CHAPTER IV

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.

_The Voyageurs’ Way_ _to the West_

_Beaver at Work_

_Left to Right: Beaver Hat, 1820_ _Clerical Beaver, 18th Century_ _Paris Beau, 1815_

_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.

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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.

_In a Swift Current_

_On the Winter Highway_

_Lord Selkirk,_ _Father of Western Settlement_

_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.

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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.

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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.

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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.