Agnes C. Laut

“ MacKenzie wrote letters, enclosed them in empty kegs, threw the kegs into the raging torrent and so sent back word of his progress to the fort. Constantly, on the Uplands, the men were startled by rocketing echoes like the discharge of a gun, when they would pass the night in alarm, each man sitting with his back to a tree and musket across his knees, but the rocketing echoes—so weird and soul-stirring in the loneliness of a silence that is audible—were from huge rocks splitting off some precipice. Sometimes a boom of thunder would set the mountains rolling. ”

“ Whether they waited here with an Indian camp until the ice would bear them, or followed the north shore of the lake on foot, cannot be told from Frobisher’s disjointed journal. Their moccasins were worn to shreds, their feet bleeding, their only food the bit of deerskin and tatters of buffalo hide stuck up on the bushes as trail marks by the Indians. Staggering through snow and water to their waists, tripped and tangled by windfall, losing themselves in the autumn storms, the three men were now barely conscious. ”

“ In a twinkling, Selkirk’s men have captured every cannon in Fort William and are knocking at the doors of the central building. Not a gun has been fired; not a blow struck; not a drop of blood shed; but the trampling feet terrify the women in the attic. They crowd above the trapdoor to hold it down, when, presto! the only tragedy of the semi-farce takes place! The crowding is too much for the trapdoor. ”

“ There are the quarrelers, who are forever shouldering their nearest neighbor off the trail, and the mischief makers, who try to rub packs off against every passing tree, and the clumsy footers, who lose a leg and go down head over heels where the sand slithers or the trail narrows, and the good old steady goers who could find their way unled from Okanogan, eight hundred miles north, to New Caledonia—sleek, well-fed, fat fellows all of them, when they leave Okanogan, however tagged and lamed they may be when they wind up Fraser River. ”

“ The regions traversed were wilder, the Indians more hostile, the scenery more varied. The Caledonia [306] brigade set out from Fort Vancouver by boat. Sixty or seventy voyageurs manned the large canoes that stemmed the floodtide of the Columbia, the pilot’s canoe flying an H. B. C. flag from its prow, the steersman of each boat striking up the tune of a voyageurs’ song, the crew joining in full-throated chorus, keeping time with the rap of their paddles, and perhaps some Highlander droning his bagpipes as the canoes wound up the rocky cañons of the great river. ”

“ By the new route of Kaministiquia, it is only a day’s paddling beyond the first long portage to the height of land. Beyond this, the canoes launch down stream, gliding with the current and “somerseting” or shooting the smaller rapids, portaging when the fall of water is too turbulent. Wherever there is a long portage there stands a half-way house—wayside inn of logs and thatch roof where some stray Frenchman sells fresh food to the voyageurs—a great nuisance to the impatient partners, for the men pause to parley. ”

“ They proceed leisurely, hunting along shore, blazing a trail through the forests as the canoes advance, encountering two grizzly bears that pursue the Indian hunter so furiously they flounder over the hunter’s wife, who has fallen to the ground flat on her face with fright, tear the man badly and are only driven off by dogs. It is the end of July before the canoes emerge from the second branch on a windy lake, surrounded by mountains with forests to the water’s edge—the lake McDougall had found the preceding autumn. ”

“ Here, then, were three parties all at daggers drawn—the Hudson’s Bay Company standing stiffly for the old order of things and marking time till the negotiations in England gave some cue for a new policy; the colonists asking for a representative government, which meant union with Canada, waiting till negotiations for Confederation gave them some cue; the independents, furtive, almost nameless, working in the dark, hand in hand with that million dollar fund, watching for their opportunity. ”

“ Once across the divide, the men passed from the bare snow uplands to the cloud line, where seas of tossing mist blotted out earth, and from cloud line to the Alpine valleys with larch-grown meadows and painters’ flowers knee deep, all the colors of the rainbow. Beside a rill trickling from the ice fields pause would be made for a meal. Then came tree line, the spruce and hemlock forests—gigantic trees, branches interlaced, [64] festooned by a mist-like moss that hung from tree to tree in loops, with the windfall of untold centuries piled criss-cross below higher than a house. The men grumbled. ”

“ Where French River comes out of Nipissing Lake, ten crosses mark where voyageurs have found a watery grave, and sometimes on the lake the heavily laden canoes are working straight against a head wind that sends choppy waves ice-cold slapping into their laps till oilcloth must be bound round the prow to keep from shipping water where a wave-crest dips over and the canoe has failed to climb. Even mounting the waves and keeping the gun’els clear of the wash, at every paddle dip the spray splashes the voyageur to his waist. The “old wolves” smoke and say nothing. ”

“ The coast Indians were always notoriously hostile. The mountain tribes warned Fraser not to go on. Mount Baker loomed south an opal fire, and on the river near what is now New Westminster Fraser saw the ripple of the tide. Where the river divided into two channels, armed Indians pursued in their canoes “singing war songs, beating time with paddles, howling like so many wolves,” flourishing spears. A few hours would have carried Fraser to the sea; but these warriors barred the way. ”

“ In the eighteen-hundreds, it was on the plains and in the mountains and in Oregon. Always, the forward step of white man, the backward step of red man—had meant a battle, bloodshed; now the colonists wiped out by the Sioux in Minnesota; or the missionaries massacred by the Cayuse in Oregon; or the Indians shot down and fleeing to the caves of the mountains like hunted animals.
How many massacres marked the forward march of the Hudson’s Bay Company from Atlantic to Pacific? Not one. The only massacre, that of Seven Oaks, was a fight of fur trader against fur trader. ”

“ At Okanogan, canoes are exchanged for horses—two or three hundred in the pack train led by the wise old bell-mares, whose tinkling in the peopleless [307] wilderness echoes through the forests like the silver notes of a flute. Pack horses are like pack people—with characters of as many colors as Joseph’s coat. There are the rascals, who bolt at every fording place, only to be rounded back with a shoulder nip by the old bell-mares. There are the lazy fellows, who go to sleep in midstream till the splashing waves have soaked every article in the pack. ”

“ To talk cupidity is nonsense. Cupidity, according to the legal rules of the game, is the business of a money-getting organization. Not the cupidity of the Hudson’s Bay Company was to blame for the extraordinary episodes in its history. Place the blame where it belongs—at the door of an ignorance as profound as it was indifferent on the part of the British statesmen who dealt with colonial affairs. ”

“ Sixty-one days it took for these Pilgrims of the Plains to cross the ocean. Storm succeeded storm. The old fur freighters wallowed in the waves like water-logged tubs, straining to the pounding seas as if the timbers would part, sails flapping to the wind tattered and rotten as the ensigns of pirates. MacDonell was furious that the colonists should have been risked on such old hulks, and recommended the dismissal of all three captains—Hanwell, Ramsey and Turner; but these mariners of the North probably knew their business when they lowered sails and lay rolling to the sea. ”

“ The forests that used to surround Churchill have been burnt back for twenty miles, and when the fever patients recover, they retreat to the woods for the winter; all but the old couple who winter in the stone fort whose ruins are typical of their own lives. Fine weather favors the settlers’ journey south, though this wilderness travel with ridge stones that cut their feet and swamps to mid-waist, gives them a foretaste of the trail leading to their Promised Land. Fifty miles distant from York, they run short of food and must boil nettle leaves; but hunger spurs speed. ”

“ And how are settlers to be sent so far inland? And to whom will they sell their produce two thousand miles from port or town? But where would humanity be if imagination sat down with folded hands before the first blank wall? Selkirk takes no heed of impossibles. He invites Colin Robertson to come back with him to meet the Hudson’s Bay Company directors, and he listens to Sir Alexander MacKenzie’s big scheme to monopolize all the fur trade by buying up Hudson’s Bay stock, and he makes mental note of the fact that if stock can be bought up for a monopoly, it can also be bought up for a colony. ”

“ Work proceeds all summer. Finlayson goes back to the Columbia, Manson taking charge. In spite of every caution against the treachery of the notorious Bella Coola Indians, who long ago proved so hostile to Sir Alexander MacKenzie, a trader by name of Richards disappears—whether a deserter or captive, Manson cannot tell. A chief is seized as hostage till the white man is returned. Sunday, the flag signals no trade. Not a breath of wind stirs the water. Not a canoe is visible, not an Indian to be seen. A drowsy sense of security comes over the fort sweltering in the summer heat. ”

“ The curé might [5] preach himself black in the face proving that a camp on the sand and a bed à la belle étoile, under the stars, are much more poetic in the telling than in life; that voyageurs don’t pass all their lives clothed in picturesque costumes chanting ditties to the rhythmic dip of paddle blades; that, in fact, when your voyageur sets out in spring he passes half his time in ice water to mid-waist tracking canoes up rapids, and that where the portage is rocky glassed with ice, you can follow the sorry fellow’s path by blood from the cuts in his feet. ”

“ Selkirk writes fully to the new governor of Canada—Sir John Sherbrooke—that having failed to obtain protection from the Canadian courts he has determined to go on, strong in his own right—as conferred by the charter and as a justice of the peace—to arrest the Northwest partners at Fort William. “I am reduced to the alternative of acting alone, or of allowing an audacious crime to pass unpunished. I cannot doubt it is my duty to act, though the law may be openly resisted by a set of men accustomed to consider force the only criterion of right.” ”

“ A chance rabbit, a prairie chicken, moss boiled in water—kept them from starvation, but finally two could journey no farther and lay down on the wind-swept ice to die. The third hurried desperately forward, hoping against hope, doggedly resolved if he must [139] perish to die hard. Suddenly, a tinkling of dog bells broke the winter stillness and the pack trains of Northwest hunters came galloping over the ice. In a twinkling, the overjoyed colonist had signaled them and told his story, and in less time than it takes to relate, the Nor’Westers were off to the rescue. ”

“ Companies don’t pay £8 bounty for nothing. Not agents were sent to the parishes, but “sly old wolves of the North”—as one parish priest calls these demoralizers of his flock—went from village to village, gay, reckless, dare-devil veterans, old in service, young in years, clothed in all the picturesque glory of beaded buckskin, plumed hats, silk sashes, to tickle the vanity of the poor country bucks, who had never been beyond their own hamlet. ”

“ In vain, Ross called a council, and went from lodge to lodge, and urged, and ordered, and pleaded, and bribed. Not a man but Old Pierre, the Iroquois, would go to work to clear the road.
The nights were spent in gambling, the days in grumbling; and old Cadiac, a Half-breed, had made himself an Indian drum or tom-tom of buffalo skin stretched on bare hoops. John Grey, the rebel, had uncased his fiddle and was filing away all night to the Red River jig and native dances of Indian pow-wow. Ross proposed the camp should give a concert. A concert meant that a dram of liquor would go the rounds. ”

“ Its canoe brigades still bring in the furs to the far fur posts. Its mid-winter dog trains still set the bells tinkling over the lonely wastes of Northern snows and it still sells as much fur at its great annual sales as in its palmiest days. But the Hudson’s Bay Company is no longer a gay Adventurer setting sail over the seas of the Unknown. It is no longer a Soldier of Fortune, with laugh for life or death carving a path through the wilderness. It is now but a commercial organization with methods similar to other money-getting companies. Free traders over-run [413] its hunting grounds. ”

“ Scripture gives us a right to retaliate for murder. If we have means to prevent murder, why not use them? Why allow ourselves to be butchered and our property stolen by such vile wretches not fit to be numbered among the living and the sooner dead, the better?... It is incredible the number of Snake Indians here. We cannot go ten yards without finding their huts of grass. No Indian nation in all North America is so numerous as the Upper and Lower Snakes, the latter as wild as deer. They lead a most wretched life. ”

“ Voyageurs and hunters are dressed in buckskin with gayest of silk bands round hair and neck. Partners are pompous in ruffles and lace and gold braid, with brass-handled pistols and daggers in belt. In each canoe go the cargoes—two-thirds merchandise, one-third provisions—oilcloth to cover it, tarpaulin for a tent, tow lines, bark and gum for repairs, kettles, dippers and big sponges to bail out water. As the canoes are loaded, they are launched and circle about on the river waiting for the signal of the head steersman. ”