Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1812 to 1820, part 2

[Illustration: ALEXANDER MACKENZIE] Nevertheless, when the furs have been dispatched for Montreal, MacKenzie launches out on May 9 of 1793 with a thirty-foot birch canoe, six voyageurs, and Alexander Mackay as lieutenant, for the hinterland beyond the Rockies.

This time the going was _against_ stream,--hard paddling, but safer than with a {328} swift current in a river with dangerous rapids.

Ten days later the river has become a canyon of tumbling cascades, the mountains sheer wall on each side, with snowy peaks jagging up through the clouds.

To portage baggage up such cliffs was impossible.

Yet it was equally impossible to go on up the canyon, and MacKenzie's men became so terrified they refused to land.

Jumping to foothold on the wall, a towrope in one hand, an ax in the other, MacKenzie cut steps in the cliff, then signaled above the roar of the rapids for the men to follow.

They stripped themselves to swim if they missed footing, and obeyed, trembling in every limb.

The towrope was warped round trees and the loaded canoe tracked up the cascade.

At the end of that portage the men flatly refused to go on.

MacKenzie ignored the mutiny and ordered the best of provisions spread for a feast.

While the crew rested, he climbed the face of a rocky cliff to reconnoiter.

As far as eye could see were cataracts walled by mighty precipices.

The canoe could not be tracked up such waters.

Mackay, who had gone prospecting a portage, reported that it would be nine miles over the mountain.

MacKenzie did not tell his men what was ahead of them, but he led the way up the steep mountain, cutting trees to form an outer railing, and up this trail the canoe was hauled, towline round trees, the men swearing and sweating and blowing like whales.

Three miles was the record that day, the voyageurs throwing themselves down to sleep at five in the afternoon, wrapped in their blanket coats lying close to the glacier edges.

Three days it took to cross this mountain, and the end of the third day found them at the foot of another mountain.

Here the river forked.

MacKenzie followed the south branch, or what is now known as the Parsnip.

Often at night the men would be startled by rocketing echoes like musketry firing, and they would spring to their feet to keep guard with backs to trees till morning; but presently they learned the cause of the pistol-shot reports.

They were now on the Uplands among the eternal snows.

The sharp splittings, the far boomings, the dull breaking thuds were frost cornices of overhanging snow crashing down in avalanches that swept the mountain slopes clear of forests.

{329} [Illustration: CAUSE OF A PORTAGE] A short portage from the Parsnip over a low ridge to a lake, and the canoe is launched on a stream flowing on the far side of the Divide, Bad River, a branch of the Fraser, though MacKenzie mistakes it for an upper tributary of the great river discovered by Gray, the Columbia.

Then, before they realize it, comes the danger of going _with_ the current on a river with rapids.

The stream sweeps to a torrent, mad and unbridled.

The canoe is as a chip in a maelstrom, the precipices racing past in a blur, the Indians hanging frantically to the gunnels, bawling aloud in fear, the terrified voyageurs reaching, .

.

.

grasping, .

.

.

snatching at trees overhanging from the banks.

The next instant a rock has banged through bottom, tearing away the stern.

The canoe reels in a swirl.

Bang goes a rock through the bow.

The birch bark flattens like a shingle.

Another swirl, and, to the amazement of all, instead of the death that had seemed impending, smashed canoe, baggage, and voyageurs are dumped on the shallows of a sandy reach.

One can guess the gasp of relief that went up.

Nobody uttered a word for some {330} time.

One voyageur, who had grasped at a branch and been hoisted bodily from the canoe, now came limping to the disconsolate group, and had stumbled with lighted pipe in teeth across the powder that had been spread out to dry, when a terrific yell of warning brought him to his senses, and relieved the tension.

MacKenzie spread out a treat for the men and sent them to gather bark for a fresh canoe.

Other adventures on Bad River need not be given.

This one was typical.

The record was but two miles a day; and now there was no turning back.

The difficulties behind were as great as any that could be before.

June 15 Bad River led them westward into the Fraser, but somewhere in the canyon between modern Quesnel and Alexandria the way became impassable.

Besides, the river was leading too far south.

MacKenzie struck up Blackwater River to the west.

_Caching_ canoe and provisions on July 4, he marched overland.

The Pacific was reached on July 22, 1793, near Bella Coola.

By September, after perils too numerous to be told, MacKenzie was back at his fur post on Peace River.

As his discoveries on this trip blazed the way to new hunting ground for his company, they brought both honor and wealth to MacKenzie.

He was knighted by the English King for his explorations, and he retired to an estate in Scotland, where he died about 1820. Meanwhile, Napoleon has sold Louisiana to the United States.

The American explorers, Lewis and Clark, have crossed from the Missouri to the Columbia; and now John Jacob Astor, the great fur merchant of New York, in 1811 sends his fur traders overland to build a fort at the mouth of Columbia River.

The Northwest Company in frantic haste dispatches explorers to follow up MacKenzie's work and take possession of the Pacific fur trade before Astor's men can reach the field.

It becomes a race for the Pacific.

[Illustration: SIMON FRASER] Simon Fraser is sent in 1806 to build posts west of the Rockies in New Caledonia, and to follow that unknown river which MacKenzie mistook for the Columbia, on down to the sea.

Two years he passed building the posts, that exist to this {331} day as Fraser planned them: Fort MacLeod at the head of Parsnip River, on a little lake set like an emerald among the mountains; Fort St. James on Stuart Lake, a reach of sheeny green waters like the Trossachs, dotted with islands and ensconced in mountains; Fraser Fort on another lake southward; Fort St. George on the main Fraser River.

Then, in May of 1808, with four canoes Fraser descends the river named after him, accompanied by Stuart and Quesnel and nineteen voyageurs.

This was the river where the rapids had turned MacKenzie back, canyon after canyon tumultuous with the black whirlpools and roaring like a tempest.

Before essaying the worst runs of the cascades Fraser ordered a canoe lightened at the prow and manned by the five best voyageurs.

It shot down the current like a stone from a catapult.

"She flew from one danger to another," relates Fraser, who was watching the canoe from the bank, "till the current drove her on a rock.

The men disembarked, and we had to plunge our daggers into the bank to keep from sliding into the river as we went down to their aid, our lives hanging on a thread."

Like MacKenzie, Fraser was compelled to abandon canoes.

Each with a pack of eighty pounds, the voyageurs set out on foot down that steep gorge where the traveler to-day can see the trail along the side of the precipice like basket work between Lilloet and Thompson River.

In Fraser's day was no {332} trail, only here and there bridges of trembling twig ladders across chasms; and over these swinging footholds the marchers had to carry their packs, the river rolling below, deep and ominous and treacherous.

At Spuzzum the river turned from the south straight west.

Fraser knew it was not the Columbia.

His men named it after himself.

Forty days was Fraser going from St. George to tide water.

Early in August he was back at his fur posts of New Caledonia.

[Illustration: ASTORIA IN 1813] Yet another explorer did the Nor'westers send to take possession of the region beyond the mountains.

David Thompson had been surveying the bounds between the United States and what is now Manitoba, when he was ordered to explore the Rockies in the region of the modern Banff.

Up on Canoe River, Thompson and his men build canoes to descend the Columbia.

Following the Big Bend, they go down the rolling milky tide past Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes, a region of mountains sheer on each side as walls, with wisps of mist marking the cloud line.

Then a circular sweep westward through what is now Washington, pausing at Snake River to erect formal claim of possession for England, then a riffle on the current, a {333} smell of the sea, and at 1 P. M.

on July 15, 1811, Thompson glides within view of a little raw new fort, Astoria.

In the race to the Pacific the Americans have gained the ground at the mouth of the Columbia just two months before Thompson came.

In Astor's fort Thompson finds old friends of the Northwest Company hired over by Astor.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE WEST COAST, SHOWING THE OGDEN AND ROSS EXPLORATIONS]

After war has broken out in open flame it is easy to ascribe the cause to this, that, or the other act, which put the match to the combustibles; but the real reason usually lies far behind the one act of explosion, in an accumulation of ill feeling that provided the combustibles.

So it was in the fratricidal war of 1812 between Canada and the United States.

The war was criminal folly, as useless as it was unnecessary.

What caused it?

What accumulated the ill feeling lying ready like combustibles for the match?

Let us see.

The United Empire Loyalists have, by 1812, increased to some 100,000 of Canada's population, cherishing bitter memories of ruin and confiscation and persecution because Congress failed to carry out the pledge guaranteeing protection to the losing side in the Revolution.

Then, because Congress failed to carry out _her_ guarantee, England delayed turning over the western fur posts to the United States for almost ten years; and whether true or false, the suspicion became an open charge that the hostility of the Indians to American frontiersmen was fomented by the British fur trader.

Here, then, was cause for rankling anger on both sides, and the bitterness was unwittingly increased by England's policy.

It was hard for the mother country to realize that the raw new nation of the United States, child of her very flesh and blood, kindred in thought and speech, was a power to be reckoned with, on even ground, looking on the level, eye to eye; and not just a bumptious, underling nation, like a boy at the hobbledehoy age, to be hectored and chaffed and bullied and badgered and licked into shape, as a sort of protectorate appended to English interests.

I once asked an Englishman why the English press was so virulently hostile to one of the most brilliant of her rising men.

"Oh," he answered, "you must be English to understand that.

We never think it hurts a boy to be well ragged when he 's at school."

Something of that spirit was in England's attitude to the new nation of the United States.

England was hard pressed in life-and-death struggle with Napoleon.

To recruit both army and navy, conscription was rigidly and ruthlessly enforced.

Yet more!

England claimed the right to impress British-born subjects in foreign ports, to seize deserters in either foreign ports or on foreign ships, and, most obnoxious of all, to search neutral vessels on the ocean highway for deserters from the British flag.

It was an era of great brutality in military discipline.

Desertions were frequent.

Also thousands of immigrants were flocking to the new nation of the United States and taking out naturalization papers.

England ignored these naturalization papers when taken out by deserters.

Let us see how the thing worked out.

A passenger vessel is coming up New York harbor.

An English frigate with cannon pointed swings across the course, signals the American vessel on American waters to slow up, sends a young lieutenant with some marines across to the American vessel, searches her from stem to stern, or compels the American captain to read the roster of the crew, forcibly seizes half a dozen of the American crew as British deserters, and departs, leaving the Americans gasping with wonder whether they are a free nation or a tail to the kite of English designs.

It need not be explained that the offense was often aggravated by the swaggering insolence of the young officers.

They considered the fury of the unprepared American crew a prime joke.

In vain the government at Washington complained to the government at Westminster.

England pigeonholed the complaint and went serenely on her way, searching American vessels from Canada to Brazil.

Or an English vessel has come to Hampton Roads to wood and water.

An English officer thinks he recognizes among the {335} American crews men who have deserted from English vessels.

Three men defy arrest and show their naturalization papers.

High words follow, broken heads and broken canes, and the English crew are glad to escape the mob by rowing out to their own vessel.

Is it surprising that the ill feeling on both sides accumulated till there lacked only the match to cause an explosion?

The explosion came in 1807. H.

M. S.

_Leopard_, cruising off Norfolk in June, encounters the United States ship _Chesapeake_.

At 3 P. M.

the English ship edges down on the American, loaded to the water line with lumber, and signals a messenger will be sent across.

The young English lieutenant going aboard the _Chesapeake_ shows written orders from Admiral Berkeley of Halifax, commanding a search of the _Chesapeake_ for six deserters.

He is very courteous and pleasant about the disagreeable business: the orders are explicit; he must obey his admiral.

The American commander is equally courteous.

He regrets that he must refuse to obey an English admiral's orders, but his own government has given _most_ explicit orders that American vessels must _not_ be searched.

The young Englishman returns with serious face.

The ships were within pistol shot of each other, the men on the English decks all at their guns, the Americans off guard, lounging on the lumber piles.

Quick as flash a cannon shot rips across the _Chesapeake's_ bows, followed by a broadside, and another, and yet another, that riddle the American decks to kindling wood before the astonished officers can collect their senses.

Six seamen are dead and twenty-three wounded when the _Chesapeake_ strikes her colors to surrender; but the _Leopard_ does not want a captive.

She sends her lieutenant back, who musters the four hundred American seamen, picks out four men as British deserters, learns that another deserter has been killed and a sixth has jumped overboard rather than be retaken, takes his prisoners back to the _Leopard_, which proceeds to Halifax, where they are tried by court-martial and shot.

It isn't exactly surprising that the episode literally set the United States on fire with rage, and that the American President {336} at once ordered all American ports closed to British war vessels.

The quarrel dragged on between the two governments for five years.

England saw at once that she had gone too far and violated international law.

She repudiated Admiral Berkeley's order, offered to apologize and pension the heirs of the victims; but _as she would not repudiate either the right of impressment or the right of search_, the American government refused to receive the apology.