Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1812 to 1846, part 3

From accounts held by the Hudson's Bay Company's Montreal lawyers it is seen that Clarke's expedition cost the Company 20,000 pounds.

{400} Before the massacre of Seven Oaks Colin Robertson had gone down to Hudson Bay in high dudgeon with Semple, intending to take ship for England; but that fall the ice drive prevented one ship from leaving the bay, and Robertson was stranded at Moose Factory for the winter, whither coureurs brought him word of the Seven Oaks tragedy and Selkirk's victory at Fort William.

Taking an Indian for guide, Robertson set out on snowshoes for Montreal, following the old Ottawa trail traversed by Radisson and Iberville long ago.

Montreal he found in a state of turmoil almost verging on riot over the imprisonment of the Northwest partners, whom Selkirk had sent east.

Nightly the goals [Transcriber's note: gaols?

] were illuminated as for festivals.

Nightly sound of wandering musicians came from the cell windows, where loyal friends were serenading the imprisoned partners.

They were released, of course, and acquitted from the charge of responsibility for the massacre of Seven Oaks.

Presently Robertson finds himself behind the bars for his part in destroying Fort Gibraltar and arresting Duncan Cameron.

He too is acquitted, and he tells us frankly that a private arrangement had been made beforehand with the presiding judge.

Probably if the Nor'westers had been as frank, the same influence would explain their acquittal.

Robertson found himself free just about the time Lord Selkirk came back from Red River by way of the Mississippi in order to avoid those careful plans for his welfare on the part of the Nor'westers at "the quiet places along Winnipeg River."

The Governor of Canada had notified members of both companies unofficially that the English government advised the rivals to find some basis of union, which practically meant that if the investigations under way were pushed to extremes, both sides might find themselves in awkward plight; but the fight had gone beyond the period of pure commercialism.

It was now a matter of deadly personal hate between man and man, which, I am sorry to say, has been carried down by the descendants of the old fighters almost to the present day.

Each side hoped to drive the other to bankruptcy; and the last throes of the {401} deadly struggle were to be in Athabasca, the richest fur field.

While Selkirk is fighting his cause in the courts, he gives Robertson carte blanche to gather two hundred more French voyageurs and proceed to the Athabasca.

[Illustration: TRACKING ON ATHABASCA RIVER] Midsummer of 1819 finds the stalwart Robertson crossing Lake Winnipeg to ascend the Saskatchewan.

At the mouth of the Saskatchewan a miserable remnant of terrified men from the last Athabasca expedition is added to Robertson's party; and John Clarke, breathing death and destruction against the Nor'westers, goes along as lieutenant to Robertson.

Everywhere are signs of the lawless conditions of the fur trade.

Not an Indian dare speak to a Hudson's Bay man on pain of horsewhipping.

Instead of canoes gliding up and down the Saskatchewan like birds of passage, reign a silence and solitude as of the dead.

Though Robertson bids his voyageurs sing and fire off muskets as signals for trade, not a soul comes down to the river banks till the fleet of advancing traders is well away from the Saskatchewan and halfway across the height of land towards the Athabasca.

{402} The amazement of the Nor'westers at Fort Chippewyan in Athabasca when Robertson pulled ashore at the conglomeration of huts known as Fort Wedderburn, may be guessed.

Two or three of the partners ran down to the shore and called out that they would like to parley; but John Clarke, filled with memory of former outrages and rocking the canoe in his fury so that it almost upset, met the overtures with a volley of stentorian abuse that sent the Nor'westers scampering and set Robertson laughing till the tears ran down his cheeks.

The change of spirit on the part of the Nor'westers was easily explained.

The most of their men were absent on the hunting field.

In a few weeks Robertson had his huts in order and had dispatched his trappers down to Slave Lake and westward up Peace River.

Then, in October, came more Nor'west partners from Montreal.

The Nor'westers were stronger now and not so peacefully inclined.

Nightly the French bullies, well plied with whisky, would come across to the Hudson's Bay fort, bawling out challenge to fight; but Robertson held his men in hand and kept his powder dry.

Early on the morning of October the 11th, Robertson's valet roused him from bed with word that a man had been accidentally shot.

Slipping a pistol in his pocket and all unsuspicious of trickery, Robertson dashed out.

It happened that the most of his men were at a slight distance from his fort.

Before they could rally to his rescue he was knocked down, disarmed, surrounded by the Nor'westers, thrown into a boat, and carried back to their fort a captive.

In vain he stormed almost apoplectic with rage, and tried to send back Indian messengers to his men.

The Nor'westers laughed at him good-naturedly and relegated him to quarters in one room of a log hut, where sole furnishings were a berth bed and a fireplace without a floor.

Robertson's only possessions in captivity were the clothes on his back, a jackknife, a small pencil, and a notebook; but he probably consoled himself that his men were now on guard, and, outnumbering the Nor'westers two to one, could hold the ground for the Hudson's Bay that winter.

As {403} time passed the captive Robertson began to wrack his brains how to communicate with his men.

It was a drinking age; and the fur traders had the reputation of capacity to drink any other class of men off their legs.

Robertson feigned an unholy thirst.

Rapping for his guard, he requested that messengers might be sent across to the Hudson's Bay fort for a keg of liquor.

It can be guessed how readily the Nor'westers complied; but Robertson took good care, when the guard was absent and the door locked, to pour out most of the whisky on the earth floor.

Then taking slips of paper from his notebook, he cut them in strips the width of a spool.

On these he wrote cipher and mysterious instructions, which only his men could understand, giving full information of the Nor'westers' movements, bidding his people hold their own, and ordering them to send messages down to the new Hudson's Bay governor at Red River,--William Williams,--to place his De Meuron soldiers in ambush along the Grand Rapids of the Saskatchewan to catch the Northwest partners on their way to Montreal the next spring.

These slips of paper he rolled up tight as a spool and hammered into the bunghole of the barrel.

Then he plastered clay over all to hide the paper, and bade the guard carry this keg of whisky back to the H. B.

C.

fort; it was musty, Robertson complained; let the men rinse out the keg and put in a fresh supply!

All that winter Robertson, the Hudson's Bay man, captive in the Nor'westers' fort, sent weekly commands to his men by means of the whisky kegs; but in the spring his trick was discovered, and the angry Nor'westers decided he was too clever a man to be kept on the field.

They would ship him out of the country when their furs were sent east.

On the way east he succeeded in escaping at Cumberland House.

Waiting only a few hours, he launched out in his canoe and followed on the trail of the Northwest partners, on down to see what would happen at Grand Rapids, where the Saskatchewan flows into Lake Winnipeg.

A jubilant shout from a canoe turning a bend in the river presently announced the news: "All the Northwest partners captured!"

When Robertson {404} came to Grand Rapids he found Governor Williams and the De Meurons in possession.

Cannon pointed across the river below the rapids.

The Northwest partners were prisoners in a hut.

The voyageurs were allowed to go on down to Montreal with the furs.

This last act in the great struggle ended tragically enough.

What was to be done with the captured partners?

They could not be sent to Eastern Canada.

Pending investigations for the union of the companies, Governor Williams sent them to York Factory, Hudson Bay, whence some took ship to England, others set out overland on snowshoes for Canada; but in the scuffle at Grand Rapids, Frobisher, one of the oldest partners, with a reputation of great cruelty in his treatment of Hudson's Bay men, had been violently clubbed on the head with a gun.

From that moment he became a raving maniac, and the Hudson's Bay people did not know what to do with such a captive.

He must not be permitted to go home to England.

His condition was too terrible evidence against them; so they kept him prisoner in the outhouses of York Factory, with two faithful Nor'wester half-breeds as personal attendants.

One dark cold night towards the first of October Frobisher succeeded in escaping through the broken bars of his cell window.

A leap took him over the pickets.

By chance an old canoe lay on Hayes River.

With this he began to ascend stream for the interior, paddling wildly, laughing wildly, raving and singing.

The two half-breeds knew that a voyage to the interior at this season without snowshoes, food, or heavy clothing, meant certain death; but they followed their master faithfully as black slaves.

Wherever night found them they turned the canoe upside down and slept under it.

Fish lines supplied food, and the deserted hut of some hunter occasionally gave them shelter for the night.

Winter set in early.

The ice edging of the river cut the birch canoe.

Abandoning it, they went forward on foot.

From York Fort, Hudson Bay, the nearest Northwest post was seven hundred miles.

By the end of October they had not gone half the distance.

Then came one of those changes so frequent in northern climes,--a sunburst of warm {405} weather following the first early winter, turning all the frozen fields to swimming marshes, and the travelers had no canoe.

By this time Frobisher was too weak to walk.

As his body failed his mind rallied, and he begged the two half-breeds to go on without him, as delay meant the death of all three; but the faithful fellows carried him by turns on their backs.

They themselves were now so emaciated they were making but a few miles a day.

Their moccasins had been worn to tatters, and all three looked more like skeletons than living men.

Then, the third week of November, Frobisher could go no farther, and the servants' strength failed.

Building a fire in a sheltered place for their master, the two faithful fellows left Frobisher somewhere west of Lake Winnipeg.

Two days later they crept into a Northwest post too weak to speak, and handed the Northwesters a note scrawled by Frobisher, asking them to send a rescue party.

Frobisher was found lying across the ashes of the fire.

Life was extinct.

[Illustration: PLANS OF YORK AND PRINCE OF WALES FORTS] In 1820 the union of the companies put an end to the ruinous and criminal struggle.

George Simpson, afterwards knighted, {406} who has been sent to look over matters in Athabasca, is appointed governor, and Nicholas Garry, one of the London directors, comes out to appoint the officers of the united companies to their new districts.

The scene is one for artist brush,--the last meeting of the partners at Fort William, Hudson's Bay men and Nor'westers, such deadly enemies they would not speak, sitting in the great dining hall, glowering at each other across tables: George Simpson at one end of the tables, pompously dressed in ruffles and satin coat and silk breeches, vainly endeavoring to keep up suave conversation;

Nicholas Garry at the other end of the table, also very pompous and smooth, but with a look on his face as if he were sitting above a powder mine, the Highland pipers dressed in tartans, standing at each end of the hall, filling the room with the drone and the skurl of the bagpipes.

[Illustration: SIR GEORGE SIMPSON, GOVERNOR OF HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, 1820] By the union of the companies both sides avoided proving their rights in the law courts.

Most important of all, the Hudson's Bay Company escaped proving its charter valid; for the charter applied only to Hudson Bay and adjacent lands "not occupied by other Christian powers"; but on the union taking place, the British government granted to the new Hudson's Bay Company license of exclusive monopoly to _all_ the Indian territory, meaning (1) Hudson Bay Country, (2) the interior, (3) New Caledonia as well as Oregon.

In fact, the union left the fur traders ten times more strongly intrenched than before.

{407} By the new arrangement Dr. John McLoughlin was appointed chief factor of the western territories known as Oregon and New Caledonia.

When the War of 1812 closed, treaty provided that Oregon should be open to the joint occupancy of English and American traders till the matter of the western boundary could be finally settled.

Oregon roughly included all territory between the Columbia and the Spanish fort at San Francisco, namely, Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, parts of Montana and Wyoming.

It was cheaper to send provisions round by sea to the fur posts of New Caledonia, in modern British Columbia, than across the continent by way of the Saskatchewan; so McLoughlin's district also included all the territory far as the Russian possessions in Alaska.

This part of the Hudson's Bay Company's history belongs to the United States rather than Canada, but it is interesting to remember that just as the French fur traders explored the Mississippi far south as the Gulf of Mexico, so English fur traders first explored the western states far south as New Spain.

This western field was perhaps the most picturesque of all the Hudson's Bay Company's possessions.

Fort Vancouver, ninety miles inland from the sea on the Columbia, was the capital of this transmontane kingdom, and yearly till 1846 the fur brigades set out from Fort Vancouver two or three hundred strong by pack horse and canoe.

Well-known officers became regular leaders of the different brigades.

There was Ross, who led the Rocky Mountain Brigade inland across the Divide to the buffalo ranges of Montana.

There was Ogden, son of the Chief Justice in Montreal, who led the Southern Brigade up Snake River to Salt Lake and the Nevada desert and Humboldt River and Mt. Shasta, all of which regions except Salt Lake he was first to discover.

There was Tom McKay, son of the McKay who had crossed to the Pacific with MacKenzie, who, dressed as a Spanish cavalier, led the pack-horse brigades down the coast past the Rogue River Indians and the Klamath Lakes to San Francisco, where Dr. Glen Rae had opened a fort for the Hudson's Bay Company.

{408} Then there was the New Caledonia Brigade, two hundred strong, which set out from Fort Vancouver up the Columbia in canoes to the scream of the bagpipes through the rocky canyons of the river.

Close to the boundary, shift was made from canoe to pack horse, and, leaving the Columbia, the brigade struck up the Okanogan Valley to Kamloops, bound for the bridle trail up Fraser River.

This brigade, in later days, was under Douglas, who became the knighted governor of British Columbia.

Tricked out in gay ribbons, the long file of pack ponies, two hundred with riders, two hundred more with packs, moved slowly along the forest trail with a drone as of bees humming in midsummer.

So well did ponies know the way that riders often fell asleep, to be suddenly jarred awake by the horses jamming against a tree, or running under a low branch to brush riders off, or hurdle-jumping over windfall.

Each of these brigades has its own story, and each story would fill a book.

For instance, Glen Rae at San Francisco has a difficult mission.

The company has a plan to take over the debts of Mexico to British capitalists and exchange them for California.

Glen Rae is sent to watch matters, but he commits the blunder of furnishing arms to the losing side of a revolution.

The debt for the arms remains unpaid.

Glen Rae suicides, and the company withdraws from California.

[Illustration: JOHN MCLOUGHLIN] {409} Presently come American settlers and missionaries over the mountains.

The American government delays settling that treaty of joint occupancy, for the more American settlers that come, the stronger will be the American claim to the territory.

McLoughlin helps the settlers who would have starved without his aid, and McLoughlin receives such sharp censure from his company for this that he resigns.

When the American settlers set up a provisional government, the foolish cry is raised, "54, 40 or fight," which means the Americans claim all the way up to Alaska, and for this there is no warrant either through their own occupation or discovery.

The boundary is compromised by the Treaty of Oregon in 1846 at the 49th parallel.

When settlers come, fur-bearing animals leave.

Long ago the Hudson's Bay Company had foreseen the end and moved the capital of its Pacific Empire up to Victoria.

A string of fur posts extends up Fraser River to New Caledonia.

{410} CHAPTER XVI FROM 1820 TO 1867

How the Family Compact worked--The old order changeth--"Loyalty cry"--Gourley driven mad--Richmond's tragic death--Patriots of the plow--Defeat of patriots--Duncombe's escape--Execution of patriots--Bloodshed in Quebec--Chenier's tragic death--Durham gives Canada a Magna Charta--Confederation--What of the future