The Reign of King Beaver
THE KING of the West was no longer the buffalo. From the time the
Company opened its first fort on the Bay, the beaver was king; and his
reign lasted two hundred years. White men and red alike, all were his
servants. They served him for what they could get out of him, as
courtiers often did with human kings in days not long ago.
The buffalo remained the chief food and house-material used by the
plainsmen themselves, but its skin was not so easy to sell as the
beaver’s. To be sure, it had a cash value. Early in the eighteenth
century we hear of a French company building many posts in the
Mississippi Valley, to make fortunes by this “neglected” trade; and they
collected 15,000 skins in one season. Many of us can remember the
buffalo robe and coat in common use, down east, and their popularity was
well deserved. Nevertheless, the Indians dealing with the fur traders
found the beaver both lighter to carry and in greater demand.
A wonderful monarch the beaver was—an architect, an engineer, an expert
lumberman. So clever was he in damming up streams, felling trees and
building lodges, that ignorant people came to believe anything of him.
He was described as walking on his hind legs and carrying a log on his
shoulder.
“Their Nests, very artificial, are six Stories high,” says John Ogilby,
Esq., in a big book published the year after the foundation of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, 1771. Now John Ogilby was a man of authority, “His
Majesty’s Cosmographer, Geographick Printer and Master of the Revels in
the Kingdom of Ireland.” Yet in one of his pictures the beaver is shown
at the feet of a Unicorn (ridden by an eagle) which seems to have leapt
off the Royal Coat of Arms. This beast, “seen sometimes on the Borders
of Canada,” Mr. Ogilby says, has “cloven Feet, shaggy Mayn, one Horn
just on their Forehead, a Tail like that of a wild Hog, black Eyes, and
a Deer’s Neck: it feeds in the nearest Wildernesses.” The males at a
certain season “grow so ravenous that they not onely devour other
Beasts, but also one another.”
The beaver’s performances alive were nothing compared to the wonders his
dead body was supposed to work. A waxy material, called castoreum, was
taken from it and used as medicine for madness, deafness, stomach-ache
and all other aches, pleurisy and sciatica, weak sight and hiccoughs,
tumors and abscesses; it killed fleas, and there was “nothing like it
for gout”; it put people to sleep, and kept them from getting sleepy; it
was even said to bring back lost memory. The fat was prescribed for
asthma, giddiness and apoplexy; the skin, for bed sores and consumption;
the hair, to stop bleeding.
It was the precious castoreum that men chiefly hunted the beaver for, in
ancient times. One of the ridiculous stories then believed was that the
clever animal used to cut out its own castoreum glands and throw them to
the hunter, who would then let it escape.
[Illustration]
_The Voyageurs’ Way_
_to the West_
[Illustration: _Chief Poundmaker_]
[Illustration: _Chief Piapot_]
[Illustration]
_Beaver at Work_
[Illustration]
_Left to Right: Beaver Hat, 1820_
_Clerical Beaver, 18th Century_
_Paris Beau, 1815_
[Illustration]
_The Beaver and the Unicorn_
The beaver’s long, sharp-edged teeth were used as chisels by the
Indians, before the white man brought in iron and steel. The meat I have
spoken of already; some of my western readers know its taste well. It is
something like tender pork; the choicest morsel, the tail, makes fine
bacon. The animal used often to be roasted whole, in the skin, till its
fur became too valuable to burn.
The French fur traders found their best market in Russia and Poland; but
the fur-wearing fashion “caught on” in France itself, and spread to
England. Then it was found that the shorter hairs of the beaver made the
finest felt, and beaver hats of many shapes became the rage. When
English hatters took to mixing cheap rabbit fur with the more expensive
material, a law was passed forbidding them to use anything but beaver.
If silk had not taken its place, in the last century, the beaver would
probably have been hunted out of existence in Canada. It disappeared
from England hundreds of years ago, and very few are now left in
northern Europe and Siberia. Even when the beaver’s fur was no longer
wanted for felting, and there was choice of many fur animals for other
purposes of luxurious clothing, it was still greatly sought after, and a
few years ago the beaver was disappearing. Then Canadian governments
forbade its capture for a while, and to-day our beaver colonies are
growing fast.
Look back now to the day when the beaver first became King of the
West—when the Company settled on the shores of the Bay.
The domain granted by Charles the Second to this company included “all
the lands, countries, and territories upon the coasts and confines” of
“all those seas, straits, bays, rivers, lakes, creeks and sounds lying
within the entrance of Hudson’s Straits,” excepting only such land as
might be in the possession of other Christian nations. As we look on the
map we see that the area thus granted included not only a strip of land
two or three hundred miles wide around the eastern and southern shores
of Hudson Bay, but an empire of forest and prairie stretching westward
to the Rocky Mountains, where the Saskatchewan had its sources—a
thousand miles across.
Over the whole of this territory of “Rupert’s Land” the Company was to
reign. Some of its powers were greater than the king himself dared to
exercise in the mother-country. An absolute monopoly of trade; power to
make laws, inflict punishment, plant colonies, build towns and forts,
maintain armies—all these were conferred on Prince Rupert and his
partners; and, to crown all, no British subject was so much as to set
foot on the soil of Rupert’s Land without the Company’s written leave.
The reason given for this imperial grant was that the Adventurers had
“at theire owne great cost and charge undertaken an Expedition for the
discovery of a new Passage into the South Sea, and for the finding some
Trade for Furrs, Mineralls, and other considerable Commodityes,” by
which the king hoped for “very great advantage” to himself and his
kingdom. As rent for the whole vast domain the Company was to pay his
Majesty “two elks and two black beavers” per annum.
* * * * *
For many years the Company had no idea of the size of its domain, and
made no attempt to occupy even the best-known districts of the interior.
The Indians from hundreds of miles up country brought their annual catch
of furs to the Company’s posts on the Bay.
The scene when one of these yearly parties appeared was picturesque, but
not altogether pleasant. Pitching their camp outside the palisade of the
fort, the red men celebrated their arrival by drinking as much of the
white men’s spirits as they could get. Although the liquor, for economy
and for safety, was plentifully mixed with water, trading was out of the
question for two or three days.
When the Indians were ready for business they were admitted to the fort
with their bundles of furs. Each skin was carefully examined, and the
price decided on was paid in the form of little notched sticks or
quills. With these counters each red man passed on into another room,
where axes, guns, blankets, mirrors, beads, trinkets, and all the other
useful or useless objects of an Indian’s desire were spread before him.
Everything was priced in beaver-skins, not in shillings or dollars. A
price list dated 1733 shows that one beaver would then buy a brass
kettle or twelve ounces of colored beads, a pound and a half of
gunpowder or two pounds of sugar, two combs or twelve needles, a pair of
shoes or two looking glasses, eight knives or two hatchets. If the
Indian asked the price of a blanket, he was told “Six Beaver.” He could
get a gallon of brandy, at that time, for four beaver. He paid ten or
twelve beaver for a gun, four for a pistol, three for a pair of breeches
or two handkerchiefs.
These were the prices at the southern forts, Albany and Moose River,
under competition. The Company charged higher prices in the north, as
they frankly said—“The French being not so near these places, and
therefore can’t interfere with the Company’s trade so much as they do at
Albany and Moose River, where they undersell the Company, and by that
means carry off the most valuable furs.”
When the last skin had been turned into the store, and the last counter
had been exchanged for British goods, the tribesmen vanished away into
the wilderness, and the piles of furs were sorted and packed for the
ocean voyage. Every summer a single London ship sailed into the Bay,
discharged her cargo of provisions for the white men and merchandise for
the red, filled her hold with the precious “peltries,” and sped away
home before the early winter barred the straits with ice.
If the Company had only had the Indians to reckon with, it might have
gone on gathering the furry harvest of the West with imperial ease. But,
as we have seen, there were other white men in America who had no notion
of submitting to such a monopoly. The King of France claimed as his own
the territory that King Charles had given away. Several times before the
close of the seventeenth century the French raided the Bay and captured
or destroyed the English forts, coming overland from Canada and also
sailing round through Hudson Straits. In 1697, France and England being
at war, five ships swooped down upon Fort York, at the mouth of Nelson
River, and captured the place after defeating three English vessels. A
peace treaty, signed that same year, left England with only one little
foot-hold on Hudson Bay, at Fort Albany. It was sixteen years before
another treaty, at the end of another war, restored the whole of the
north land to the English King and Company.
There was no end, even then, to the furious competition of the French
fur-buyers. If it had been only the official French Company, that would
have been bad enough; but swarms of independent French traders were
bidding against both the French Company and the English.
These men were outlaws. Flogging, and branding with red-hot irons, were
the mildest of the penalties decreed against the “free traders” by their
own French Government. Yet the temptation of fortunes to be made by fur
proved stronger than all the risks. Hundreds of young men took to the
woods, and spent their lives roaming from one Indian camp to another,
living as the Indians lived, and buying up in advance the skins which
should have gone down to the Company at Quebec. At one time, when the
whole population of the French colony was only about 10,000, as many as
800 men were away in the forest, defying the King and his officers.
These “coureurs de bois,” or forest-runners, were protected not only by
the forest hiding them, but often by the very officials who were
supposed to be hunting them down. Many officials were quite ready to
take big bribes from the outlaws. The Governor himself went in for
unlawful trading on a large scale, in secret partnership with outlaws
who smuggled the beaver-skins over to the English colonists in the
south.
* * * * *
In the summer of 1731, a French army captain named Pierre de la
Vérendrye—Canadian born, he was—set out from Montreal for the West.
Like most of the earlier explorers, French or English, he was keen to
discover an outlet to the Western Ocean. The Governor gave his full
consent—but he would give nothing more. Some of the merchants were then
persuaded to “stake” the expedition, supplying Vérendrye with goods to
trade for furs in all the unknown lands he was to discover. The captain
took with him his three sons, the youngest only sixteen, and a nephew as
second in command, besides a dozen soldiers and a band of Indians.
It was a long and tragic journey. At the western end of Lake of the
Woods, Vérendrye built a fort among the Crees. Some of these Indians one
day fired on a party of Sioux, and then pretended that the French had
done it. In revenge, the Sioux set upon a French detachment, on its way
to fetch up supplies from Michilimackinac, and killed every man,
including a priest and the explorer’s eldest son. The merchants at home
in Canada were grumbling because the cargoes sent down to them were not
as large as they had expected, and jealous rivals falsely accused
Vérendrye of keeping some of the furs for himself. More than once he had
to go back east before he could get enough goods for trading.
At last, in the February of 1737, he got as far as the south end of Lake
Winnipeg, where his sons had already built a fort. The year after, he
made his way up the Red River to its junction with the Assiniboine and
established a trading post—Fort Rouge, now part of the city of
Winnipeg. Pressing on to the West, he built another fort at Portage la
Prairie, where Indians bound for Hudson Bay used to lift their canoes
from the Assiniboine for the overland carry to Lake Manitoba.
Surely the ocean could not be far away now! Montreal was fifteen hundred
miles behind him in the East—how could he know that the ocean of his
dreams was still nearly as far again to the West? The Assiniboines knew
nothing of such a sea, but they had heard tales of it through the
Mandans, farther south. Southward, accordingly, the captain marched for
a month and a half across the plains, till he found the Mandans on the
Missouri River. But even they could only tell him a vague story of white
men in armor who were said to have built stone houses beside salt water,
somewhere away in the south-west—the Spaniards, perhaps, on the Pacific
coast of Mexico.
Back to the north tramped the disappointed captain over the snowy plain,
and spent the rest of the winter among the Assiniboines; but his sons
made one excursion to the unknown country north-west. There they
discovered two more great rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan, and
started a trading post where the rivers joined. In the spring their
father had once more to make his weary way to Montreal, where the
discontented merchants had refused to send him any fresh goods, and even
threatened to seize his property for goods already supplied. He never
saw the West again. It was years before he succeeded in getting leave to
make another expedition, and then it was too late—he died in Montreal
in the midst of his preparations.
His two sons, Pierre and François, meanwhile, had done their best to
carry on his work. They pushed on to the West, visiting one tribe after
another who had never seen a white man before, and came at last to an
encampment of the Bow Indians. Now the Bows were just sending a war
party out against a tribe still farther West, so the Frenchmen went on
with them, over the high plateau of Montana, and at last, one day early
in 1743, as they travelled they saw rising above the horizon a beautiful
range of snowy peaks.
They had discovered the Rocky Mountains. If they could only climb that
range, they thought, they would see the long-sought ocean spreading out
below their feet on the other side. The Indians, however, flatly refused
to go on. Not finding the tribe they had come to fight, the Bows hurried
back home, fearing the enemy would get there ahead of them; and the
disappointed brothers had to go with the rest.
The bravery and dogged perseverance of Vérendrye and his sons had thrown
open a new world, the prairie and woodland of the West; and their
fellow-countrymen pressed in to reap the profits of its trade. While the
English Company’s officers sat waiting for the Indians to bring their
furs down to the Bay, the French traders pressed farther and farther
west and north, buying up the furs themselves.
The Indians living far inland, though eager for the white man’s
wonderful wares, did not like making the long journey to the Bay.
Sometimes they nearly starved before they got there; sometimes they were
kept at home by fear of attack from hostile tribes.
The first white man who ventured inland from the Bay and tried to
overcome their hesitation did so without orders. Henry Kellsey was just
a lad who had made particular friends of Indians around Port Nelson. The
Governor did not like this, and punished him. Henry ran off, joined a
party of Indians, and after a year or so came back with an Indian wife.
He was forgiven, and the Company was glad to employ him after that, “to
call, encourage and invite the remoter Indians to a trade with us.”
Half a century later, another adventurous young Englishman, named
Anthony Hendry, was sent off on the same errand; and he was the first
white man to explore the great plain between the North and South
Saskatchewan. There for the first time Indians were discovered hunting
buffalo on horseback, near the Red Deer River, and Anthony hunted with
them. These were the Blackfeet. They used pads of buffalo skin for
saddles, with stirrups of the same leather.
When he had smoked the pipe of peace, Hendry asked the Chief to send his
young men down to the Bay, promising guns, ammunition, “and everything
else they desire,” in return for beaver and wolf skins. But the chief
said his men could neither paddle canoes nor live on fish; they could
only travel on horseback, and needed buffalo meat. Besides, they did not
want guns—bows and arrows were all they needed. It was not very long
before they changed their minds.
Hendry spent a whole winter in the park lands, which he found swarming
with beaver and otter. The Indians, however, would never go hunting till
they were actually short of supplies. Even when the cold weather was
coming on and many had not furs enough for winter clothing, they would
spend their time feasting and dancing to the music of the tom-tom.
In spite of all the Company’s invitations, it could not keep the Indians
from staying at home and selling furs to the more enterprising French
traders who came to their very doors. At the French Fort de la Corne, on
the Saskatchewan, Hendry found Captain de la Corne himself; and, the
Englishman says, “I am certain he hath got above one thousand of the
richest skins.”
Yes, and very soon British traders were doing the same—especially
Scotsmen, who flocked over when King Louis gave up Canada to King
George.
The Company found that its easy-going habit of staying on the sea-shore
did not pay. Easy-going habits don’t. Besides, other British merchants,
who wanted to get into Hudson Bay and share its trade, began to
complain. They said: “The Company only got the privilege of keeping all
the trade to itself because it made big promises, to attempt the
discovery of the North-west Passage to Asia, and to search for minerals
as well as fur. It has not kept its promises.”
Something more had to be done, the Company saw that. So it sent off one
of its best men, Samuel Hearne, on an exploring trip inland from Prince
of Wales Fort, at the mouth of Churchill River. He set out in November,
1769, with two other white men and four Indians; but the Indians
deserted, and he had to come back. In February he started again, and got
up into the “barren lands,” where his party nearly starved. At last he
came upon the herd of caribou on their spring procession from the
woodlands in the west where they had spent the winter. Meat was now
plentiful; but the explorer’s quadrant was broken, and without that
instrument he would not be able to put his route on the map for future
travellers; so again he had to turn back. It was nearly the end of
November when he reached the Fort.
After such hardships he must have been greatly tempted to stay there
until spring. But no; he would not rest until he had won the double goal
he had set before him. He was bent on reaching a mysterious river, where
Indians said that enormous masses of copper were found; and as the river
was believed to flow north he hoped it would lead him to an unknown
sea-way uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. If he waited till
spring for his next start, he could not reach that sea before winter,
when it would all be hidden under ice. So, after only twelve days’ rest,
he plunged once more into the wilderness, alone with five Indians.
It was a year and a half before his white comrades saw him again. Now,
however, he had great things to tell. He had not only found the
Coppermine River, but had followed it down and down to its very mouth.
There at last, on the 17th of July, he had looked out upon the Arctic
Sea. It was truly the North-west Passage, or one of the North-west
Passages, that lay before his eyes, for its waters connect with both
oceans, east and west; but he could not be sure of that. Indeed it took
a hundred years more of exploration to prove the fact.
The young explorer had a bitter experience in the far north, the country
of the Eskimo. These “Usquemows,” as the old travellers called them,
were an interesting and generally harmless folk. Captain Coats gives a
quaint description of them, as he used to see them on his many voyages
through Hudson Straits: “Bold, robust, hardy people, undaunted,
masculine men, no tokens of poverty or want, with great, fat, flatt,
greazy faces, little black piercing eyes, good teeth, lank, black,
matted hair, with little hands and feet, under proportion; a well made
back and shoulders; loyns, buttocks and haunces well fortified; thighs
are pretty full, but their legs taper to a little foot.” The women, he
says, are “very fair when free from greese, very submissive to their
men, very tender of their children, and are indefatigable in the
gew-gaws to please their men and children,”—little ivory toys carved
like fishes, fowls, animals, people, ships and boats.
The Indians, however, had “no use for” the Eskimo, except to raid and
rob and kill them. A band of Indians who had joined Hearne’s party,
apparently for this very object, attacked an Eskimo village, without the
slightest provocation, while the people were asleep in their tents, and
slaughtered them, men, women and children. The horrified white man tried
to stop the massacre, but the Indians pushed him aside. The Eskimo had
furs, the white men wanted furs, and the Indians thought it unreasonable
for a white man to object if they got those furs by murder.
As for the mountains of copper which the Indians had described, Hearne
found only “a jumble of rocks and gravel,” and the best specimen he
could find was a lump of ore weighing about four pounds.
Coming back from the Arctic, on Christmas Eve he found himself looking
out upon a vast lake which no white man had seen before and few have
seen since. We know it on the map as Great Slave Lake. In Hearne’s time,
buffalo beyond numbering roamed the plains up to its southern shore. He
spent the rest of the winter among the Indians, and when spring came a
party of them accompanied him down to the fort on Hudson Bay.
From this time forward the Company sent its officers back into the
country that Hearne had explored, and other parts of the interior, where
they built trading forts on the shores of many a river and lake. Fort
Cumberland was the first of them, on the lower Saskatchewan. The trade
picked up, but if the Company thought it would now be allowed to have
things all its own way it was much mistaken. The revolutionary war broke
out between the British colonists down east and the Mother Country. The
King of France, though he ruled his own people with tyranny and hated
the idea of popular freedom, hated England more, and he was delighted to
help anyone who would injure her. So, while his soldiers were sent over
to help the American colonists on land, his sailors raided Hudson Bay,
where they captured, looted and destroyed the English Company’s forts.
Hearne was by this time in command of Fort Prince of Wales, but his
handful of clerks and traders could do nothing against three ships of
war.
The next year, 1783, ended the war between the nations; but the trade
war between the Company and the other fur traders went on more bitterly
than ever. A rival “North West Company” was formed by Scottish merchants
down in Canada, who engaged many of the French “voyageurs” and “coureurs
de bois,” and their half-Indian sons, and sent them out skirmishing for
trade and building forts among the tribes of the far west. The old
Company met the competition by building more forts and organizing on its
own account more bands of hardy Frenchmen and “Métis”—the name given to
men of mingled French and Indian blood.
* * * * *
The names of three great western rivers, the Mackenzie, the Thompson and
the Fraser, still remind us that some of the North West Company’s men
were famous explorers as well as traders.
Alexander Mackenzie, a young Scot from the Hebrides, was the officer in
charge of Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca. With the old dream of the
North-west Passage in his mind, he set off on the 2nd of June, 1789, to
descend a river flowing from the lake towards the north. His little
flotilla of canoes presently came out on another lake, the Great Slave.
Following its shores to the West, Mackenzie found the water at last
pouring out to form another river. This he followed day after day,
starting at three or four every morning, till the stream widened out
into a bay of many islands, where the tide rose and fell and whales were
playing. It was only the 14th of July, but the homeward journey would be
against the current, and the freeze-up would come early. Mackenzie
swiftly turned his back on the Arctic Sea, and reached his fort on the
12th of September. His tremendous dash had carried him nearly 3,000
miles in 102 days.
This adventure by no means took the edge off his appetite for
exploration. As he had proved that Mackenzie River did not flow to the
Pacific Ocean, he made up his mind to get there some other way. In 1793,
early in May, he once more left Lake Athabasca behind, and this time
steered his canoes up the Peace River to its source in the mountains. He
crossed the divide, and began to descend an unknown stream, but as this
only flowed south he struck over land to the west, and on the 22nd of
July came out on salt water, near Bella Coola. He had then only twenty
pounds of pemmican left, with fifteen of rice and six of flour, for his
party of ten; but they managed to get safely home to the fort after a
month’s hard travel across the mountains. Mackenzie’s troubles had been
many and great, from cataract and precipice, from hostile Indians and
cowardly guides; but he won the fame of the first man to cross the whole
width of the continent from Atlantic to Pacific.
In 1806, the year after Trafalgar, the young Welshman, David Thompson,
another of this Company’s officers, went up the North Saskatchewan to
Rocky Mountain House and across the Rockies to the Columbia. He spent
several years exploring the mountains and establishing posts for trade,
and at last descended the whole length of the Columbia to the Pacific.
At the mouth of the river he found that another party had got there
ahead of him, and had built a fort under the flag of the United States.
As a matter of fact, two explorers named Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark had reached that point in 1806, being the first white men to cross
the height of land from the Missouri to the coast. The fort had been
established five years later by a trading expedition sent round Cape
Horn from New York by John Jacob Astor. It was captured by the North
West Company’s men during the War of 1812, and Astor allowed the Company
to buy out his rights; but later on, as we shall see, it was decided
that this part of the coast should belong to the United States.
The North West Company meanwhile had sent young Simon Fraser up into the
mountains to discover the true course of the river which Mackenzie had
left because it seemed to go south instead of west. It was supposed to
be the head waters of the Columbia. Fraser and a brother Scot, John
Stuart, began by building little forts for trade. One of these, where
the mysterious river was joined by the Nechaco, he called Fort George,
after the King. There he embarked on one of the most perilous voyages
ever undertaken. With Stuart, and Jules Maurice Quesnel, nineteen
voyageurs and two Indians, in four birch-bark canoes, he trusted himself
to a torrent of which he knew nothing except that Indians living on its
banks declared no man could ever get through alive. Running rapids where
the chances were ten to one for death, clinging with heavy loads on
their backs to the precipitous walls of canyons when the raging torrent
absolutely compelled a portage, building new bark canoes when the old
were smashed beyond repair, those brave men came out at last on smooth
water where the tides of the Pacific rose and fell. Near where they
landed, the city of New Westminster now stands. They had explored the
whole length of the Fraser River, which to-day thrills even railway
travellers in the safety of an observation car.
* * * * *
The dangers conquered by these brave young men were great enough; but,
after all, it was only the grim force of nature they had to fight as
they broke their way through the mountains, with some little trouble now
and then from timid guides and suspicious bands of Indians. Back on the
plains and woodlands in the heart of the continent, there was danger of
another kind, and a most disgraceful one. The two companies were
practically at war.
In a “civilized” land, with the law wide awake, unscrupulous competitors
have to be satisfied with slower methods of ruining each other. In the
wild west of our fathers’ time the voice of civilization was feeble, and
law was laughed at. The passion of gain was free to indulge its natural
tendency to crime. Parties of rival traders, meeting in solitudes where
no witnesses were to be feared, fought out their differences with gun
and hatchet.
All the trickery of war was brought into play as well as its violence.
At some points both companies had trading posts, and the rival traders
now and then entertained each other in quite a neighborly way. Once the
Hudson’s Bay men, having discovered that an Indian hunting party had
just returned to its camp forty miles away, invited the Nor’-westers to
a dance, and kept them revelling while four Hudson’s Bay sledges dashed
away over the snow and bought up the whole of the catch. Next day the
Nor’-westers heard of the same hunting party and made the same long
journey, hoping to do a big trade, but came back, of course,
empty-handed and full of wrath.
[Illustration]
_In a Swift Current_
[Illustration]
_On the Winter Highway_
[Illustration]
_Lord Selkirk,_
_Father of Western Settlement_
[Illustration]
_Fort Douglas, (in background),_
_Where Winnipeg Now Stands_
The Nor’-westers hid their anger, and watched for a chance to pay off
the score. A party of them, on their way to an Indian camp, met a
Hudson’s Bay party bound in the same direction. They started a camp
fire, and began talking and drinking in the friendliest way. The Bay men
took all that was offered them; but the wily Nor’-westers only sipped
their liquor and secretly poured the rest on the snow. At last the Bay
men fell asleep. The Nor’-westers then tied them on their sledges and
whipped up the dog teams, which carried the sleepers safely home to
their fort, while their sober rivals went on to the Indian camp and got
the whole of the furs.
Many deeds of violence remained hidden in the breasts of the
perpetrators. Of those that came to light, the most notorious was the
“Battle of Seven Oaks,” or “Red River Massacre,” in 1816.
* * * * *
It was the foundation of the first white settlement in the West that led
to that shocking event.
Until 1811, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been steadily opposed to any
colonizing of its land. A permanent white population, it thought, would
injure the fur trade. The Company’s officials even declared, and some of
them doubtless believed, that the country was unfit for settlement or
cultivation. But Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, who was Governor
of the Company in 1811, knew better. He had already, in 1803, taken
oversea a party of poor Scottish Highlanders, who established a colony
in Prince Edward Island, and a little later he tried to start a
settlement in Ontario. Seeing prospects of greater success in the West,
he and his relations bought a majority of the Hudson’s Bay shares, and
so controlled the whole of the Company’s operations. His next step was
to buy from the Company 116,000 square miles of land, stretching north
and south across Manitoba into Dakota and Minnesota, and including the
present site of Winnipeg, where the Assiniboine flows into Red River.
The pioneers of western settlement sailed from Glasgow for Hudson Bay on
July 26, 1811, but met “boisterous, stormy and cold weather,” and it was
two months before they cast anchor at York Factory. There, though
unskilled with the axe, they built log huts and spent the winter.
Starting in boats for the next stage of their pilgrimage on July 6, up
Hayes River and through Lake Winnipeg, it took them nearly as long to
reach their Red River home as it had taken to cross the sea. They
arrived on the 30th of August, and the first land was broken for crop
that fall. Other parties meanwhile were coming out to join them, mostly
from the north of Scotland and the Hebridean Isles, but some from
Ireland too.
The North West Company did not like its rival’s new colony, and its
hostility flamed up at last in the “Pemmican War,” which came about in
this way.
The settlers, until they could raise food for themselves, had to live
chiefly on the buffalo. The North West Company’s men, however, had been
used to drawing their supplies of pemmican largely from the same
district, and as the Company’s Métis were skilled hunters the food
supply of the colony was in danger. An order was made that no pemmican
should be taken away from Lord Selkirk’s land. The Métis disobeyed the
order, chased the buffalo out of reach of the settlers, and went on
shipping pemmican out to the North West Company’s trading posts. The
quarrel grew more and more fierce, and the Nor’-westers resolved to
drive the Selkirk settlers out of the country. They burned the
farmhouses and other buildings, destroyed the crops, and chased off any
settlers who refused to go. “The Colony is gone to the Devil,” as one of
the conquerors wrote.
The colonists came back to their devastated farms, however, or some of
them did, and the old Company tried to give them better protection. The
enemy organized a force, including Métis and Indians, for a fresh
attack. The Hudson’s Bay commander, Governor Semple, went out to meet
them, but his party was surrounded. The Governor and a score of the
settlers were killed, and the rest were either captured or put to
flight. So ended the “Battle of Seven Oaks.” Lord Selkirk sent up
reinforcements, and many of the original settlers went back to restore
their ruined homes; some of their descendants are still to be found in
the neighborhood; but for half a century no fresh attempt was made to
colonize the West.
The worst effects of all that fierce competition between the companies,
unfortunately, fell not on the rivals, but on the native races for whose
custom both were struggling. Each side made strenuous efforts to win
over the tribes, and one of the principal attractions offered was
“fire-water.” The red man is even more easily maddened and destroyed by
alcohol than the white, and with spirits thrust upon them at every turn
the Indians were plunging headlong to ruin, when the murderous
competition suddenly stopped. The two companies had become
sensitive—not in the heart, but in the pocket—to the evil effects of
their feud. In 1821, Lord Selkirk having died, the Nor’-westers made
terms and even joined forces with their rivals.
The Hudson’s Bay Company, freed from the dangers and losses of
competition, and reinforced by the Scots who had fought them so
fiercely, began a fresh career of peace and profit. In the same year its
privilege of trading monopoly was extended to cover—for twenty-one
years—the mountains and valleys and islands of what we call British
Columbia, in addition to the plains and forests of the interior, an
extension which was renewed in 1838 for a term to end in 1859. The
Company’s rule now stretched from the Atlantic end of Hudson Strait to
the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
* * * * *
Dotted at long intervals over the Company’s 2,800,000 square miles of
earth stood the forts where the furs were collected, and where the
authority of civilization was exercised by traders largely recruited
from the Orkney Islands. These young men, entering the Company’s service
as clerks, gradually made their way up till they became chief factors or
chief traders. Forty per cent. of the Company’s annual profit was
divided among these officers. The profits were very high, for the goods
sold by the Company cost a mere trifle compared to the value of the furs
received from the Indians in payment.
Even with such a partnership in prospect, the young men found the life
at first very hard to bear. They were cut off not only from home but
from all the social and religious observances which ordinary colonists
take with them from one land to another. No towns were allowed to spring
up. The Company’s men, and the families of mixed race clustering around
the fort, grew vegetables for their own use; but the rest of the
territory was a gigantic game preserve, jealously guarded against the
intrusion of settlers.
A postal service had been organized by the company, but to many a fort
the mail only came once a year, and letters were months old when
delivered. Communication was not difficult—that is to say, there were
no great physical obstacles, at any rate till the Rocky Mountains were
reached; there were rivers navigable by big boats from the Mountains to
the Bay, though broken in the east by rapids where the boats had to be
hauled up by ropes on the way back; there were easy trails over the
prairie—pony and ox carts used to ply between Edmonton and Winnipeg, a
thousand miles; and in winter dog sledges and men on snowshoes could
glide in all directions over the frozen land; yet the immensity of the
distances to be covered made travelling intolerably slow.
* * * * *
They rarely visited their homes in Scotland, these hardy fur traders.
Even those who came down to the forts on Hudson Bay, where the fur bales
were loaded in ships for the old country, knew that they could not cross
the sea and come back in the same year. And the voyage was perilous as
well as long—no one could ever tell how long it might be.
The Bay itself, though not free from risk, was the easiest part of the
way. Getting into the Straits, and through them, and out at the other
end—that was the fearful part of it. The Arctic ice was bad enough by
itself; but masses of rocky ice hurled about by furious storms, or
tossed to and fro on racing tides, made navigation terrible, and when a
blinding fog fell on the turbulent sea the sailors were helpless.
Captain Coats, who for twenty-four years commanded ships sailing between
England and Hudson Bay, from 1727 to 1751, wrote the story of his
experiences for the benefit of his sons, who had taken up his own
adventurous trade. “The tides,” he says, are “so violent and surprising,
especially when disturbed and distracted by ice, that nothing but
experience can comprehend or imagine.” An ordinary spring tide “rises
near 30 foot all along the streights,” “boyling up in eddies and
whirlpools in a most amazing manner,” and “shattering in shivers immense
bodys of ice.” In 1727, near the meridian of Cape Farewell, “two pieces
of ice shutt upon us and sunk our ship.” In 1736 he was “entangled in
ice which shutt upon us, by the tides only (for it was dead calm) and
crushed our sides in, and sunk her in 20 minutes.”
A vessel had to leave England by May 20 to be sure of reaching the mouth
of Hudson Straits by 6th July, and then the trouble began. One year the
captain tried six times to enter the straits, from the 1st to the 12th
of July, and had to stand out to sea every time.
“Sometimes,” he says, “in favorable seasons, we have entred the
streights sooner.” Once he got in by June 26, “and got up with great
labour about 60 degrees, but there we found such banks and walls of ice
from side to side that we did little or nothing untill the 20th July.”
And “as it is very hazardous to enter the streights before the beginning
of July, for ice, so it is dangerous to be in that bay after the middle
of September; the gales of wind and snow setts in for a continuence,
with very short calm intervals; the severe frost are such that you
cannot work a ship;” there are “violent piercing winds, which no
creature can face for a continuence.” Even on shore, at the forts,
“those terrible snowdrifts and dark condensed foggs are hardly to be
guarded against.” “So apprehensive are our people of being caught out in
those frightful drifts that they never suffer a stranger to go a bow
shott from the palisades without a person of experience with them.”
When steamers took the place of sailing ships, the length and the risk
of the voyage were greatly reduced, but nothing could abolish the “dark
condensed foggs” and “immense bodys of ice” in Hudson Straits.
Far less dangerous and disagreeable was the inland water route by which
the North-west Company sent its furs down to Montreal—the route opened
up by the old French explorers; but no risk could be much worse than a
sudden storm when the traders came out on the lakes in their boats and
canoes. There were plenty of other hardships too, on that long voyage;
yet there were plenty of hardy French voyageurs to undertake and even
enjoy the adventure.
Others made the adventure too, on occasion. Sir George Simpson, the
young Scot who was made Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company on its
union with the North-west Company in 1821, made the long trip from
Montreal to Manitoba about forty times. He travelled in state, with a
Highland piper to rouse the echoes and excite the wondering awe of the
natives when he was nearing an outpost.
A lively picture of the West is given us by Paul Kane, who undertook
that journey in 1846, not as a trader but as an artist. Paul Kane set
out, as he tells us, “with no companions but my portfolio and box of
paints, my gun and a stock of ammunition,” to make pictures of Indian
life and “the scenery of an almost unknown country.”
Such a journey as it was! Leaving Toronto on the 9th of May, he reached
“Fort Vancouver,” ninety miles from the mouth of the Columbia River—now
in the States, but then “the largest port in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s
Dominions”—only on the 8th of December.
From the head of Lake Superior he had to travel practically all the way
by canoe, though occasionally on horseback. His route lay through the
Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, up the North
Saskatchewan to Edmonton House, up the Athabasca to Jasper’s, across the
Yellowhead Pass—through which the Canadian National Railway now
runs—then down the whole length of the Columbia, by the Arrow Lakes and
Fort Okanagan.
At Edmonton he found quite “a large establishment,” forty or fifty men,
with their wives and children, amounting altogether to about 139, all
living within the pickets of the fort. The men were occupied chiefly in
building the company’s boats, sawing timber and cutting up firewood. The
women, all, without exception, either Indian or Métis, were employed
making moccasins and clothing for the men, and converting buffalo meat
into “pimmi-kon.”
The one real settlement in the whole of the West was that of Fort Garry,
extending about 50 miles along the banks of the Red River, and “back
from the water, according to the original grant from the Indians, as far
as a person can distinguish a man from a horse on a clear day.” Here
lived about 6,000 Métis, all speaking Cree and French, though “governed
by a chief named Grant.”
The white folk, about 3,000 in number, were Scottish families, living
“in great plenty so far as mere food and clothing are concerned.”
Luxuries were “almost unattainable.” There was “no market nearer than
St. Paul’s, on the Mississippi River, a distance of nearly 700 miles
over a trackless prairie.”
The Scotsmen were genuine farmers—the fathers of western agriculture.
The Métis of that time—well, they had discarded “the practice of
scalping,” but otherwise Kane says they differed “in very few respects
from the pure Indians.” In fact, when our artist went riding with them
after buffalo, the first game they stalked was a party of Sioux Indians,
of whom they brought down eight at one volley. “They abandoned the dead
bodies to the malice of a small party of Saulteaux, who accompanied
them.” These Indian allies immediately “commenced a scalp dance, during
which they mutilated the bodies in a most horrible manner. One old
woman, who had lost several relatives by the Sioux, rendered herself
particularly conspicuous” in this ghastly work.
When they came up with the buffalo, a herd of four or five thousand
bulls, the chase continued only about one hour, but at the end of that
time five hundred lay dead and dying over an area of five or six square
miles. It was calculated, according to Kane, that the Métis alone
destroyed 30,000 annually.
Farther west, near Fort Carlton, our traveller found the Indians hunting
buffalo in their own way—driving them into an enclosure and then
despatching them with spears and arrows. Some of the bowmen were so
strong that arrows passed right through the buffalo’s body.
This had been the third herd driven into one pound within ten or twelve
days, the disgusted artist says, “and the putrefying carcasses tainted
the air all round. The Indians in this manner destroy innumerable
buffaloes, apparently for the mere pleasure of the thing. Not one in
twenty is used in any way, so that thousands are left to rot where they
fall.” Even the wolves, hovering around while the slaughter was going
on, could not dispose of such a monstrous feast.
Who can wonder at the disappearance of the buffalo, massacred like that?
The Indian might have gone on hunting them on foot with bows and arrows
forever without making much difference to the herd; but first came the
horse, then the gun, and then the crowd of Métis wanting pemmican to
feed white traders as well as themselves—with all these against him,
the King of the Plains could not hope to survive. And other calamities
besides man overtook him. Between Fort Pitt and Edmonton, Paul Kane saw
large herds of buffalo swimming across the Saskatchewan, on their usual
spring migration; but he saw also thousands of dead buffalo strewn along
the banks—so weakened by disease, or by lack of food, that they were
drowned in the attempt to swim the river.
The guns which the Indians got from the white man and used to
exterminate their “best friend, the buffalo,” helped them also to
exterminate each other. The feud between the Iroquois confederacy and
the Hurons in the early days of Eastern Canada was no more relentless
than the feud between the Blackfoot confederacy and the Crees in the
West, even in the reign of Queen Victoria.
Voyaging down the North Saskatchewan one day, below Fort Pitt, Kane
says, “we saw a large party of mounted Indians riding furiously towards
us.” They proved to be “a war party of Blackfoot Indians, Blood Indians,
Sur-cees, Gros Ventres and Paygans—the best mounted, the best looking,
the most warlike in appearance, and the best accoutred of any tribe I
had ever seen.” But—“we had a Cree Indian in one of our boats, whom we
had to stow away under the skins lest he should be discovered.” The
warriors were friendly enough to the white men. “They spread a buffalo
skin for us to sit down upon, depositing all their knives, guns and bows
and arrows on the ground in front of us, in token of amity,” and passed
round the pipe of peace. “After our smoke several of the young braves
engaged in a horse race, to which sport they are very partial, and at
which they bet heavily; they generally ride on those occasions stark
naked, without a saddle, and with only a lasso fastened to the lower jaw
of the horse.”
Yet the sport these men were bent on was nothing less than a war of
extermination against their fellow-countrymen. “They told us they were a
party of 1,500 warriors, from 1,200 lodges, pitching their tents on
towards Edmonton, leaving few behind capable of bearing arms. They were
in pursuit of the Crees and Assiniboines, whom they threatened totally
to annihilate, boasting that they themselves were as numerous as the
grass on the plains.”
The artist “must be a great medicine-man,” the warriors thought, as they
saw him drawing their portraits. As they were expecting a battle with
the Crees next day, they got up a war dance, and with much solemnity
placed him in the best position “to work his incantations” for their
success—that is, to draw his pictures while they danced.
* * * * *
Turn your eyes now to the north. At the very time when the adventurous
artist and his fur-trading friends were floating through the
long-established “North-west boat passage” across the continent, the
search for a north-west ship passage was ending in tragedy.
“We met here,” says the artist, arriving at the Pas on the 12th of June,
1848, “Sir John Richardson and Dr. Rae, _en route_ to Mackenzie River,
with two canoes, in search of Sir John Franklin,” the great Arctic
explorer.
Three years before, on May 19, 1845, Franklin had left England in
command of an expedition to discover what Columbus and so many other
explorers had vainly sought, a sea-way to the east through the west. In
his two ships, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_, of the British navy, there
sailed 129 officers and men. They were seen in July by a passing vessel
in Baffin’s Bay, and then they vanished. Not one man ever came back.
One expedition after another was sent in search of them—by the British
Government, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, by American friends, and by
Lady Franklin herself when all others had given up the task as hopeless.
In 1853, John Rae—a splendid specimen of the Hudson’s Bay factor, whom
I knew in his later years—met a band of Eskimo who in the winter of
1850 had seen, first a large party of white men dragging southward a
boat and sledges, and, some time after, dead bodies both on the mainland
and on Montreal Island, near the mouth of Back’s Fish River. From the
Eskimo, Rae recovered a silver plate engraved with Franklin’s name, and
many forks and spoons with the initials of his officers.
At last, but not until 1859, Lieutenant Hobson, an officer of Lady
Franklin’s expedition under Captain McClintock’s command, found on King
William Island three skeletons, two of them in a boat on a sleigh. In a
stone cairn, too, he discovered the only written record of the tragedy,
signed by Captain Crozier of the _Terror_. In a few sentences, scribbled
on the edges of a printed form, this told that the ships had been beset
by the ice since September 12, 1846; that Sir John Franklin had died on
June 11, 1847; that on April 22, 1848, the ships had been abandoned;
that twenty-four men, including nine officers, were dead; and that the
remaining one hundred and five were starting for Back’s Fish River. It
was too late. An old Eskimo woman was found who said that the strangers
“fell down and died as they walked along.”
Though Franklin was lost, the object of his search was found. The relief
expeditions added immensely to our knowledge of the north, and filled in
the great blank Arctic map with a labyrinth of islands and straits. In
1850 one British ship, the _Investigator_, rounding Cape Horn and
passing in through Behring Sea, sailed eastward for hundreds of miles
along the north coast of Alaska and Rupert’s Land, before being frozen
in. Captain McClure, with six men in a sledge, pressed on over the ice
through Prince of Wales Strait between Banks Land and Prince Albert
Land, for six days, till they came in sight of Melville Sound, which had
already been entered from the east.
They had discovered, therefore, the existence of a North-west Passage;
but when summer came, and the captain tried to bring his ship through
the narrow strait, he was blocked by ice in mid-August, and had to spend
a second winter frozen up. In April he was reached by a party from
another ice-bound ship, the _Resolute_, which had come in from the
Atlantic. Abandoning their own ship, McClure and his men went back with
this party over the ice to the _Resolute_. That vessel also, and two
others, had to be abandoned, after still another winter in the Arctic;
and the crews were only rescued by fresh ships coming from England in
1854.
As McClure and his men had come over the sea from the Pacific to the
Atlantic Ocean, though not all the way by ship, they won a prize of
$50,000 which the British Government had long before offered for the
finding of the North-west Passage.
Having been found, the North-west Passage was left severely alone. Only
one ship ever went through, and then not by McClure’s route, the Prince
of Wales Strait. On June 16, 1903, in the little yacht _Gjoa_, the
Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had already discovered the South Pole,
left Christiania with his six companions. Passing Hudson Strait by, they
sailed north, struck in west over the top of Baffin’s Land, then turned
south into Peel Sound and Franklin Strait and down the east side of King
William Land. Then, almost doubling on their tracks, they turned west
again and crept along the coast of the mainland, through the length of
Coronation Bay, past the mouths of the Coppermine and Mackenzie Rivers,
and finally got down into the Pacific through Behring Strait. They cast
anchor at Nome, in Alaska, on August 31, 1906.
This voyage proved that if a navigator was prepared to spend a few years
on the trip, including several winters frozen up in Arctic solitude, he
might in the end get through from Atlantic to Pacific by sea, the dream
and heart’s desire of countless old explorers. But if the old explorer
had the chance to-day, and heard he could get through by land in less
than five days by a Canadian railway, the dream would lose its
attraction. A North-west Passage was wanted strictly for use, not to
ornament a map.