Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1812 to 1820, part 1

While Canada waged war for her national existence against her border neighbors to the south, as in the days of the bushrovers' raids of old, afar in the west, in the burnt-wood, iron-rock region of Lake Superior, on the lonely wind-swept prairies, at the foothills where each night's sunset etched the long shadows of the mountain peaks in somber replica across the plains, in the forested solitude of the tumultuous Rockies was the ragged vanguard of empire blazing a path through the wilderness, voyageur and burnt-wood runner, trapper, and explorer, pushing across the hinterlands of earth's ends from prairie to mountains, and mountains to sea.

It was but as a side clap of the great American Revolution that the last French cannon were pointed against the English forts on Hudson Bay.

When France sided with the American colonies a fleet of French frigates was dispatched under the great Admiral La Pérouse against the fur posts of the English Company.

One sleepy August afternoon in 1782, when Samuel Hearne, governor of Fort Churchill, was sorting furs in the courtyard, gates wide open, cannon unloaded, guards dispersed, the fort was electrified by the sudden apparition of three men-of-war, sails full blown, sides bristling with cannon, plowing over the waves straight for the harbor gate.

French colors fluttered from the masthead.

Sails rattled down.

Anchors were cast, and in a few minutes small boats were out sounding the channel for position to attack the fort.

Hearne had barely forty men, and the most of them were decrepits, unfit for the hunting field.

As sunset merged into the long white light of northern midnight, four hundred French mariners landed on the sands outside Churchill.

{319} Hearne had no alternative.

He surrendered without a blow.

The fort was looted of furs, the Indians driven out, and a futile attempt made to blow up the massive walls.

Hearne and the other officers were carried off captives.

Matonabbee, the famous Indian guide, came back from the hunt to find the wooden structures of Churchill in flame.

He had thought the English were invulnerable, and his pagan pride could not brook the shame of such ignominious defeat.

Withdrawing outside the shattered walls, Matonabbee blew his brains out.

A few days later Port Nelson, to the south, had suffered like fate.

The English officers were released by La Pérouse on reaching Europe.

As for the fur company servants, they waited only till the French sails had disappeared over the sea.

Then they came from hiding and rebuilt the burnt forts.

Such was the last act in the great drama of contest between France and England for supremacy in the north.

For two hundred years explorers had been trying to find a northern passage between Europe and Asia by way of America, from east to west.

Now that Canada has fallen into English hands; now, too, that the Russian sea-otter hunters are coasting down the west side of America towards that region which Drake discovered long ago in California, England suddenly awakens to a passion for discovery of that mythical Northwest Passage.

Instead of seeking from east to west she sought from west to east, and sent her navigator round the world to search for opening along the west coast of America.

To carry out the exploration there was selected as commander that young officer, James Cook, who helped to sound the St. Lawrence for Wolfe, and had since been cruising the South Seas.

On his ships, the _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_, was a young man whose name was to become a household word in America, Vancouver, a midshipman.

March of 1778 the _Resolution_ and _Discovery_ come rolling over the long swell of the sheeny Pacific towards Drake's land of New Albion, California.

Suddenly, one morning, the dim sky line resolved into the clear-cut edges of high land, but by night such a roaring hurricane had burst on the ships as drove them {320} far out from land, too far to see the opening of Juan de Fuca, leading in from Vancouver Island, though Cook called the cape there "Flattery," because he had hoped for an opening and been deluded.

Clearer weather found Cook abreast a coast of sheer mountains with snowy summits jagging through the clouds in tent peaks.

A narrow entrance opened into a two-horned cove.

Small boats towed the ships in amid a flotilla of Indian dugouts whose occupants chanted weird welcome to the echo of the surrounding hills.

Women and children were in the canoes.

That signified peace.

The ships were moored to trees, and the white men went ashore in that harbor to become famous as the rendezvous of Pacific fur traders, Nootka Sound, on the sea side of Vancouver Island.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN COOK] Presently the waters were literally swarming with Indian canoes, and in a few days Cook's crews had received thousands of dollars' worth of sea-otter skins for such worthless baubles as tin mirrors and brass rings and bits of red calico.

This was the beginning of the fur trade in sea otter with Americans and English.

Some of the naked savages were observed wearing metal ornaments of European make.

Cook did not think of the Russian fur traders to the north, but easily persuaded himself these objects had come from the English fur traders of Hudson Bay, and so inferred there _must_ be a Northeast Passage.

By April, Cook's ships were once more afloat, {321} gliding among the sylvan channels of countless wooded islands up past Sitka harbor, where the Russians later built their fort, round westward beneath the towering opal dome of Mount St. Elias, which Bering had named, to the waters bordering Alaska; but, as the world knows, though the ships penetrated up the channels of many roily waters, they found no open passage.

Cook comes down to the Sandwich Islands, New Year of 1779. There the vices of his white crew arouse the enmity of the pagan savages.

In a riot over the theft of a rowboat, Cook and a few men are surrounded by an enraged mob.

By some mistake the white sailors rowing out from shore fire on the mob surrounding Cook.

Instantly a dagger rips under Cook's shoulder blade.

In another second Cook and his men are literally hacked to pieces.

All night the conch shells of the savages blow their war challenge through the darkness and the signal fires dance on the mountains.

By dint of persuasion and threats the white men compel the natives to restore the mangled remains of the commander.

Sunday, February 21, amid a silence as of death over the waters, the body of the dead explorer is committed to the deep.

[Illustration: FORT CHURCHILL, AS IT WAS IN 1777] [Illustration: TOTEM POLES, BRITISH COLUMBIA] The chance discovery of the sea-otter trade by Cook's crew at Nootka brings hosts of English and American adventurers to the Pacific Coast of Canada.

There is Meares, the English officer from China, who builds a rabbit hutch of a barracks at Nootka and almost involves England and Spain in war because the Spaniards, having discovered this region before Cook, knock the log barracks into kindling wood and forcibly seize an English trading ship.

There is Robert Gray, the Boston trader, who pushes the prow of his little ship, _Columbia_, up a spacious harbor south of Juan de Fuca in May of 1792 and discovers Columbia River, so giving the United States flag prior claim here.

There is George Vancouver, the English commander, sent out by his government in 1791-1793 to receive Nootka formally back from the Spaniards of California and to explore every inlet from Vancouver Island to Alaska.

As luck would have it, Vancouver, the Englishman, and Gray, the American, are both hovering off {322} the mouth of the Columbia in April of 1792, but a gale drives the ships offshore, though turgid water plainly indicates the mouth of a great river somewhere near.

Vancouver goes on up north.

Gray, the American, comes back, and so Vancouver misses discovering the one great river that remains unmapped in America.

Up Puget Sound, named after his lieutenant, up Fuca Straits, round Vancouver Island, past all those inlets like seas on the mainland of British Columbia, coasts Vancouver, rounding south again to Nootka in August.

In Nootka lie the Spanish frigates from California, bristling with cannon, the red and yellow flag blowing to the wind above the palisaded fort.

In solemn parade, with Maquinna, the Nootka chief, clad in a state of nature, as guest of the festive board, Don Quadra, the Spanish officer, dines and wines Vancouver; but when it comes to business, that is another matter!

Vancouver understands that Spain is to surrender _all_ sovereignty north of San Francisco.

Don Quadra, with pompous bow, maintains that the international agreement was to surrender rights only north of Juan de Fuca, leaving the rest of the northwest coast free to all nations for trade.

Incidentally, it may be mentioned, Don Quadra was right, but the two commanders agree to send home to their respective governments for {323} instructions.

Meanwhile Robert Gray, the American, comes rolling into port with news he has discovered Columbia River.

Vancouver is skeptical and chagrined.

Having failed to discover the river, he goes down coast to explore it.

It may be added, he sends his men higher up the river than Gray has gone, and has England's flag of possession as solemnly planted as though Robert Gray had never entered Columbia's waters.

The next two years Vancouver spends exploring every nook and inlet from Columbia River to Lynn Canal.

Once and for all and forever he disproves the myth of a Northeast Passage.

His work was negative, but it established English rights where America's claims ceased and Russia's began, namely between Columbia River and Sitka, or in what is now known as British Columbia.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN GEORGE VANCOUVER] [Illustration: NOOTKA SOUND (From an engraving in Vancouver's journal)] As the beaver had lured French bushrovers from the St. Lawrence to the Rockies, so the sea otter led the way to the exploration of the Pacific Coast.

Artist's brush and novelist's pen have drawn all the romance and the glamour and the adventure of the beaver hunter's life, but the sea-otter hunter's life is {324} almost an untold tale.

Pacific Coast Indians were employed by the white traders for this wildest of hunting.

The sea otter is like neither otter nor beaver, though possessing habits akin to both.

In size, when full-grown, it is about the length of a man.

Its pelt has the ebony shimmer of seal tipped with silver.

Cradled on the waves, sleeping on their backs in the sea, playful as kittens, the sea otters only come ashore when driven by fierce gales;

but they must come above to breathe, for the wave wash of storm would smother them.

Their favorite sleeping grounds used to be the kelp beds of the Alaskan Islands.

Storm or calm, to the kelp beds rode the Indian hunters in their boats of oiled skin light as paper.

If heavy surf ran, concealing sight and sound, the hunters stood along shore shouting through the surf and waiting for the wave wash to carry in the dead body; if the sea were calm, the hunters circled in bands of twenty or thirty, spearing the sea otter as it came up to breathe; but the best hunting was when hurricane gales churned sea and air to spray.

Then the sea otter came to the kelp beds in herds, and through the storm over the wave-dashed reefs, like very spirits of the storm incarnate, rushed the hunters, spear in hand.

It is not surprising that the sea-otter hunters perished by tens of thousands every year, or that the sea otter dwindled from a yield of 100,000 a year to a paltry 200 of the present day.

Meanwhile Nor'west traders from Montreal and Quebec, English traders from Hudson Bay, have gone up the Saskatchewan far as the Athabasca and the Rockies.

What lies beyond?

Whither runs this great river from Athabasca Lake?

Whence comes the great river from the mountains?

Will the river that flows north or the river that comes from the west, either of them lead to the Pacific Coast, where Cook's crews found wealth of sea otter?

The lure of the Unknown is the lure of the siren.

First you possess it, then it possesses you!

Cooped up in his fort on Lake Athabasca, Alexander MacKenzie, the Nor'wester, begins wondering about those rivers, but you can't ask business men to bank on the Unknown, to write blank checks for profits on what {325} you may not find.

And the Nor'westers were all stern business men.

For every penny's outlay they exacted from their wintering partners and clerks not ten but a hundredfold.

And Alexander MacKenzie received no encouragement from his company to explore these unknown rivers.

The project got possession of his mind.

Sometimes he would pace the little log barracks of Fort Chippewyan from sunset to day dawn, trying to work out a way to explore those rivers; or, sitting before the huge hearth place, he would dream and dream till, as he wrote his cousin Roderick, "I did not know what I was doing or where I was."

Finally he induced his cousin to take charge of the fort for a summer.

Then, assuming all risk and outlay, he set out on his own responsibility June 3, 1789, to follow the Great River down to the Arctic Ocean.

"English Chief," who often went down to Hudson Bay for the rival company, went as MacKenzie's guide, and there were also in the canoes two or three white men, some Indians as paddlers, and squaws to cook and make moccasins.

[Illustration: FORT CHIPPEWYAN, ATHABASCA LAKE (From a recent photograph)] {326} The canoes passed Peace River pouring down from the mountains;

then six dangerous rapids, where many a Nor'west voyageur had perished, one of MacKenzie's canoes going smash over the falls with a squaw, who swam ashore; then rampart shores came, broader and higher than the St. Lawrence or the Hudson, the boats skimming ahead with blankets hoisted for sails through foggy days and nights of driving rain.

Cramped and rain-soaked, bailing water from the canoes with huge sponges, the Indians began to whine that the way was "hard, white man, hard."

Then the river lost itself in a huge lagoon, Slave Lake, named after defeated Indians who had taken refuge here; and the question was, which way to go through the fog across the marshy lake!

Poking through rushes high as a man, MacKenzie found a current, and, hoisting a sail on his fishing pole, raced out to the river again on a hissing tide.

Here lived the Dog Rib Indians, and they frightened MacKenzie's men cold with grewsome tales of horrors ahead, of terrible waterfalls, of a land of famine and hostile tribes.

The effect was instant.

MacKenzie could not obtain a guide till "English Chief" hoisted a Slave Lake Indian into the canoe on a paddle handle.

Though MacKenzie himself nightly slept with the vermin-infested guide to prevent desertion, the fellow escaped one night during the confusion of a thunder-storm.

Again a chance hunter was forcibly put into the canoe as guide; and the explorer pushed on for another month.

North of Bear Lake, Indian warriors were seen flourishing weapons along shore, and MacKenzie's men began to remark that the land was barren of game.

If they became winter bound, they would perish.

MacKenzie promised his men if he did not find the sea within seven days, he would turn back.

Suddenly the men lost track of day, for they had come to the region of long light.

The river had widened to swamp lands.

Between the 13th and 14th of July the men asleep on the sand were awakened by a flood of water lapping in on their baggage.

What did it mean?

For a minute they did not realize.

Then they knew.

It was the tide.

They had found the sea.

Hilarious as boys, they jumped from bed to man their canoes and chase whales.

{327} September 12, all sails up before a driving wind, the canoes raced across Athabasca Lake to the fort landing, Roderick, his nephew, shouting a welcome.

MacKenzie had laid one of the two ghosts that haunted his peace.

Now he must lay the other.

Where did Peace River come from?

His achievement on MacKenzie River had been greeted by the other Nor'west partners with a snub.

Nevertheless MacKenzie asked for leave of absence that he might go to London and study the taking of astronomic observations in order to explore that other river flowing from the mountains; and in London, though poor and obscure, he heard all about Cook's voyages and Meare's brush with the Spaniards at Nootka, and plans for Captain Vancouver to make a final exploration of the Pacific Coast.

Hurrying back to the Nor'wester's fort on Peace River, he was beset by the blue devils of despondency.

What if Peace River did _not_ lead to the Pacific Ocean at all?

What if he were behind some other discoverer?

What if the venture proved a fool's trip leading to a blind nowhere?

He was only a junior partner and could ill afford either money or time for failure.