Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1763 to 1812, part 2

Up at Michilimackinac similar scenes were enacted.

Major Etherington and Captain Leslie had some thirty-five soldiers.

There were also hosts of traders outside the walls, among whom was Alexander Henry of Montreal.

Word had come of Pontiac at Detroit, but Etherington did not realize that the uprising was general.

June 4 was the King's birthday.

Shops had been closed.

Flags blew above the fort.

Gates were wide open.

Squaws with heads under shawls sat hunched around the house steps, with that concealed beneath their shawls which the English did not guess.

All the men except Henry, who was writing letters, and some Frenchmen, who understood the danger signs, had gone outside the gates to watch a fast and furious game of lacrosse.

Again and again the ball came bounding towards the fort gates, only to be whisked to the other end of the field by a deft toss, followed by the swift runners.

No one was louder in applause than Etherington.

The officers were completely off guard.

Suddenly the crowds swayed, gave way, opened; .

.

.

{287} and down the field towards the fort gates surged the players.

A

dexterous pitch!

The ball was inside the fort.

After it dashed the Indians.

In a flash weapons were grasped from the shawls of the squaws.

Musket and knife did the rest.

When Henry heard the war whoop and looked from a window he saw Indian warriors bending to drink the blood of hearts that were yet warm.

For two days Henry lived in the rubbish heap of the attic in the house of Langlade, a pioneer of Wisconsin.

Of the whites at Michilimackinac only twenty escaped death, and they were carried prisoners to the Lower Country for ransom.

From Virginia to Lake Superior such was the Indian war known as Pontiac's Campaign.

Fort Pitt held out like Detroit.

Niagara was too strong for assault, but in September twenty-four soldiers, who had been protecting _portage_ past the falls, were waylaid and driven over the precipice at the place called Devil's Hole.

More soldiers sent to the rescue met like fate, horses and wagons being stampeded over the rocks, seventy men in all being hurled to death in the wild canyon.

Amherst, who was military commander at this time, was driven nearly out of his senses.

A foe like the French, who would stand and do battle, he could fight; but this phantom foe, that vanished like mist through the woods, baffled the English soldier.

In less than six months two thousand whites had been slain; and Amherst could not even find his foe, let alone strike him.

"_Can we not inoculate them with smallpox, or set bloodhounds to track them_?"

he writes distractedly.

By the summer of 1764 the English had taken the war path.

Bradstreet was to go up the lakes with twelve hundred men, Bouquet, with like forces, to follow the old Pennsylvania road to the Ohio, both generals to unite somewhere south of Lake Erie.

Of Bradstreet the least said the better.

He had done well in the great war when he captured Fort Frontenac almost without a blow; but now he strangely played the fool.

He seemed to think that peace, peace at any price, was the object, whereas peace that is not a victory is worthless with the Indian.

Deputies met him on the 12th of August near Presqu' Isle, Lake Erie.

{288} They carried no wampum belts and were really spies.

Without demanding reparation, without a word as to restoring harried captives, without hostages for good conduct, Bradstreet entered into a fool's peace with his foes, proceeded up to Detroit, and was back at Niagara by winter; though he must have realized the worthlessness of the campaign when his messengers sent to the Illinois were ambushed.

[Illustration: BOUQUET] When Bouquet heard of the sham peace he was furious and repudiated Bradstreet's treaty in toto.

Bouquet was a veteran of the great war, and knew bushfighting from seven years' experience on Pennsylvania frontiers.

Slowly, with his fifteen hundred rangers and five hundred Highlanders, express riders keeping the trail open from fort to fort, scouts to fore, Bouquet moved along the old army trail used by Forbes to reach Fort Pitt.

Friendly Indians had been warned to keep green branches as signals in the muzzles of their guns.

All others were to be shot without mercy.

Indians vanished before his march like mist before the sun.

August 5 found Bouquet south of Fort Pitt at a place known as Bushy Run.

The scouts had gone ahead to prepare nooning for the army at the Run.

In seven hours the men had marched seventeen miles spite of sweltering heat; but at one, just as the thirsty columns were nearing the rest place, the crack--crack--crack of rifle shots to the fore set every man's blood jumping.

From quick march they broke to a run, priming guns, ball in mouth as they ran.

A moment later the old trick of Braddock's ambush was being repeated, but this time the Indians were dealing with a seasoned man.

Bouquet swung his fighters in a circle round the stampeding horses and provision wagons.

The heat was terrific, the men almost mad with thirst, the horses neighing and plunging and breaking away to the woods; and the army stood, a red-coated, tartan-plaid target for invisible foes!

By this time the men were fighting as Indians fight--breaking ranks, jumping from tree to tree.

It is n't easy to keep men standing as targets when they can't get at the foe; but Bouquet, riding from place to place, kept his men in hand till darkness screened them.

Sixty had fallen.

A circular barricade {289} was built of flour bags.

Inside this the wounded were laid, and the army camped without water.

The agonies of that night need not be told.

Here the neighing of horses would bring down a clatter of bullets aimed in the dark; and the groans of the wounded, trampled by the stampeding cavalcade, would mingle with the screams of terror from the horses.

The night continued hot almost as day in the sultry forest, and the thirst with both man and beast became anguish.

Another such day and another such night, and Bouquet could foresee his fate would be worse than Braddock's. Passing from man to man, he gave the army their instructions for the next day.

They would form in three platoons, with the center battalion advanced to the fore, as if to lead attack.

Suddenly the center was to feign defeat and turn as if in panic flight.

It was to be guessed that the Indians would pursue headlong.

Instantly the flank battalions were to sweep through the woods in wide circle and close in on the rear of the savages.

Then the fleeing center was to turn.

The savages would be surrounded.

Daybreak came with a cracking of shots from ambush.

Officers and men carried out instructions exactly as Bouquet had planned.

At ten o'clock the center column broke ranks, wavered, turned, .

.

.

fled in wild panic!

With the whooping of a wolf pack in full cry, the savages burst from ambush in pursuit.

The sides deployed.

A moment later the center had turned to fight the pursuer, {290} and the Highlanders broke from the woods, yelling their slogan, with broadswords cutting a terrible hand-to-hand swath.

Sixty Indians were slashed to death in as many seconds.

Though the British lost one hundred and fifteen, killed and wounded, the Indians were in full flight, blind terror at their heels.

The way was now open to Port Pitt, but Bouquet did not dally inside the palisades.

On down the Ohio he pursued the panic-stricken savages, pausing neither for deputies nor reënforcements.

At Muskingum Creek the Indians sent back the old men to sue, sue abjectedly, for peace at any cost.

Bouquet met them with the stern front that never fails to win respect.

They need not palm off their lie that the fault lay with the foolish young warriors.

If the old chiefs would not control the young braves, then the whole tribe, the whole Indian race, must pay the penalty.

In terror the deputies hung their heads.

He would not even discuss the terms of peace, Bouquet declared, till the Indians restored every captive,--man, woman, and child, even the child of Indian parentage born in captivity.

The captives must be given suitable clothing, horses, and presents.

Twelve days only would he permit them to gather the captives.

If man, woman, or child were lacking on the twelfth day, he would pursue them and punish them to the uttermost ends of earth.

The Indians were dumfounded.

These were not soft words.

Not thus had the French spoken, with the giving of manifold presents.

But powder was exhausted.

No more was coming from the French traders of the Mississippi.

Winter was approaching, and the Indians must hunt or starve.

Again the coureurs are sent spurring the woods from tribe to tribe with wampum belts, but this time the belts are the white bands of peace.

While Bouquet waits he sends back over the trail for hospital nurses to receive the captives, and the army is set knocking up rude barracks of log and thatch in the wilderness.

Then the captives begin to come.

It is a scene for the brush of artist, for all frontiersmen who have lost friends have rallied to Bouquet's camp, hoping against hope and afraid to hope.

There is the mother, whose infant child has been snatched from her arms in {291} some frontier attack, now scanning the lines as they come in, mad with hope and fear.

There is the husband, whose wife has been torn away to some savage's tepee, searching, searching, searching among the sad, wild-eyed, ill-clad rabble for one with some resemblance to the wife he loved.

There is the father seeking lost daughters and afraid of what he may find; and there are the captives themselves, some of the women demented from the abuse they have received.

England may have spent her millions to protect her colonies, but she never spent in anguish what these rude frontiersmen suffered at Bouquet's camp.

[Illustration: RETURN OF THE ENGLISH CAPTIVES (From a contemporary print)] So ended what is known as the Pontiac War.

Up at Detroit in 1765 Pontiac, in council with the whites, explains that he has listened to bad advice, but now his heart is right.

"Father, you have stopped the rum barrel while we talked," he says grimly; "as our business is finished, we request that you open the barrel, that we may drink and be merry."

Not a very heroic curtain fall to a dramatic life.

But pause a bit: the Pontiac War was the last united stand of a doomed race against the advance of the conquering alien; and the Indian is defeated, and he knows it, and he acknowledges it, and he {292} drowns his despair in a vice, and so he passes down the Long Trail of time with his face to the west, doomed, hopeless, pushed westward and ever west.

Pontiac goes down the Mississippi to his friends, the French fur traders of St. Louis.

One morning in 1767, after a drinking bout, he is found across the river, lying in camp, with his skull split to the neck.

By the sword he had lived, by the sword he perished.

Was the murder the result of a drunken quarrel, or did some frenzied frontiersman with deathless woes bribe the hand of the assassin?

The truth of the matter is unknown, and Pontiac's death remains a theme for fiction.

What with struggles for power and Indian wars, one might think that the few hundred English colonists of Quebec and Montreal had all they could do.

Not so: their quarrels with the French Catholics and fights with the Indians are merely incidental to the main aim of their lives, to the one object that has brought them stampeding to Canada as to a new gold field, namely, quick way to wealth; and the only quick way to wealth was by the fur trade.

In the wilderness of the Up Country wander some two or three thousand cast-off wood rovers of the old French fur trade.

As the prodigals come down the Ottawa, down the Detroit, down the St. Lawrence, the English and Scotch merchants of Montreal and Quebec meet them.

Mighty names those merchants have in history now,--McGillivrays and MacKenzies and McGills and Henrys and MacLeods and MacGregors and Ogilvies and MacTavishes and Camerons,--but at this period of the game the most of them were what we to-day would call petty merchants or peddlers.

In their storehouses--small, one-story, frame affairs--were packed goods for trade.

With these goods they quickly outfitted the French bushrover-- worth to a canoe--and packed the fellow back to the wilderness to trade on shares before any rival firm could hire him.

Within five years of Wolfe's victory in 1759 all the French bushrovers of the Up Country had been reëngaged by merchants of Montreal and Quebec.

{293} [Illustration: MONTREAL (From a contemporary print)] Then imperceptible changes came,--the changes that work so silently they are like destiny.

Because it is unsafe to let the rascal bushrovers and voyageurs go off by themselves with worth to the canoe load, the merchants began to accompany them westward.

"Bourgeois," the voyageurs call their outfitters.

Then, because success in fur trade must be kept secret, the merchants cease to have their men come down to Montreal.

They meet them with the goods halfway, at La Vérendrye's old stamping ground on Lake Superior, first at the place called Grand Portage, then, when the United States boundary is changed in 1783, at Kaministiquia, or modern Fort William, named after William McGillivray.

Pontiac's War puts a stop to the new trade, but by 1766 the merchants are west again.

Henry goes up the Saskatchewan to the Forks, and comes back with such wealth of furs he retires a rich magnate of Montreal.

The Frobisher brothers strike for new hunting ground.

So do Peter Pond and Bostonnais Pangman, and the MacKenzies, Alexander {294} and Roderick.

Instead of following up the Saskatchewan, they strike from Lake Winnipeg northward for Churchill River and Athabasca, and they bring out furs that transform those peddlers into merchant princes.

A little later the chief buyer of the Montreal furs is one John Jacob Astor of New York.

Then another change.

Rivalry hurts fur trade.

Especially do different prices demoralize the Indians.

The Montreal merchants pool their capital and become known as the Northwest Fur Company.

They now hire their voyageurs outright on a salary.

No man is paid less than what would be in modern money, with board; and any man may rise to be clerk, trader, wintering partner, with shares worth 800 pounds (), that bring dividends of two and three hundred per cent.

The petty merchants whom Murray and Carleton despised became in twenty years the opulent aristocracy of Montreal, holding the most of the public offices, dominating the government, filling the judgeships, and entertaining with a lavish hospitality that put vice-regal splendor in the shade.

The Beaver Club is the great rendezvous of the Montreal partners.

"Fortitude in Distress" is the motto and lords of the ascendant is their practice.

No man, neither governor nor judge, may ignore these Nor'westers, and it may be added they are a law unto themselves.

One example will suffice.

A French merchant of Montreal took it into his head to have a share of this wealth-giving trade.

He was advised to pool his interests with the Nor'westers, and he foolishly ignored the advice.

In camp at Grand Portage on Lake Superior he is told all the country hereabout belongs to the Nor'westers, and _he_ must decamp.

"Show me proofs this country is yours," he answers.

"Show me the title deed and I shall decamp."

Next night a band of Nor'westers, voyageurs well plied with rum, came down the strand to the intruder's tents.

They cut his tents to ribbons, scatter his goods to the four winds, and beat his voyageurs into insensibility.

"Voila!

there are our proofs," they say.

The French merchant hastens down to Montreal to bring lawsuit, but the judges, you must remember, are shareholders in the {295} Northwest Company, and many of the Legislative Council are Nor'westers.

What with real delays and sham delays and put-offs and legal fees, justice is a bit tardy.

While the case is pending the French merchant tries again.

This time he is not molested at Fort William.

They let him proceed on his way up the old trail to Lake of the Woods, the trail found by La Vérendrye; and halfway through the wilderness, where the cataract offers only one path for portage, the Frenchman finds Nor'-westers building a barricade; he tears it down.

They build another; he tears that down.

They build a third; fast as he tears down, they build up.

He must either go back baffled by these suave, smiling, lawless rivals, or fight on the spot to the death; but there is neither glory nor wealth being killed in the wilderness, where not so much as the sands of the shore will tell the true story of the crime.

So the French merchant compromises, sells out to the Nor'westers at cost plus carriage, and retires to the St. Lawrence cursing British justice.

It may be guessed that the sudden eruption of "the peddlers," these bush banditti, these Scotch soldiers of fortune with French bullies for fighters, roused the ancient and honorable Hudson's Bay Company from its half-century slumber of peace.

Anthony Hendry, who had gone up the Saskatchewan far as the Blackfoot country of the foothills, they had dismissed as a liar in the fifties because he had reported that he had seen _Indians on horseback_, whereas the sleepy factors of the bay ports knew very well they never saw any kind of Indians except Indians in canoes; but now in the sixties it is noted by the company that not so many furs are coming down from the Up Country.

It is voted "the French Canadian peddlers of Montreal" be notified of the company's exclusive monopoly to the trade of these regions.

One Findley is sent to Quebec to look after the Hudson's Bay Company's rights; but while the English company _talks_ about its rights, the Nor'westers go in the field and _take_ them.

The English company rubs its eyes and sits up and scratches its heavy head, and passes an order that Mr. Moses Norton, chief {296} factor of Churchill, send Mr. Samuel Hearne to explore the Up Country.

Hearne has heard of Far-Away-Metal River, far enough away in all conscience from the Canadian peddlers; and thither in December, 1770, he finds his way, after two futile attempts to set out.

Matonabbee, great chief of the Chippewyans, is his guide,--Matonabbee, who brings furs from the Athabasca, and is now accompanied by a regiment of wives to act as beasts of burden in the sledge traces, camp servants, and cooks.

Hearne sets out in midwinter in order to reach the Coppermine River in summer, by which he can descend to the Arctic in canoes.

Storm or cold, bog or rock, Matonabbee keeps fast pace, so fast he reaches the great caribou traverse before provisions have dwindled and in time for the spring hunt.

Here all the Indian hunters of the north gather twice a year to hunt the vast herds of caribou going to the seashore for summer, back to the Up Country for the winter, herds in countless thousands upon thousands, such multitudes the clicking of the horns sounds like wind in a leafless forest, the tramp of the hoofs like galloping cavalry.

Store of meat is laid up for Hearne's voyage by Matonabbee's Indians; and a band of warriors joins the expedition to go down Coppermine River.

If Hearne had known Indian customs as well as he knew the fur trade, he would have known that it boded no good when Matonabbee ordered the women to wait for his return in the Athabasca country of the west.

Absence of women on the march meant only one of two things, a war raid or hunt, and which it was soon enough Hearne learned.

They had come at last, on July 12, 1771, on Coppermine River, a mean little stream flowing over rocky bed in the Barren Lands of the Little Sticks (Trees), when Hearne noticed, just above a cataract, the domed tepee tops of an Eskimo camp.

It was night, but as bright as day in the long light of the North.

Instantly, before Hearne could stop them, his Indians had stripped as for war, and fell upon the sleeping Eskimo in ruthless massacre.

Men were brained as they dashed from the domed tents, women speared as they slept, children dispatched with less thought than the white man would give to the killing of a fly.

In vain Hearne, {297} with tears in his eyes, begged the Indians to stop.

They laughed him to scorn, and doubtless wondered where he thought they yearly got the ten thousand beaver pelts brought to Churchill.

A few days later, July 17, 1771, Hearne stood on the shores of the Arctic, heaving to the tide and afloat with ice; but the horrors of the massacre had robbed him of an explorer's exultation, though he was first of pathfinders to reach the Arctic overland.

Matonabbee led Hearne back to Churchill in June of 1772 by a wide westward circle through the Athabasca Bear Lake Country, which the Hudson's Bay people thus discovered only a few years before the Nor'westers came.

[Illustration: SAMUEL HEARNE] No longer dare the Hudson's Bay Company ignore the Up Country.

Hearne is sent to the Saskatchewan to build Fort Cumberland, and Matthew Cocking is dispatched to the country of the Blackfeet, modern Alberta, to beat up trade, where his French voyageur, Louis Primeau, deserts him bag and baggage, to carry the Hudson's Bay furs off to the Nor'westers.

No longer does the English company slumber on the shores of its frozen sea.

Yearly are voyageurs sent inland,--"patroons of the woods," given bounty to stay in the wilds, luring any trade from the Nor'westers.