPTER XIX
1770-1800
EXTENSION OF TRADE TOWARD LABRADOR, QUEBEC AND ROCKIES—HEARNE
FINDS THE ATHABASCA COUNTRY AND FOUNDS CUMBERLAND HOUSE ON THE
SASKATCHEWAN—COCKING PROCEEDS TO THE BLACKFEET—HOWSE FINDS THE PASS IN
ROCKIES
While Anthony Hendry, the English smuggler, was making his way up the
Saskatchewan to the land of the Blackfeet—the present province of
Alberta—the English Adventurers were busy making good their claim to
Labrador. Except as a summer rendezvous, Rupert, the oldest of the
Company’s forts, at the southeast corner of the bay—had been abandoned,
but far up the coast of Labrador on the wildest part of this desolate
shore, was that fort which the Company was shortly forced to dismantle
at great loss—Richmond. When Captain Coates was sent to cruise the east
coast of Hudson Bay, thirty men under John Potts and Mr. Pollexfen, had
been left on Richmond Gulf to build a fort. There was no more dangerous
region on the bay. It was here Hudson’s crew had been attacked by
the Eskimos, and here the Eskimos yearly came to winter and hunt the
white whale. Between the rugged main shore and the outer line of barren
islands was usually open water. Camped on the rocky islets, the timid
Eskimos were secure from Indian foe, and if the white whale fisheries
failed, they had only to scud across the open water or portage over
the ice to the mainland and hunt partridge on Richmond Gulf. From one
hundred and fifty to three hundred Eskimos yearly wintered within
trading distance of Richmond.
Quickly, storehouses, barracks, wareroom and guardroom were erected
just inside the narrow entrance from Hudson Bay to Richmond Gulf, and
round all thrown a ten-foot palisade. This was in 1749. Coates had
been attracted to Richmond Gulf—which he calls Artiwinipack—by its
land-locked, sheltered position and the magnificent supply of lumber
for building. The Eskimo whale fisheries were farther south at Whale
River and East Main, with winter lodges subordinate to Richmond. The
partridges of the wooded slopes promised abundance of food, and there
was excellent fox and beaver trapping. Compared to the other rocky
barrens of northern Labrador, Richmond Harbor seemed Paradise, “_but
oh, my conscience_,” wrote Captain Coates, “_there is so profound
silence, such awful precipices, no life, that the world seems asleep.
The land is so tremendous high that wind and water reverberate between
the cliffs entering two miles to our gulf. Inside are mountains,
groves, cascades and vales adorned with trees. On the Hudson Bay side
nothing is seen but barren rocks. Inside, all is green with stately
woods.... On the high mountains is only snow moss; lower, a sort of
rye grass, some snow drops and violets without odor, then rows of
evergreens down to the very sea. On the right of the gulf is Lady
Lake’s Grove under a stupendous mountain, whence falls a cascade
through the grove to the sea. In short, such is the elegant situation
of Richmond Fort that it is not to be paralleled in the world._”
Such were the high hopes with which Richmond Fort was founded. To-day
it is a howling wilderness silent as death but for the rush of waters
heard when white men first entered the bay. Partridge there were in
plenty among the lonely evergreens, and game for trapping; but not
the warmest overtures of Chief Factor Potts and Mr. Pollexfen and Mr.
Isbister, who yearly came up from Albany, could win the friendship of
the treacherous Eskimos. They would not hunt, and the white men dare
not penetrate far enough inland to make their trapping pay. Potts kept
his men whale fishing off Whale River, but in five years the loss to
the Company had totaled more than £24,000. The crisis came in 1754.
Day and night, the stealthy shadow of Eskimo spies moved through the
evergreens of the gulf. In vain Potts gave the chiefs presents of
gold-laced suits, beaver hats with plumes, and swords. “They _shaked_
my hands,” he records, “and hugged and embraced and smiled”; but the
very next trapper, who went alone to the woods, or attempted to drive
his dog train south to Whale River, would see Eskimos ambushed behind
rocks and have his _cache_ rifled or find himself overpowered and
plundered. One day in February, Mr. Pollexfen had gone out with his men
from Whale River trapping. When they returned in the afternoon they
found the cook boy had been kidnapped and the house robbed of every
object that could be carried away—stores of ammunition, arms, traps,
food, clothes, even the door hinges and iron nails of the structure.
Waiting only till it was dark, the terrified hunters hitched their dog
sleighs up, tore off all bells that would betray flight, and drove
like mad for the stronger fort of Richmond. Potts hurriedly sent out
orders to recall his trappers from the hills and manned Richmond for
siege. It was four days before all the men came under shelter, and
nightly the Eskimos could be heard trying to scale the palisades. The
fort was so short of provisions, all hands were reduced to one meal a
day. Potts called for volunteers, to go to the rescue of the kidnapped
cook—a boy, named Matthew Warden; and thirteen men offered to go. The
Eskimos had taken refuge on the islands of the outer shore. Frost-fog
thick as wool lay on the bay. Eskimos were seen lurking on the hills
above the fort. A council was held. It was determined to catch three
Eskimos as hostages for the cook’s safety rather than risk the lives
of thirteen men outside the fort. Some ten days later, when a few men
ventured out for partridges, the forest again came to life with Eskimo
spies. Potts recalled his hunters, sent two scouts to welcome the
Eskimos to the fort and placed all hands on guard. Three Indians were
conducted into the house. In a twinkling, fetters were clapped on two,
and the third bade go and fetch the missing white boy on pain of death
to the hostages. The stolid Eskimo affected not to understand. Potts
laid a sword across the throats of the two prisoners and signaled the
third to be gone. The fellow needed no urging but scampered. “I had our
men,” relates Potts, “one by one pass through the guardroom changing
their dresses every time to give the two prisoners the idea that I had
a large garrison. They seemed surprised that I had one hundred men,
but they spoke no word.” The next day, the fettered prisoners drew
knives on their guard, seized his gun and clubbed the Company men from
the room. In the scuffle that followed, both Eskimos were shot. The
danger was now increased a hundredfold. Friendly Montagnais Indians,
especially one named Robinson Crusoe, warned Potts that if the shooting
were known, nothing could save the fort. The bodies were hidden in the
cellar till some Montagnais went out one dark night and weighting the
feet with stones, pushed them through a hole in the ice. How quickly
white men can degenerate to savagery is well illustrated by the conduct
of the cooped-up, starving garrison. Before sending away the dead
bodies, they cut the ears from each and preserved them in spirits of
alcohol to send down by Indian scouts to Isbister at Moose with a
letter imploring that the sloop come to the rescue as soon as the ice
cleared. For two months the siege lasted. Nothing more was ever heard
of the captured boy, but by the end of May, Isbister had sent a sloop
to Richmond. As told elsewhere, Richmond was dismantled in 1778 and the
stores carried down to Whale River and East Main.
Important changes had gradually grown up in the Adventurer’s methods.
White servants were no longer forbidden to circulate with the Indians
but encouraged to go out to the hunting field and paid bounties on
their trapping. Three men had been sent out from York in January, 1772,
to shoot partridges for the fort. It was a mild, open winter. The men
carried provisions to last three weeks. Striking back through the marsh
land, that lies between Hayes and Nelson Rivers, they camped for the
first night on the banks of the Nelson. The next morning, Tuesday,
the 7th of January, they were crossing the ice of the Nelson’s broad
current when they suddenly felt the rocking of the tide beneath their
feet, looked ahead, saw the frost-smoke of open water and to their
horror realized that the tidal bore had loosened the ice and they were
adrift, bearing out to sea. In vain, dogs and men dashed back for the
shore. The ice floe had separated from the land and was rushing seaward
like a race horse. That night it snowed. The terrified men kept watch,
hoping that the high tide would carry the ice back to some of the long,
low sand-bars at Port Nelson. The tide did sway back the third day but
not near enough for a landing. This night, they put up their leather
tents and slept drifting. When they awakened on Friday the 10th, they
were driving so direct for the shore that the three men simultaneously
dashed to gain the land, leaving packs, provisions, tent and sleighs;
but in vain. A tidal wave swept the floe off shore, and when they
set back for their camp, they were appalled to see camp kit, sleds,
provisions, all—drive past afloat. The ice floe had broken. They were
now adrift without food or shelter, James Ross carrying gun, powder
bag and blanket over his shoulders as he had risen from sleep, Farrant
wearing only the beaver coat in which he had slept, Tomson bereft of
either gun or blanket.
[Illustration: Fort Rae, on Great Slave Lake, One of the Northernmost
Posts of the Fur Trade.]
This time, the ebb carried them far into the bay where they passed the
fourth night adrift. The next day, wind and the crumbling of the ice
added to their terrors. As the floe went to pieces, they leaped from
float to float trying to keep together on the largest icepan. Farrant
fell through the slush to his armpits and after being belted tightly
in his beaver coat lay down behind a wind-break of ice blocks to die.
Their only food since losing the tent kit had been some lumps of sugar
one of them had chanced to have in his pockets. During Saturday night
the 11th of January, the ice grounded and great seas began sweeping
over the floe. When Ross and Tomson would have dragged Farrant to
a higher hummock of the ice field, they found that he was dead. On
Monday, the weather grew cold and stormy. Tomson’s hands had swollen so
that he could not move a muscle and the man became delirious, raving
of his Orkney home as they roamed aimlessly over the illimitable ice
fields. That night, the seventh they had been adrift, just as the
moon sank below the sea, the Orkneyman, Tomson, breathed his last.
Ross was now alone. A great ice floe borne down by a wash of the tide,
swept away Tomson’s body. Ross scrambled upon the fresh drift and
hoping against hope, scarcely able to believe his senses, saw that the
new icepan extended to the land. Half blinded by sun glare, hands and
feet frozen stiff, now laughing hysterically, now crying deliriously,
the fellow managed to reach shore, but when the sun set he lost all
sense of direction and could not find his way farther. That night, his
hands were so stiff that he could not strike a light on his flint, but
by tramping down brushwood, made himself a bed in the snow. Sunrise
gave him his bearings again and through his half-delirium he realized
he was only four miles from the fort. Partly walking, partly creeping,
he reached York gates at seven that night. One of the dogs had followed
him all the way, which probably explains how he was not frozen sleeping
out uncovered for nine nights. Hands and feet had to be amputated, but
his countrymen of Orkney took up a subscription for him and the Company
gave him a pension of £20 a year for life. The same amount was bestowed
on the widows of the two dead men. It is not surprising that Hudson
Bay became ill-omened to Orkneymen who heard such tales of fur hunting
as have been related of Richmond and York.
But the Company was now on the eve of the most momentous change in its
history. Anthony Hendry had reported how the French traders had gone up
the Saskatchewan to the tribes of equestrian Indians; and Hendry had
been cashiered for his pains. Now a new fact influenced the Company.
French power had fallen at Quebec, in 1759. Instead of a few French
traders scattered through the West, were thousands of wildwood rovers,
half-Indian, half-French, voyageurs and bush-lopers, fled from the new
laws of the new English régime to the freedom of the wilderness. Beyond
Sault Ste. Marie, the long hand of the law could not reach. Beyond the
Sault, was law of neither God nor man. To make matters worse, English
merchants, who had flocked to Montreal and Quebec, now outfitted these
French rovers and personally led them to the far hunting field of the
_Pays d’en Haut_—a term that meant anything from Lake Superior to the
Pole. The English Adventurers sent more men up stream—up the Moose
toward Quebec as far as Abbittibbi, up the Albany toward what is now
Manitoba past Henley House as far as Osnaburg, across what is now
Keewatin toward Lake Superior as far as New Brunswick House. The catch
of furs showed a decrease every year. Fewer Indians came to the bay,
fewer hunters to the outlying fur posts. Dividends dropped from 10 to 8
and from 8 to 6 and from 6 to 5 per cent. Instead of 100,000 beaver a
year there came to the London market only 40,000 and 50,000 a year.
To stand on the rights of monopoly conferred by an ancient charter
while “interlopers and pedlars,” as the Company called them—ran
away with the profits of that monopoly, was like standing on your
dignity with a thief while he picked your pockets. The “smug ancient
gentlemen,” as enemies designated the Company, bestirred themselves
mightily. Moses Norton, governor of Churchill, was no more anxious
to fight the French Canadians on the hunting field now than he had
been in the days of Anthony Hendry, but being half-Indian he knew
all the legends of the Indians—knew that even if the French already
had possession of the Saskatchewan, north of the Saskatchewan was an
unclaimed kingdom, whence no white man had yet set foot, as large again
as the bounds of Hudson Bay.
Besides, the Company had not forgotten those legends of minerals in the
North which had lured Captain Knight to his death. Chippewyan Indians
still came to Churchill with huge masses of amorphous copper strung on
necklaces or battered into rough pots and pans and cooking utensils.
Whence came that copper? Oddly enough, the world cannot answer that
question yet. The Indians said from “a Far-Away-Metal River” that
ran to a vast sea where the tide ebbed and flowed. Once more hopes
of finding a Northwest Passage rose; once more hopes of those metals
that had led Knight to ship-wreck. Norton suggested that this time
the search should be made by land. Serving as a clerk on a brig at
Churchill was a well-educated young Englishman already mentioned—Samuel
Hearne.
The yearly boats that came to Churchill in 1769, commissioned Hearne
for this expedition, whose ostensible object was the finding of the
Metal River now known as the Coppermine but whose real object was the
occupation of a vast region not yet preempted by the Canadians. The
story of Hearne’s travels would fill a volume. Norton, the governor,
was a curious compound of ability and sham, strength and vice. Born
of an Indian mother and English father, he seemed to have inherited
all the superstitions of one and vices of the other. He was educated
in England and married an English woman. Yet when he came to the
wilderness, he had a seraglio of native wives that would have put a
Mormon to the blush. These he kept apart in rudely but gorgeously
furnished apartments to which he alone possessed the keys. At the
mess-room table, he wearied the souls of his officers by long-winded
and saintly sermons on virtue which were expounded as regularly as the
night supper came round. Did some blackleg expiating dissipations by
life in the wilds judge Norton’s sermons by his conduct and emulate
his example rather than his precepts, Norton had the culprit tied to
the triangle and flogged till his back was raw. An Indian is never a
hypocrite. Why would he be? His code is to do as he wishes, to follow
his desires, to be stronger than his enemies, to impose on the weak.
He has no religion to hold a higher example up like a mirror that
reflects his own face as loathsome, and he has no science to teach him
that what religion calls “evil” means in the long run, wretchedness
and rottenness and ruin. But the hypocrisy in Norton was the white man
strain—the fig leaf peculiar to civilized man—living a lie so long
that he finally believes the lie himself. Knowledge of white man’s
science, Norton had; but to the Indian in him, it was still mystery;
“medicine,” a secret means to kill an enemy, arsenic in medicine,
laudanum in whiskey, or poison that caused convulsions to an Indian who
refused either a daughter for the seraglio or beaver at Norton’s terms.
A white man who could wield such power was to the Indians a god, and
Norton held them in the hollow of his hand. Equally successful was the
half-breed governor managing the governing committee of the Hudson’s
Bay Company in London; for he sent them enormous returns in beaver at
small outlay.
Seven great guns roared their God-speed as the fort gates opened and
Hearne sped out by dog train for his inland trip north on November 6,
1769. Norton waved a farewell and Hearne disappeared over the rolling
drifts with two Indians as guides, two white men as packers to look
after provisions. Striking northwest, Hearne was joined by other
traveling Indians. Bitterly cold weather set in. One Indian guide
deserted the first night out and the other proved himself an impudent
beggar, who camped when it was cold and camped when it was wet and
paused to hunt when it was fair, but laid up no stock of provisions,
giving Hearne plainly to understand that the whole Indian cavalcade
looked to the white men’s sleighs for food. The travelers did not make
ten miles a day. At the end of the month Hearne wakened one morning to
find his stores plundered and gales of laughter ringing back as the
Indians marched off with their booty. Not even guns were left. Rabbit
and partridge-snaring saved the three white men from starving as they
retreated. They were safe inside the fort once more by December 11.
Hearne’s object setting out in midwinter had been to reach the North
before summer, and nothing daunted, he again set forth with five fresh
guides on February 23, 1770, again depending on snares for food. April
saw the marchers halted on the borders of the Barren Lands, scouring
the wide wastes of treeless swamps and rock for game. Caribou had
retreated inland and not yet begun their traverse to the bay. Until
wild fowls came winging north, the camp lived on snow water, tobacco
and such scraps of leather and dried meat as had not already been
devoured. A chance herd of wandering deer relieved the famine till
June, when rations were again reduced; this time, to wild cranberries.
Then the traverse of the caribou herds came—a rush of countless myriads
with the tramp of an army and the clicking of a multitude of horns
from west to east for weeks. Indians had gathered to the traverse in
hundreds. Moss served as fuel. Provisions were abundant. Hearne had
almost decided to winter with the wandering Chippewyans when they again
began to plunder his store of ammunition. Wind had smashed some of the
survey instruments, so he joined a band of hunters on their way to the
fort, which he reached on November 25.
Hearne had not found “Far-Away-Metal-River,” nor the copper mines,
nor the Northwest Passage, but he had found fresh tribes of Indians,
and these were what Norton wanted. December 7, 1770, less than a
month from his home-coming, Hearne was again dispatched by Norton.
Matonabbee, a famous guide of the Chippewyans, accompanied the explorer
with a retinue of the Indian’s wives to draw sleds and handle baggage.
Almost as notable as Norton was Matonabbee, the Chippewyan chief—an
Indian of iron constitution and iron will, pitiless to his wives,
whom he used as beasts of burden; relentless in his aims, fearless
of all Indians, a giant measuring more than six feet, straight as an
arrow, supple as willow, hard as nails. Imperturbable and good-natured
Matonabbee set the pace at winged speed, pausing for neither hunger nor
cold. Christmas week was celebrated by fasting. Matonabbee uttered no
complaint; and the white man could not well turn back when the Indian
was as eager for the next day’s march as if he had supped sumptuously
instead of going to bed on a meal of moss water. Self-pity, fear,
hesitation, were emotions of which the guide knew nothing. He had
undertaken to lead Hearne to “Far-Away-Metal-River,” and only death
could stop him.
In the Barren Lands, caribou enough were killed to afford the whole
company provisions for six months; and the marchers were joined by
two hundred more Indians. Wood became scarcer and smaller as they
marched north. Matonabbee halted in April and ordered his wives to
camp while the men made dugouts for the voyage down stream. The boats
were heavy in front to resist the ice jams. If Hearne had marveled
at the large company now following Matonabbee to a hard, dangerous
hunting field he quickly guessed good reasons when wives and children
were ordered to head westward and await the warrior’s return at Lake
Athabasca. Women are ordered away only when there is prospect of
war, and Hearne could easily surmise whence the Chippewyans annually
obtained eleven thousand of their best beaver pelts. The sun no longer
set. It was continual day, and on June 12, 1771, the swamps of the
Barrens converged to a narrow, rocky river bed whence roared a misty
cataract—“Far-Off-Metal-River”—the Coppermine River, without any sign
of the ebbing tide that was to lead to the South Sea. When Hearne
came back to his Indian companions from the river bed, he found them
stripped and daubed in war paint, gliding as if in ambush from stone
to stone down the steep declivity of the waterfall. Then far below the
rapids, like the tops of big bowlders, appeared the rounded leather
tent-peaks of an Eskimo camp. The Eskimos were apparently sound asleep,
for it was midnight though as light as day.
Before Hearne could collect his senses or alarm the sleeping victims,
he had been left far to the rear by his villainous comrades. Then
occurred one of the most deplorable tragedies in the history of the
Hudson’s Bay Company. Such of the horrors as are tellable, I have told
elsewhere in the account of Hearne’s travels. The raiders fell on the
Eskimos like wolves on the sheepfold. Not content with plundering the
camp of beaver pelts, they speared, stabbed, bludgeoned, men, women,
children, old and young, till the river ran red with innocent blood.
Rushing forward, Hearne implored Matonabbee to stop the slaughter.
Matonabbee’s response was a shout of laughter. What were the weak for
but to be the victims of the strong? What did these fool-Eskimos toil
for but to render tribute of their toil to him, who had the force to
take? The doctrine was not a new one. Neither is it yet old; only
we moderns do our bludgeoning with financial coercion, competition,
monopoly or what not, instead of the butt end of a gun, or stone spear;
and it would be instructive to know if philosophers in a thousand years
will consider our methods as barbarous as we consider the savages of
two hundred years ago.
The tortures of that raid have no place in a history of the Hudson’s
Bay Company. They are told in Hearne’s life, and they haunted the
explorer like a bloody nightmare. One day later, on July 17, Hearne
stood on the shores of the Arctic ocean—the first white man to witness
the tossing ice floes of that green, lone, paleocrystic sea; but his
vision was not the exaltation of an explorer. It was a hideous memory
of young girls speared bodily through and through and left writhing
pinioned to the ground; of young boys whose hearts were torn out and
devoured while warm; of old men and women gouged, buffeted, beaten
to death. It does not make a pretty picture, that doctrine of the
supremacy of strength, the survival of the fit, the extermination of
the weak—it does not make a pretty picture when you reduce it to terms
of the physical. How quickly wild-beast savagery may reduce men to the
level of beasts was witnessed as Hearne rested on the shores of the
Arctic—a musk ox was shot. The warriors tore it to pieces and devoured
it raw.
Retreating up the shelving rocks of the Coppermine twenty miles, Hearne
found what he thought were the copper mines from which the Indians made
their metal weapons. The company then struck westward for the famous
Athabasca region where the wives were to camp for the winter. Athabasca
proved a hunter’s paradise as it has been ever since Hearne discovered
it. Beaver abounded in the swampy muskegs. Buffalo roamed to the south.
Moose yards were found in the wooded bluffs; mink, marten, fox, every
fur bearer which the English Adventurers sought. In spring, a flotilla
carried the Indians down to Churchill, where Hearne arrived on June 30,
1772.
The geographical importance of Hearne’s discovery—the fact that he had
found a region half the size of European Russia and proved that not a
narrow strip of land lay between the Atlantic and Pacific but a vast
continent—was eclipsed by the importance of his discoveries for the fur
traders. The region must be occupied by the English Company before the
French Canadians found it. Old Moses Norton sick unto death hastened
to send word to the governing committee in London, and the governing
committee voted Hearne a present of £200, £10 a year for a valet, £130
a year as a salary, and promotion as governor on Norton’s death, which
occurred on December 29, 1773.
The death of Norton was of a piece with his life. The bully fell ill of
some deadly intestinal trouble that caused him as excruciating tortures
as ever his poisons had caused his victims. Calling the officers of the
fort, he publicly made his will, leaving all his savings to his wife
in England but directing that she should yearly set aside £10 for the
clothing of his Indian wives at Churchill. As the Indian women stood
round the dying tyrant’s bed his eye detected an officer whispering to
one of the young Indian wives. With a roar, Norton leaped to his feet
in the bed.
“You —— —— ——,” he roared, “I’ll burn you alive! I’ll burn you alive——”
The effort cost the bully his life. He fell back dead—he whose hand
had tyrannized over the fort for fifty years, a mass of corrupting
flesh which men hurriedly put out of sight. Hearne was called from the
Saskatchewan to become governor and undertake the opening of the inland
trade. Hearne’s report on his trip to the Coppermine and Athabasca
was received at London in November, 1772. In May of 1773, the minutes
recorded “that the company having under consideration the interruptions
to the trade from the Canadian Pedlars as reported by Isaac Batts at
Basquia, do decide on mature deliberation to send Samuel Hearne to
establish a fort at Basquia with Mr. Cocking.” They were accompanied
by Louis Primo, John Cole and half a dozen French renegades, who had
been bribed to desert from the Canadians—in all seventeen men. Hearne
did better than he was instructed. Leaving Batts, Louis Primo and the
Frenchmen at Basquia to compete against the Canadians, he established
Cumberland House far above, on the Saskatchewan, at Sturgeon Lake,
where the Indians could be intercepted before they came down to the
French posts. Traders inland were paid £40 a year with a bounty of £2
when they signed their contract and a bonus of a shilling for every
twenty beaver.
When Hearne was recalled to Churchill to become governor, Matthew
Cocking was left superintendent of inland trade. Cocking had earned
laurels for himself by a voyage almost as important as Hearne’s. The
very week that Hearne came back to Churchill at the end of June,
1772, from the Athabasca, Cocking had set out from York for the South
Saskatchewan. He accompanied the Assiniboines returning from their
yearly trip to the bay. By the end of July he had crossed the north end
of Lake Winnipeg and gone up the Saskatchewan to Basquia. Louis Primo,
the renegade Frenchman, was met leading a flotilla of canoes down to
Hudson Bay, and it must have afforded Cocking great satisfaction to see
that the activity of the Hudson’s Bay Company had forced the French
Canadians to desert both their posts on the lower Saskatchewan. He
passed the empty houses on the banks of the river where the leaders of
the French-Canadians had had their forts, Findlay’s and Frobisher’s and
Curry’s. Leaving canoes somewhere eastward of the Forks, Cocking struck
south for the country of the Blackfeet at the foothills of the Rockies,
near what is now the International Boundary. The South Saskatchewan
was crossed at the end of August in bull-boats—tub-like craft made of
parchment stretched on willows. In the Eagle Hills, Cocking met French
traders, who had abandoned civilized life and joined the Indian tribes.
The Eagle Hills were famous as the place where the Indians got tent
poles and birch bark before crossing the plains to the east and south.
Cocking spent the winter with the Blackfeet and the Bloods and the
Piegans and the Sarcees, whom he names as the Confederacy of Waterfall
Indians, owing to the numerous cataracts on the upper reaches of Bow
River. He was amazed to find fields of cultivated tobacco among the
Blackfeet and considered the tribe more like Europeans than any Indians
he had ever met. The winter was spent hunting buffalo by means of the
famous “pounds.” Buffalo were pursued by riders into a triangular
enclosure of sticks round a large field. Behind the fences converging
to a point hid the hunters, whose cries and clappings frightened the
herds into rushing precipitately to the converging angle. Here was
either a huge hole, or the natural drop over the bank of a ravine,
where the buffalo tumbled, mass after mass of infuriated animals,
literally bridging a path for the living across the bodies of the dead.
The Blackfeet hunters thought nothing of riding for a hundred miles
to round up the scattered herds to one of these “pounds” or “corrals.”
All that Hendry had said of the Blackfeet twenty years before, Cocking
found to be true. All were riders—men, women, children—the first
tribes Cocking had yet met where women were not beasts of burden. The
tribe had earthen pots for cooking utensils, used moss for tinder, and
recorded the history of the people in rude drawings on painted buffalo
robes. In fact, Cocking’s description of the tribal customs might be an
account of the Iroquois. The Blackfeet’s entire lives were spent doing
two things—hunting and raiding the Snakes of the South for horses. Men
and women captives were tortured with shocking cruelty that made the
Blackfeet a terror to all enemies; but young captives were adopted into
the tribe after the custom followed by the Iroquois of the East. Of
food, there was always plenty from the buffalo hunts; and game abounded
from the Saskatchewan Forks to the mountains.
[Illustration: Traders Leaving Athabasca Landing for the North.]
When Cocking tried to persuade the Blackfeet to come down to the fort
with furs, they were reluctant. They did not understand canoe travel
and could not take their horses, and why should they go down? The
Assiniboines would trade the furs for firearms to be brought to the
Blackfeet. Cocking pointed out that with more firearms, they could
be masters of the entire country and by dint of presenting cocked
hats and swords and gold-laced red coats to the chiefs, induced them to
promise not to trade with “the Canadian Pedlars.” “We have done all in
our power to keep them from trading with François or Curry, who lie at
the Portage (the Rapids) of the Saskatchewan to intercept the natives
coming to us.”
On May 16, 1773, Cocking set out to return to the fort. For the first
time, a few young Blackfeet joined the canoes going to York. At the
Forks, two rival camps were found, that of Louis Primo who had come
over to the Hudson’s Bay from the French, and old François working for
the French Canadians. The English traders had no liquor. Four gallons
of rum diluted with water won the Indians over to old François, the
Canadian, who picked out one hundred of the rarest skins and was only
hindered taking the entire hunt because he had no more goods to trade.
François’ house was a long log structure divided into two sections,
half for a kitchen and mess room, half for a trading room, and the
furs were kept in the loft. Outside, were two or three log cabins for
François’ white men, of whom he had twenty. Round all ran ten-foot
stockades against which lay the great canoes twenty-four feet long,
twenty-two inches deep, which carried the furs to Lake Superior.
Cocking, who was used to factors ruling like little kings, was shocked
to find old François “an ignorant Frenchman, who did not keep his men
at proper distance and had no watch at night. It surprises me,” he
writes, “to observe what a warm side the natives hath to the French
Canadians.”
Down at Grand Rapids near the mouth of the Saskatchewan, Cocking
received another shock. Louis Primo and those Frenchmen bribed to join
the Hudson’s Bay, who had gone on from the Forks ahead of Cocking, were
to join him at the last portage of the Saskatchewan to go down to York.
He found that they had gone back to the French bag and baggage with
all their furs and goods supplied by the Hudson’s Bay and were already
halfway down to Lake Superior. Spite of being only “an ignorant old
Frenchman,” François had played a crafty game. By June 18, Cocking was
back at York.
But the Company did not content itself with occasional expeditions
inland. Henceforth “patroons of the woods,” as they were called, were
engaged to live inland with the Indians and collect furs. Fifty-one
men were regularly kept at Cumberland House, and a bonus of £20 a year
regularly paid to the patroons. Whenever a Frenchman could be bribed
to come over to the Hudson’s Bay traders, he was engaged at £100 a
year. Bonuses above salaries amounted to £200 a year for the factors,
to £40 for the traders, to £80 for traveling servants. The Company now
had a staff of five hundred white men on the field and ten times as
many Indians. In 1785, Robert Longmore is engaged to explore inland up
Churchill River as far as Athabasca, where, in 1799, Malcolm Ross is
permanently placed as chief trader at £80 a year. In 1795, Joseph Howse
is sent inland from York to explore the Rockies, where he gives his
name to a pass, and “it is resolved that forts shall be erected in this
country too.” John Davidson explores the entire coast of Labrador on
the east; and on the west of Hudson Bay Charles Duncan reports finally
and, as far as the Company is concerned, forever—_there is no navigable
Northwest Passage_. In all, the Company has spent £100,000 seeking that
mythical passage, which is now written off as total loss. Up at Marble
Island, the sea still takes toll of the brave, and James Mouat, the
whaler, is buried in 1773, beside Captain Knight. At this stage too,
I am sorry to say, 12,000 gallons of brandy are yearly sent into the
country.
It was in 1779 that _The King George_ ship beat about the whole summer
in the ice without entering York and was compelled to unload its cargo
at Churchill, for which Captain Fowler was suspended and lost his
gratuity of £100.
Such strenuous efforts brought big rewards in beaver, seventy, and
eighty, and ninety thousand a year to London, but the expenses of
competition had increased so enormously that dividends had fallen from
10 to 5 per cent. I suppose it was to impress the native mind with the
idea of pomp, but about this time I find the Company furnished all its
officers with “brass-barreled pistols, swords with inlaid handles,
laced suits and cocked hats.” A more perfect example of the English
mind’s inability to grasp American conditions could not be found than
an entry in the expense book of 1784 when the Company buys “150 tracts
on _the Country Clergyman’s Advice to Parishioners_” for distribution
among North American Indians, who could not read any language let alone
English.
It was no longer a policy of drift but drive, and in the midst of this
came the shock of the French war. All hands were afield from Churchill
but thirty-nine white servants one sleepy afternoon on August 8, 1782,
and Governor Hearne was busy trading with some Indians whom Matonabbee
had brought down, when the astounding apparition appeared of a fleet
at sea. No appointed signals were displayed by the incoming ships—they
were _not_ Company ships, and they anchored five miles from the fort
to sound. Churchill had not heard of war between France and England. No
alarm was felt. The fort had been forty years in building and was one
of the strongest in America, constructed of stone with forty great guns
and an outer battery to prevent approach. Probably intending to send
out a boat the next morning, Hearne went comfortably to bed. At three
in the morning, which was as light as day, somebody noticed that four
hundred armed men had landed not far from the fort and were marching in
regular military order for the gates. Too late, a reveille sounded and
bells rang to arms. Hearne dashed out with two men and met the invaders
halfway. Then he learned that the fleet was part of the French navy and
the four hundred invaders regular marines under the great officer—La
Perouse. Resistance was impossible now. The guns of the fort were not
even manned. The garrison was too small to permit one man to a gun. At
six in the morning, the British flag was lowered and a white tablecloth
of surrender run up on the pole. Hearne and the officers were taken
on board prisoners of war. Then the rough soldiery ran riot. Furs,
stores, documents—all were plundered, and a second day spent blowing up
the fortifications. Buildings were burned but the French were unable
to do serious damage to the walls. Matonabbee the great chief looked
on in horror. He had thought his English friends invincible, and now
he saw his creed of brute strength turned upon them and upon himself.
No longer he smiled contemptuously at the horror. It was one thing
to glory in the survival of the strong—another to be the under dog.
Matonabbee drew away outside the walls and killed himself. Old Norton’s
widows and children were scattered. On one the hardships fell with
peculiar harshness. His daughter Marie he had always nurtured as a
white girl. She fled in terror of her life from the brutal soldiery and
perished of starvation outside the walls.
Hearne has been blamed for two things in this surrender, for not making
some show of resistance and for not sending scouts overland south to
warn York. For thirty-nine men to have fought four hundred would have
invited extermination, and Hearne did not know that the invaders were
enemies till he himself was captured and so could not send word to
York. What he might have done was earlier in the game. If he had sent
out a pilot to guide the ships into Churchill Harbor, it might have led
the enemy to wreck among reefs and sand-bars.
On the third day, the three French men-of-war set sail for York,
leaving Churchill in flames. Outward bound, one of the Company ships
was sighted coming into Churchill. The French gave chase till seven in
the evening, but the English captain led off through such shoal water
the French desisted with a single chance volley in the direction of the
fleeing fur ship.
On August 20, the Company ship lying at York observed a strange fleet
some twenty miles off shore landing men on Nelson River behind York,
which faced Hayes River. From plans taken at Churchill, La Perouse
had learned that York was weakest to the rear. There were in the fort
at that time sixty English and twelve Indians with some twenty-five
cannon and twelve swivel guns on the galleries. There was a supply of
fresh water inside the fort with thirty head of cattle; but a panic
prevailed. All the guns were overset to prevent the French using them,
and the English ship scudded for sea at nightfall.
The French meanwhile had marched across the land behind York and now
presented themselves at the gates. The governor, Humphry Martin,
welcomed them with a white flag in his hand. Umfreville, who gives the
account of the surrender, was among the captured. His disgust knew no
bounds. “The enemy’s ships lay at least twenty miles from the factory
in a boisterous sea,” he writes, “and could not co-operate with the
troops on shore. The troops had no supplies. Cold, hunger and fatigue
were hourly working in our favor. The factory was not in want of a
single thing to withstand siege. The people showed no fear but the
reverse. Yet the English governor surrendered without firing a gun.”
The French did not attempt to occupy the forts, which they had
captured, but retired with the officers as prisoners, and with the
plunder. By October the Company had received letters from the prison
at Dinan Castle, France, asking for the ransom of the men. By May, the
ransomed men were in London, and by June back at their posts on the bay.
_Notes to Chapter XIX._—As stated elsewhere, Cocking classified the
Blackfeet Confederacy as Waterfall Indians, composed of Powestic
Athinuewuck, Mithco Athinuewuck, (Blood); Koskiton Wathesitock
(Blackfeet); Pegonow (Piegan); Sassewuck (Sarcee). Cocking’s Journal
is in the Hudson’s Bay Company House, London, and in the Canadian
Archives, Ottawa.
The account of Hearne’s Voyages will be found in “Pathfinders of the
West,” or in the accounts by himself, (1) the report submitted to the
H. B. C., (2) his published journals in French and English, of which I
used the French edition of 1799, which is later and fuller than either
his report to the H. B. C. or the English book.
* * * * *
I find the beaver receipts of this period as follows:
A. F. (Albany Fort) 21,454 M. R. (Moose) 8,860 E. M. (East Main) 7,626
YF. & SF. (York & Severn) 37,861 C. R. (Churchill) 9,400
Churchill and York, of course, included the inland trade.
* * * * *
In 1777, the minutes record the dismissal of Thomas Kelsey for ill
behavior at P. of Wales (Churchill); the last of Henry Kelsey’s line.
* * * * *
In 1779, December, the warehouse of Lime Street was burned and all the
records without which this history could not have been written—narrowly
escaped destruction.
* * * * *
In 1797, communication was opened by way of London with the Russian fur
traders of the west coast. In this year, too, 95,000 beaver was the
total.
* * * * *
The sums paid to ransom the officer, ran all the way from £6,000 to
£4,000, so that it is no wonder, though receipts were large, there were
no dividends this year.
* * * * *
I find in the minutes of 1777, Samuel Hearne orders £20 yearly to
_Sarah La Petite_, from which one may guess that Samuel had personal
reasons for giving such a black picture of Moses Norton.
* * * * *
In 1780, Andrew Graham, whose journals give a great picture of this
period, asks that his Indian boy be sent home.
* * * * *
In 1782, the following names, famous in Manitoba history, came into the
lists of the officers of the Company: Clouston, Ballantine, Linklater,
Spencer, Sutherland, Kipling, Ross, Isbister, Umfreville.
* * * * *
It was in 1787 that the fearful ravages of smallpox reduced the Indian
population. This year of plague deserves a chapter by itself, but space
forbids. No “black death” of Europe ever worked more terrible woe than
the contagion brought back from the Missouri by wandering Assiniboines.
* * * * *
The account of the siege of Richmond by the Eskimos is taken from
Pott’s report to the Company. A copy of this the _Winnipeg Free Press_
recently published as a letter. The description of Richmond is from
Captain Coates’ account. Strange that this Richmond should have gone
back to the state of desolation in which Coates found it. It was Coates
who named all the places of this region.
* * * * *
Nearly every great mineral discovery of America was preceded by the
predictions of the fur trader. It will be interesting to watch if
Hearne’s copper mine is ever re-discovered.
* * * * *
The story of Ross and Tomson and Farrant, I found first in the minutes
of H. B. C. House and then in Umfreville’s account of life at York.
* * * * *
I have throughout referred to Prince of Wales Fort as Churchill, as the
constant changing of names confuses the reader.
* * * * *
From the records it is impossible to tell whether the post Whale River
was Little Whale, or Great Whale. Judging from the fact that the
journey was performed by dog-sled in a night, to Richmond, it must have
been the nearer post.
* * * * *
I have not referred to the mistake in latitude made by Hearne in his
journey North, for which so many critics censure him. It would be
interesting to know how many men would have been in a condition to
take any observation at all after a week’s sleepless marching and the
horrors of the massacre.
* * * * *
Hearne’s picture will be found in “Pathfinders of the West.”
CHAPTER XX
1760-1810
“THE COMING OF THE PEDLARS”—A NEW RACE OF WOOD-ROVERS THRONGS TO THE
NORTHWEST—BANDITS OF THE WILDS WAR AMONG THEMSELVES—TALES OF BORDER
WARFARE, WASSAIL AND GRANDEUR—THE NEW NORTHWEST COMPANY CHALLENGES THE
AUTHORITY AND FEUDALISM OF THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY
La Perouse’s raid on Churchill and York was the least of the
misfortunes that now beset the English Adventurers. Within a year
from the French victory, the English prisoners had been ransomed from
France and the dismantled forts were rebuilt. It was a subtler foe
that menaced the Hudson’s Bay Company. Down at Abbittibbi, halfway to
Quebec—in at Henley House and Martin’s Falls and Osnaburg House on
the way from Albany to the modern Manitoba—up the Saskatchewan, where
Cocking and Batts and Walker held the forts for trade—between Churchill
and Athabasca, where Longmore and Ross had been sent on Hearne’s
trail—yes, even at the entrance to the Rockies, where Mr. Howse and
the astronomer Turner had found a pass leading from the headwaters of
the Saskatchewan, constantly there emerged from the woods, or swept
gayly up in light birch canoes, strange hunters, wildwood rovers,
free-lances, men with packs on their backs, who knocked nonchalantly at
the gates of the English posts for a night’s lodging and were eagerly
admitted because it was safer to have a rival trader under your eye
than out among the Indians creating bedlam by the free distribution of
rum.
“Pedlars,” the English called these newcomers, who overran the sacred
territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company as though royal charters were a
joke and trading monopolies as extinct as the dodo. It was all very
well to talk of the rights of your charter, but what became of your
rights if interlopers stole them while you talked about them? And what
was the use of sending men to drum up trade and bring Indians down
to the bay with their furs, if pedlars caught the Indians halfway
down at portage, carrying place and hunting rendezvous, and in spite
of the fact that those Indians owed the English for half-a-dozen
years’ outfit—rifled away the best of the furs, sometimes by the free
distribution of rum, sometimes by such seditious talk as that “the
English had no rights in this country anyway and the Indians were
fools to become slaves to the Hudson’s Bay Company?”
This was a new kind of challenge to feudalism. Sooner or later it was
bound to come. The ultimate umpire of all things in life is—Fact. Was
the charter valid that gave this empire of trade to a few Englishmen,
or was it buncombe? “The Pedlars” didn’t talk about their rights.
_They took them._ That was to be supreme test of the English Company’s
rights. Somebody else took the rights, and there were good reasons why
the Hudson’s Bay Company did not care to bring a question of its rights
before the courts. When the charter was confirmed by act of Parliament
in 1697, it was specified for only seven years. At the end of that
period the Company did not seek a renewal. Request for renewal would
of itself be acknowledgment of doubt as to the charter. The Company
preferred “to have and to hold,” rather than risk adverse decision.
They contented themselves with blocking the petitions of rivals for
trade privileges on the bay, but the eruption of these wildwood
rovers—“The French Canadian Pedlars”—was a contingency against which
there seemed to be no official redress.
It remained only for the old Company to gird itself to the fray—a fight
with bandits and free-booters and raiders in a region where was law
of neither God nor man. Sales had fallen to a paltry £2,000 a year.
Dividends stopped altogether. Value of stock fell from £250 to £50. The
Company advertised for men—more men. Agents scoured the Orkneys and
the Highlands of Scotland for recruits, each to sign for five years,
a bounty of £8 to be paid each man. Five ships a year sailed to the
bay. Three hundred “patroons” were yearly sent into the woods, and when
their time expired—strange to relate—they did not return to Scotland.
What became of them? Letters ceased to come home. Inquiries remained
unanswered. The wilderness had absorbed them and their bones lay
bleaching on the unsheltered prairie where the arrow of Indian raider
inspired by “the Pedlars” had shot them as they traversed the plains.
No wonder service with the Hudson’s Bay Company became ill-omened in
the Orkneys and the Highlands! In spite of the bounty of £8 a man,
their agents were at their wits’ ends for recruits.
When Hendry had gone up the Saskatchewan in 1754, he had seen the
houses of French traders. French power fell at Quebec in 1759, and
the French wood-rovers scattered to the wilds; but when Cocking went
up the Saskatchewan in 1772, what was his amazement to find these
French rovers organized under leadership of Scotch merchants from
Montreal—Curry, and Frobisher, and McTavish, and Todd, and McGill, and
McGillivrays.
Under French rule, fur trade had been regulated by license. Under
English rule was no restriction. First to launch out from Montreal
with a cargo of goods for trade, was Alexander Henry, senior, in 1760.
From the Michilimackinac region and westward, Henry in ten years, from
1765 to 1775, brought back to Montreal such a wealth of furs, that
peltry trade became a fever. No capital was needed but the capital of
boundless daring. Montreal merchants advanced goods for trade. One went
with the canoes as partner and commander. Three thousand dollars worth
of goods constituted a load. Frenchmen were engaged as hunters and
voyageurs—eight to a canoe, and before the opening of the century, as
many as five hundred canoes yearly passed up the Ottawa from Montreal
for the _Pays d’en Haut_, west of Lake Superior, ten and twenty canoes
in a brigade. In this way, Thomas Curry had gone from Lake Superior
to Lake Winnipeg, and Lake Winnipeg up the Saskatchewan, in 1766, as
far as the Forks, bribing that renegade Louis Primo, to steal the furs
bought by Cocking for the Hudson’s Bay, and to lead the brigade on
down to Montreal. One voyage sufficed to yield Curry $50,000 clear,
a sum that was considered a fortune in those days, and enabled him
to retire. The fur fever became an epidemic, a mania. James Finlay of
Montreal, in 1771, pushed up the Saskatchewan beyond the Forks, or
what is now Prince Albert. Todd, McGill & Company outfitted Joseph and
Benjamin Frobisher for a dash north of the Saskatchewan in 1772-5,
where, by the luckiest chance in the world, they met the Chippewyan
and Athabasca Indians on their way to Churchill with furs for the
Hudson’s Bay Company. The Frobishers struck up friendship with “English
Chief”—leader of the Indian brigades—plied the argument of rum night
and day, bade the Indians ignore their debts to the English company,
offered to outfit them for the next year’s hunt and bagged the entire
cargo of furs—such an enormous quantity that they could take down only
half the cargo that year and had to leave the other half cached, to the
everlasting credit of the Indian’s honesty and discredit of the white
man’s. Henceforth, this post was known as Portage de Traite. It led
directly from the Saskatchewan to the Athabasca and became a famous
meeting place. Portage “of the Stretched Frog” the Indians called it,
for the Frobishers had been so keen on the trade that they had taught
the Indians how to stretch skins, and the Indians had responded in
mischief by tacking a stretched frog skin on the door of the cabin.
Pushing yet farther toward Athabasca, the Frobisher brothers built
another post norwestward, Isle à la Crosse, on an island where the
Indians met for the sport of lacrosse.
Besides the powerful house of McTavish, Frobisher, Todd, McGill and
McGillivray, were hosts of lesser traders who literally peddled their
goods to the Indians. In 1778, these pedlars pooled their stock and
outfitted Peter Pond to go on beyond the Frobisher posts to Athabasca.
Here, some miles south of the lake, Pond built his fort. Pond was a
Boston man of boundless ambition and energy but utterly unscrupulous.
While at Athabasca, he heard from the Indians rumors of the Russian
fur traders on the Pacific Coast and he drew that famous map of the
interior, which was to be presented to the Empress of Russia. He seems
to have been cherishing secret designs of a great fur monopoly.
Fur posts sprang up on the waterways of the West like mushrooms. Rum
flowed like water—50,000 gallons a year “the pedlars” brought to
the Saskatchewan from Montreal. Disorders were bound to ensue. At
Eagle Hills near Battleford, in 1780, the drunken Crees became so
obstreperous in their demands for more liquor that the three terrified
traders cooped up in their house tried to save themselves by putting
laudanum in the liquor. An Indian was drugged to death. The sobered
Crees sulky from their debauch, arose to a man, rammed the doors,
stabbed the three whites and seven half-breed traders to death, burnt
the fort and sent coureurs running from tribe to tribe across the
prairie to conspire for a massacre of all white traders in the country.
Down on the Assiniboine at what is now known as Portage la Prairie,
where the canoemen portaged across to Lake Manitoba and so to Lake
Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, were three strong trading houses under
two men called Brice and Boyer. With them were twenty-three Frenchmen.
Three different companies had their rendezvous here. The men were
scattered in the three houses and off guard when one night the darkness
was made hideous by the piercing war cry of the Assiniboines. Before
lights could be put out, the painted warriors had swooped down on two
of the houses. The whites were butchered as they dashed out—eleven
men in as many seconds. The third house had warning from the shots at
the others. Brice and Boyer were together. Promptly, lights were put
out, muskets rammed through the parchment windows and chinks of the
log walls, and a second relay of loaded weapons made ready. When the
Assiniboines attempted to rush the third house, they were met with a
solid crash of musketry that mowed down some thirty warriors and gave
the assailants pause. With checked ardor, the Indians retreated to the
other houses. They could at least starve the white men out, but the
white men wisely did not wait. While the Assiniboines rioted, drunk
on the booty of rum in the captured cabins, Brice ordered all liquor
spilt in his house. Taking what peltries he could, abandoning the rest,
Brice led a dash for the river. Darkness favored the fugitive whites.
Three only of the retreating men fell under the shower of random
arrows—Belleau, Facteau, Lachance. Launching canoes with whispers and
muffling their paddles, the white men rowed all night, hid by day, and
in three days were safe with the traders at the Forks, or what is now
Winnipeg.
Up at Athabasca, Pond, the indomitable, was setting a bad example for
lawless work. Wadin was his partner; Le Sieur, his clerk. No greater
test of fairness and manhood exists than to box two men in a house
ten by ten in the wilderness, with no company but their own year in,
year out. Pond was for doing impossibles—or what seemed impossibles
at that day. He had sent two traders down Big River (the MacKenzie)
as far as Slave Lake. The Indians were furiously hostile. Wadin, the
Swiss partner, opposed all risks. Lonely, unstrung and ill-natured,
Pond conceived that hatred for his partner which men, who have been
tied too close to an alien nature, know. The men had come to blows.
One night the quarrel became so hot, Le Sieur withdrew from the house.
He had gone only a few steps when he heard two shots. Rushing back, he
found the Swiss weltering in his blood on the floor. “Be off! Never
let me see your face again,” shouted the wounded man, catching sight
of Pond. Those were his last words. It is a terrible commentary on
civilization that the first blood shed in the Athabasca was that of a
white man slain by a white man; but the Athabasca was three thousand
miles away from punishment and the merry game had only begun. Later,
Pond was tried for this crime, but acquitted in Montreal.
Roving Assiniboines had visited the Mandanes of the Missouri, this
year. They brought back with them not only stolen horses, but an
unknown, unseen horror—the germ of smallpox—which ran like a fiery
scourge for three years, from Red River and the Assiniboine to the
Rockies, sweeping off two-thirds of the native population. Camp after
camp, tribe after tribe, was attacked and utterly destroyed, leaving
no monument but a heap of bleaching bones scraped clean by the wolves.
Tent leather flapped lonely to the wind, rotting on the tepee poles
where Death had spared not a soul of a whole encampment. In vain the
maddened Indians made offerings to their gods, slew their children to
appease this Death Demon’s wrath, and cast away all their belongings.
Warriors mounted their fleetest horses and rode like mad to outrace
the Death they fancied was pursuing them. Delirious patients threw
themselves into the lakes and rivers to assuage suffering. The epidemic
was of terrible virulence. The young and middle-aged fell victims most
readily, and many aged parents committed suicide rather than live on,
bereft of their children. There was an end to all conspiracy for a
great uprising and massacre of the whites. The whites had fled before
the scourge as terrified as were the Indians and for three years there
was scarcely a fur trader in the country from the Missouri to the
Saskatchewan.
During the interval, the merchants of Montreal had put their heads
together. Division and internecine warfare in the face of Indian
hostility and the Hudson’s Bay traders steady advancement inland, were
folly. The Montrealers must unite. The united traders were known as
the Northwest Company. The Company had no capital. Montreal partners
who were merchants outfitted the canoes with goods. Men experienced
in the trade led the brigades westward. The former gave credit for
goods, the latter time on the field. The former acted as agents to
sell the furs, the latter as wintering partners to barter for the
furs with the Indians. To each were assigned equal shares—a share
apiece to each partner, or sixteen shares in all, in the first place;
later increased to twenty and forty-six and ninety-six shares as the
Company absorbed more and more of the free traders. As a first charge
against the proceeds were the wages of the voyageurs—£100 a year,
five times as much as the Hudson’s Bay Company paid for the same
workers. Then the cost of the goods was deducted—$3,000 a canoe—and
in the early days ninety canoes a year were sent North. Later, when
the Nor’Westers absorbed all opposition, the canoes increased to five
hundred. The net returns were then divided into sixteen parts and the
profits distributed to the partners. By 1787, shares were valued at
£800 each. At first, net returns were as small as £40,000 a year, but
this dividend among only sixteen partners gave what was considered
a princely income in those days. Later, net returns increased to
£120,000 and £200,000, but by this time the number of partners was
ninety-six. Often the yearly dividend was £400 a share. As many as
200,000 beaver were sold by the Nor’Westers in a year, and the heaviest
buyer of furs at Montreal was John Jacob Astor of New York. Chief among
the Eastern agents, were the two Frobisher brothers, Benjamin and
Joseph—McGill, Todd, Holmes, and Simon McTavish, the richest merchant
of Montreal, nicknamed “the Marquis” for his pompous air of wearing
prosperity. Chief among the wintering partners were Peter Pond, the
American of Athabasca fame, the McGillivrays, nephews of McTavish; the
MacLeods, the Grants, the Camerons, MacIntoshes, Shaws, McDonalds,
Finlays, Frasers, and Henry, nephew of the Henry who first went to
Michilimackinac.
Not only did the new company forthwith send ninety canoes to the North
by way of Lake Superior, but one hundred and twenty men were sent
through Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to Detroit, for the fur region
between Lake Huron and the Mississippi. It was at this period that
the Canadian Government was besieged for a monopoly of trade west of
Lake Superior, in return for which the Nor’Westers promised to explore
the entire region between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean. When
the Government refused to grant the monopoly, the Nor’Westers stopped
asking for rights. They prepared _to take them_.
In Montreal, the Nor’Westers were lords in the ascendant, socially
and financially, living with lavish and regal hospitality, keeping
one strong hand on their interests in the West, the other hand on
the pulse of the government. Some of the partners were members of
the Assembly. All were men of public influence, and when a wintering
partner retired to live in Montreal, he usually became a member of
the governing clique. The Beaver Club with the appropriate motto,
“Fortitude in Distress,” was the partners’ social rendezvous, and
coveted were the social honors of its exclusive membership. Governors
and councillors, military heroes and foreign celebrities counted it
an honor to be entertained at the Beaver Club with its lavish table
groaning under weight of old wines from Europe and game from the
_Pays d’en Haut_. “To discuss the merits of a beaver tail, or moose
nose, or bear’s paw, or buffalo hump”—was the way a Nor’West partner
invited a guest to dinner at the Beaver Club, and I would not like to
testify that the hearty partners did not turn night into day and drink
themselves under the mahogany before they finished entertaining a
guest. Most lordly of the grandees was, of course, “the Marquis,” Simon
McTavish, who built himself a magnificent manor known as “the Haunted
House,” on the mountain. He did not live to enjoy it long, for he died
in 1804. Indeed, it was a matter of comment how few of the ninety-six
partners lived to a good old age in possession of their hard-earned
wealth.
“No wonder,” sarcastically commented a good bishop, who had been on
the field and seen how the wealth was earned, “when the devil sows the
seed, he usually looks after the harvest.”
But it was not all plain sailing from the formation of the Company.
Pond and Pangman, the two Boston men, who had been in the North when
the partnership was arranged, were not satisfied with their shares.
Pond was won over to the Nor’Westers, but Pangman joined a smaller
company with Gregory, and MacLeod, and Alexander MacKenzie, and Finlay.
MacKenzie, who was to become famous as a discoverer, was sent to Isle
à la Crosse to intercept furs on the way to Hudson Bay. Ross was sent
up to oppose Peter Pond of the Nor’Westers in Athabasca. Bostonnais
Pangman went up the Saskatchewan to the Rockies, with headquarters at
what is now Edmonton, and the rest of what were known as the Little
Company faithfully dogged the Nor’Westers’ footsteps and built a
trading house wherever Indians gathered.
Failing to establish a monopoly by law, the Nor’Westers set themselves
to do it without law. The Little Company must be exterminated. Because
Alexander MacKenzie later became one of the Nor’Westers, the details
have never been given to the public, but at La Crosse where he waited
to barter for the furs coming from the North to the Hudson’s Bay, the
Nor’Westers camped on his trail. The crisis in rivalry was to meet the
approaching Indian brigades. The trader that met them first, usually
got the furs. Spies were sent in all directions to watch for the
Indians, and spies dogged the steps of spies. It was no unusual thing
for one side to find the Indians first and for a rival spy to steal the
victory by bludgeoning the discoverer into unconsciousness or treating
him to a drink of drugged whiskey. In the scuffle and maneuver for the
trade, one of Alexander MacKenzie’s partners was murdered, another of
his men lamed, a third narrowly escaping death through the assassin’s
bullet being stopped by a powderhorn; but the point was—MacKenzie got
the furs for the Little Company. The Nor’Westers were beaten.
Up at Athabasca, Pond, the Nor’Wester was opposed by Ross, the Little
Company man. Hearne, of Hudson’s Bay, had been to Athabasca first of
all explorers, but Pond was the first of the Montreal men to reach
the famous fur region of the North, and he did not purpose seeing
his labors filched away by the Little Company. When Laroux brought
the Indians from Slave Lake to the Nor’Westers and Ross attempted to
approach them, there was a scuffle. The Little Company leader fell
pierced by a bullet from a revolver smoking in the hand of Peter Pond.
Did Pond shoot Ross? Was it accidental? These questions can never be
answered. This was the second murder for which Pond was responsible
in the Athabasca, and ill-omened news of it ran like wildfire south
to Isle à la Crosse and Portage de Traite where Alexander MacKenzie
and his cousin Roderick were encamped. Nor’Westers and Little Company
men alike were shocked. For the Montreal men to fight among themselves
meant alienation of the Indians and victory for the Hudson’s Bay.
Roderick MacKenzie of the Little Company and William McGillivray of the
Nor’Westers decided to hasten down to Montreal with the summer brigades
and urge a union of both organizations. Locking canoes abreast, with
crews singing in unison, the rival leaders set out together, and the
union was effected in 1787 by the Nor’Westers increasing their shares
to admit all the partners of the Gregory and MacKenzie concern. Pond
sold his interests to the MacGillivrays and retired to Boston.
The strongest financial, social and political interests of Eastern
Canada were now centered in the Northwest Company. There were ways of
discouraging independent merchants from sending pedlars to the North.
Boycott, social or financial, the pulling of political strings that
withheld a government passport, a hint that if the merchant wanted a
hand in the trade it would be cheaper for him to pool his interests
with the Nor’Westers than risk a $3,000 load on his own account—kept
the field clear or brought about absorption of all rivals till 1801.
Then a Dominique Rousseau essayed an independent venture led by his
clerk, Hervieux. Grand Portage on Lake Superior was the halfway post
between Montreal and the _Pays d’en Haut_—the metropolis of the
Nor’Westers’ domain. Here came Hervieux’s brigade and pitched camp some
hundred yards away from the Nor’West palisades. Hardly had Hervieux
landed when there marched across to him three officers of the Northwest
Company, led by Duncan McGillivray, who ordered the newcomers to be off
on pain of death, as all the land here was Northwest property. Hervieux
stood his ground stoutly as a British subject and demanded proof that
the country belonged to the Northwest Company. To the Nor’Westers, such
a demand was high treason. McGillivray retorted he would send proof
enough. The partners withdrew, but there sallied out of the fort a
party of the famous Northwest bullies—prize fighters kept in trim for
the work in hand. Drawing knives, they cut Hervieux’s tents to shreds,
scattered his merchandise to the four winds and bedrubbed the little
men, who tried to defend it, as if they had been so many school boys.
“You demand our title to possession? You want proofs that we hold this
country? Eh? Bien! Voila! There’s proof! Take it; but if you dare to go
into the interior, there will be more than tents cut! Look out for your
throats.”
Totally ruined, Hervieux was compelled to go back to Montreal, where
his master in vain sued the Nor’Westers. The Nor’Westers were not
responsible. It was plain as day: they had not ordered those bullies to
come out, and those bullies were a matter of three thousand miles away
and could not be called as witnesses.
Determined not to be beaten, Rousseau attempted a second venture in
1806, this time two canoes under fearless fellows led by one Delorme,
who knew the route to the interior. He instructed Delorme to avoid
clashing with the Nor’Westers by skirting round their headquarters
on Lake Superior, if necessary by traveling at night till beyond
detection. Delorme was four days’ march beyond Lake Superior when
Donald McKay, a Nor’Wester, suddenly emerged from the underbrush
leading a dozen wood-rovers. Not a word was said. No threats. No
blustering. This was a no-man’s-land where there was no law and
everyone could do as he liked. McKay liked to do a very odd thing just
at this juncture, just at this place. His bush-lopers hurried on down
stream in advance of Delorme’s canoes and leveled a veritable barricade
of trees across the trail. Then they went to the rear of Delorme and
leveled another barricade. Delorme didn’t attempt to out-maneuver his
rivals. At most he had only sixteen men, and that kind of a game meant
a free fight and on one side or the other—murder. He sold out both his
cargoes to McKay at prices current in Montreal, and retreated from the
fur country, leaving the sardonic Nor’Westers smiling in triumph. These
were some of the ways by which the Nor’Westers dissuaded rivals from
invading the _Pays d’en Haut_. On their part, they probably justified
their course by arguing that rivalry would at once lead to such murders
as those in the Athabasca. In their secret councils, they well knew
that they were keeping small rivals from the field to be free for the
fight against the greatest rival of all—the Hudson’s Bay Company.
[Illustration:
CHART Showing the Routes of HUDSON and MUNK ]
_Footnote to Chapter XX._—The contents of this chapter are taken
primarily from the records of the Hudson’s Bay House; secondarily,
from the Journals of the Nor’West partners as published by Senator
Masson, Prof. Coues, and others; also, and most important, from such
old missionary annals as those of the Oblates and other missionaries
like Abbé Dugas, Tassé, Grandin, Provencher and others. In the most of
cases, the missionary writer was not himself the actor (there are two
exceptions to this) but he was in direct contact with the living
actor and took his facts on the spot, so that his testimony is even
more non-partisan than the carefully edited Masson essay and records.
I consider these various missionary legends the most authentic source
of the history of the period, though their evidence is most damning
to both sides. These annals are exclusively published by Catholic
organizations and so unfortunately do not reach the big public of which
they are deserving.
The exact way in which the N. W. C. was formed, I found very
involved in the Masson essay. A detailed account of all steps in the
organization is very plainly given in the petitions of the Frobisher
Brothers, Peter Pond and McGill to Gov. Haldimand for a monopoly of the
fur trade. The petitions are in the Canadian Archives. A curious fear
is revealed in all these petitions—that the Americans may reach and
possess the Pacific Coast first. As a matter of fact that is exactly
what Grey and Lewis and Clarke did in the Oregon region.
From the H. B. C. Archives I find the following data on this era: Batts
and Walker and Peter Fidler held the mouth of the Saskatchewan for the
English; one Goodwin worked south from Albany almost to Lake Superior
and west to modern Manitoba; half a dozen French run-aways from the N.
W. C. were engaged as spies at £100 a year; the Martin Falls House is
built inland from Albany in 1782; in spite of ignominious surrender,
Hearne and Humphrey Martin go back as Governors of Churchill and
York; Edward Umfreville leaves the H. B. C. (wages £141) and joins
the N. W. C.; Martin and Hearne, La Perouse’s prisoners, were dropped
at Stromness in November, whether on the way to France or back from
France, I can’t tell; their letters do not reach the H. B. C. till
March, 1783; William Paulson is surgeon at East Main; no dividends from
1782 to 1786; Joseph Colen succeeds Martin at York in ’86; William Auld
succeeds Hearne at Churchill in ’96; James Hourie is massacred by the
Indians of East Main; H. B. C. servants from the growing dangers become
mutinous, six are fined at East Main for mutiny; four at York fined £4
each, namely Magnus Tait, Alex. Gunn, John Irvine, Benj. Bruce, two at
Churchill £20 each, Robert Pexman and Henry Hodges. Andrew Graham, the
old factor of Severn, being now destitute at Edinburg, is given thirty
guineas in 1801.
Transcriber’s Notes
Page 186—changed accomodated to =accommodated= Page 242—changed
Palcentia to =Placentia= Page 263—changed pursuading to =persuading=
Page 272—changed quittting to =quitting= Page 319—changed proceeeds to
=proceeds= Page 366—changed suggetsed to =suggested= Page 407—changed
necesssary to =necessary=
The variant spellings of the following name has been left as printed:
Grossilier, Grosilier, Groseilier, Groseillers.