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THE ONLY SLUM IN CANADA—LITTLE CHAMPLAIN STREET, QUEBEC

“One of the quaintest customs that I found in the minute books,” writes Agnes C. Laut, the company’s painstaking historian, “was regarding the home-coming ships. The money that had accrued from sales during the ships’ absence was kept in an iron box in the warehouse on Fenchurch Street. It ranged in amount from £2,000 to £11,000. To this, only the governor and deputy-governor had the keys. Banking in the modern sense of the word was not begun till 1735. When the ships came in, the strong box was hauled forth and the crews paid. . . . An average of ten thousand beaver a year was brought home. Later, otter and mink and marten became valuable. These, the common furs, whalebone, ivory, elks’ hoofs and whale blubber made up the list of the winter sales. Before the days of newspapers, the lists were posted in the Royal Exchange, and sales held ‘by candle’ in lieu of the auctioneer’s hammer—a tiny candle being lighted, pins stuck in at intervals along the shaft, and bids shouted till the light burned out. One can guess with what critical caress the fur fanciers ran their hands over the soft nap of the silver fox, blowing open the fur to examine the depth and find whether the pelt had been damaged in the skinning. Half a dozen of these rare skins from the fur world meant more than a cargo of beaver. What was it, anyway—this creature; rare as twentieth-century radium, that was neither blue fox nor grey, neither cross nor black? . . . Was it senility or debility or a splendid freak in the animal world like a Newton or a Shakespeare in the human race? Of all the scientists from Royal Society and hall of learning, who came to gossip over the sales at the coffee houses, not one could explain the silver fox.”

The Adventurers’ right to the greater part of the present Dominion of Canada was disputed by the French. A nation went to war with a company. France dispatched fighting fleets. So did the Adventurers; for, what with the high price of silver fox and the low price of beads, the iron box at Fenchurch Street kept well filled. Hudson Bay was again and again the scene of horrible carnage; now one party having the best of it, now another. Anybody wishing to have his eyes opened to what happened between 1682 and 1713 should read “The Conquest of the Great North West,” by the authoress I have just quoted. Let us fix our gaze on one typical scene in the grim retrospect.

In 1697 five French men-of-war arrived in Hudson Straits under the command of the redoubtable Iberville. On his ship, the Pelican, forty men were down with scurvy. On another, the Wasp, a gun broke loose during a gale, crushing several of the crew. For eighteen days the little fleet was ice-jammed in an impenetrable fog. Later, the Pelican became separated from the rest of the fleet. Seeing three ships on the horizon, Iberville hastened towards the supposed friends. They proved to be English men-of-war, the Hampshire, the Dering, and the Hudson’s Bay. When the French commander made that discovery, it was too late to flee. “Quickly, ropes were stretched to give the mariners hand-hold over the frost-slippery deck. Stoppers were ripped from the fifty cannon, and the batterymen below, under La Salle and Grandville, had stripped naked in preparation for the hell of flame and heat that was to be their portion in the impending battle. Bienville, Iberville’s brother, swung the infantrymen in line above decks, swords and pistols prepared for the hand-to-hand grapple. De la Potherie got the Canadians to the forecastle, knives and war hatchets out, bodies stripped, all ready to board when the ships knocked keels. . . . The Hampshire let fly two roaring cannonades that ploughed up the decks of the Pelican and stripped the French bare of masts to the hull. At the same instant, Grimmington’s Dering and Smithsend’s Hudson’s Bay circled to the left of the French and poured a stream of musketry fire across the Pelican’s stern. At one full blast, forty French were mowed down; but the batterymen below never ceased their crash of bombs straight into the Hampshire’s hull.”

For four hours the battle raged. “The ships were so close, shout and counter-shout could be heard across decks. Faces were singed with the closeness of the musketry fire. Ninety French had been wounded. The Pelican’s decks swam in blood that froze to ice, slippery as glass, and trickled down the clinker boards in reddening splashes. Grape shot and grenade had set the fallen sails on fire. Sails and mast poles and splintered davits were a mass of roaring flame that would presently extend to the powder magazines and blow all to eternity. . . . Still the batterymen below poured their storm of fire and bomb into the English hull. The fighters were so close, one old record says, and the holes torn by the bombs so large in the hull of each ship, that the gunners on the Pelican were looking into the eyes of the smoke-grimed men below the decks of the Hampshire. For three hours the English had tacked to board the Pelican, and for three hours the mastless, splintered Pelican had fought like a demon to cripple her enemy’s approach. The blood-grimed, half-naked men had rushed en masse for the last leap, the hand-to-hand fight, when a frantic shout went up. . . . The batteries of the Hampshire had suddenly silenced. The great ship refused to answer to the wheel. That persistent, undeviating fire bursting from the sides of the Pelican had done its work. The Hampshire gave a quick, back lurch. Before the amazed Frenchmen could believe their senses, amid the roar of flame and crashing billows and hiss of fires extinguished in an angry sea, the Hampshire, all sails set, settled and sank like a stone amid the engulfing billows. Not a soul of her two hundred and fifty men—one hundred and ninety mariners and servants, with sixty soldiers—escaped.

“The screams of the struggling seamen had not died on the waves before Iberville had turned the batteries of his shattered ship full force on Smithsend’s Hudson’s Bay. Promptly the Hudson’s Bay struck colours, but while Iberville was engaged boarding his captive and taking over ninety prisoners, Grimmington on the Dering showed swift heel and gained refuge in Fort Nelson.”

Iberville had not noticed the gathering storm, which now broke upon him. “Mist and darkness and roaring sleet drowned the death cries of the wounded, washed and tossed and jammed against the railings by the pounding seas. The Pelican could only drive through the darkness before the storm flaw; ‘the dead,’ says an old record, ‘floating about on the decks among the living.’ The hawser that had towed the captive ship snapped like thread. Captor and captive in vain threw out anchors. The anchors raked bottom. Cables were cut, and the two ships drove along the sands. The deck of the Pelican was icy with blood. Every shock of smashing billows jumbled dead and dying en masse. The night grew black as pitch. The little railing that still clung to the shattered decks of the Pelican was now washed away, and the waves carried off dead and wounded. Tables were hurled from the cabin. The rudder was broken, and the water was already to the bridge of the foundering ship, when the hull began to split, and the Pelican buried her prow in the sands, six miles from the fort.”

The boats had been shot away. Men swam ashore with guns and powder-horns between their teeth. They also strove to tow rough rafts on which the wounded were placed. Eighteen lives were lost in the darkness. As for the survivors, “for twelve hours they had fought without pause for food, and now, shivering round fires kindled in the bush, the half-famished men devoured moss and seaweed raw. Two feet of snow lay on the ground, and when the men lighted fires and gathered round them, they became targets for sharpshooters from the fort, who aimed at the camp fires.

Then three of Iberville’s other ships arrived, one without her steering gear, another without her rudder. The Violent had foundered in a storm. A Frenchman went with flag of truce and bandaged eyes to demand surrender of the fort. Its English garrison sent him back with “No” for his answer. Under cover of fog, the French landed and erected their cannon in the very teeth of the fort. A mutual bombardment occupied two days. Then the French sent another emissary to explain that, if the fort did not surrender, no quarter would be given. “Quarter be cursed!” thundered Bailey, the English commander. Afterwards the palisades were hacked down; and when the inevitable capitulation took place, the garrison marched out with flags flying, to the defiant music of fife and drum.

Truly, the French and English of those days were game and tough, and not lacking in the more conspicuous qualities of the tiger and the bulldog. For all those ships and men to have been fighting over the beaver and the silver fox, and the filling of that iron box in Fenchurch Street, gives the modern mind a good deal to think about. As one reads the story of fierce international hatred, of incursions and pillage and crafty ambuscades, of frequent battles on land and water, Hudson Bay figures to the imagination as a frozen inferno of bloodshed, famine, disease and human anguish unspeakable. The rival traders and raiders timed their death-grips as far as possible to correspond with official periods of warfare between France and Great Britain; but European compacts did not always carry weight with the moving spirits of Hudson Bay. However, the Peace of Utrecht left the company at last in uncontested possession of that huge area, and brought to a close the Adventurers’ long maritime struggle. Their warlike operations, however, were not over, for presently the company became involved in sustained and sanguinary inland strife.

When the French King held sway in “New France,” certain of its citizens, acting under Royal licence, adventured into the forests to collect furs from the Indians. Strangely enough, the extinction of French authority in Eastern Canada gave a great impetus to that French industry. Licences being no longer needed, an augmented army of daring spirits went forth in canoes to voyage into the unknown territories, and barter beads and brandy for the red man’s furry booty. Merchants at Montreal fitted out the dashing voyageurs, and waxed opulent from the sale of skins. A fierce rivalry grew among the enterprising Frenchmen, who strove to out-vie one another in hospitality to the much-sought-after Indians. There were incidents like this:

A party of drunken Crees became so obstreperous in their demand for more rum that three traders, who had a little fort as shelter, sought to strengthen their position by adding laudanum to the liquor. One Indian drank too much and died, whereupon his enraged followers smashed the fort and slaughtered their three treacherous hosts, as well as seven other men who happened to be present. Nor did revenge stop there. Word was sent to other tribes that all white traders had better be massacred; and not far away, three companies of Frenchmen, sleeping within the inadequate protection of three wooden houses, were aroused one night by the dread war cry of the Assiniboines, and, for the most part, were promptly slain.

Meanwhile the English fur traders were traversing the rivers that flowed into Hudson Bay, and erecting their fortified posts away inland. Just how far “Rupert’s Land” extended in any given direction they were not in a position to say—they merely knew that, be it little or much, it all belonged to them; Charles II., having, indeed, given away most of the North American continent with true kingly generosity.

And thus it came about that the French fur traders, besides having to put up with a rivalry among themselves, and with spasmodic Indian savagery, found themselves confronted by English competitors, who looked upon them as trespassers and thieves. In the circumstances, the Montreal merchants (who, to add to the complication, were Scotsmen) judged it advisable to combine, so that the voyageurs from Eastern Canada should present a united front to their foes. Such was the origin, in 1783, of the North-West Company, destined to grow exceedingly rich and reckless and to maintain a long, fierce and bloody feud with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Let us glance at a few representative incidents recorded by Agnes Laut: “The North-West partner, Haldane, came to Bad Lake in 1806 with five voyageurs and knocked up quarters for themselves near the Hudson’s Bay cabins. By May, William Corrigal, the Hudson’s Bay man, had four hundred and eighty packs of furs. One night, when all the English were asleep, the Nor’-West bullies marched across, broke into the cabins, placed pistols at the heads of Corrigal and his men, and plundered the place of furs.” There was further trouble at the same place a little later. “An Indian had come to the post in September. Corrigal outfitted him with merchandise for the winter’s hunt, and three English servants accompanied the saulteur down to the shore. Out rushed the Nor’-Wester MacDonell flourishing his sword, accompanied by a bully, Adhemer, raging aloud that the Indian had owed furs to the Nor’-Westers and should not be allowed to hunt for the Hudson’s Bay. The two Corrigal brothers and one Tait ran from the post to the rescue. With one sweep of the sword, Eneas MacDonell cut Tait’s wrist off, and with another hack on the neck felled him to the ground. The French bully had aimed a loaded pistol at the Corrigals, daring them to take one step forward. John Corrigal dodged into the lake. MacDonell then rushed at the Englishmen like a madman, cutting off the arm of one, sending a hat flying from another whose head he missed, hacking the shoulder of a third. Unarmed, the Hudson’s Bay men fled for the fort gates. The Nor’-Westers pursued. Coming from the house door, John Mowat, a Hudson’s Bay man, drew his pistol and shot Eneas MacDonell dead. Couriers went flying to the North-West camp for reinforcements. Haldane and McLellan, two partners, came with a rowdy crew and threatened if Mowat were not surrendered they would have the Indians butcher every soul in the fort, if it cost a keg of rum for every scalp. Mowat promptly surrendered,” and, after being confined for a year at Fort William, was sentenced by Montreal judges to be imprisoned for six months and to be branded.

The business rivals overran the whole country right to the Pacific, and the names of rivers and passes in Western Canada bear witness to the enterprise and hardihood of those pioneer explorers. Indeed, the Hudson’s Bay men and the Nor’-Westers discovered between them the bulk of the Dominion. That is their title to the respect and gratitude of posterity. For the rest, what a tragic farce the whole business was! Here was a country so enormous that the fastest trains to-day occupy nearly a week in crossing it by a direct route from east to west; a country stretching so far northward that its present population of eight million merely suffices thinly to sprinkle a southern strip; a country with agricultural and mineral resources adequate for the support of over one hundred million people—and those two commercial corporations turned their opportunities to no better account than in murdering one another’s representatives over the miserable business of trading beads and brandy for the hides of small quadrupeds.

Please do not suppose that I write in any spirit of criticism and censure. The world evolves in its own strange way; and the human race is permanently incapacitated by altered circumstances from sitting in judgment on its ancestors. Still, the spectacle of those two companies feeling cramped by each other’s presence in a roomy place like Canada, and using pistols and daggers to lessen the pressure of commercial competition, is exceedingly droll, if grim.

The state of affairs to which I have referred continued until 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company absorbed its formidable opponent. That amalgamation was preceded by a very interesting and important event. Lord Selkirk, a wealthy viscount, and one of the noblest characters in Canadian history, established the first community of immigrant settlers in the North-West—a fact to which I shall recall the reader’s attention in my chapter about Winnipeg. The area conceded for settlement was known as the Red River district, and included much of the present Province of Manitoba and part of what is now the State of Minnesota. To secure the co-operation of the Hudson’s Bay Company in his philanthropic design, Lord Selkirk had taken the precaution first to buy up a controlling interest in that commercial concern. Warfare between Nor’-Westers and Hudson’s Bay men involved those early settlers in some bloody horrors. But in the present chapter we need only consider the affairs of the pioneer community in relation to the future opening up of the entire North-West to colonisation. And first I would mention a peaceful understanding at which the Selkirk settlers arrived with the Indians of the district. Land was surrendered in consideration of the annual payment to each tribe of “one hundred pounds of good merchantable tobacco”; that compact of 1817 being interesting as the forerunner of an important series of treaties with the red man.

United as one company, the fur traders flourished exceedingly, and came in time to exercise authority, not merely throughout the present Dominion, but over territory since absorbed into the American Republic, besides extending their sway to Alaska and across the ocean to the Sandwich Islands—a tolerably large area to be exploited in the interests of the iron box of Fenchurch Street. The coming of human settlers to disturb the furry quadrupeds was, of course, a calamity to be prevented, or at any rate delayed, by all the power and statecraft at the company’s command. But the tide of democracy could not for ever be resisted, and the pelt-collectors’ title to a huge empire melted before the hard facts of American, British and Russian occupation.

The company was not so foolish as to take up arms in defence of its flimsy rights. Its policy was to hinder human encroachment as long as possible, and then bow to the inevitable. By 1835 its spheres of influence had sadly dwindled, and its titles to territorial possession were becoming more and more shadowy. The governor and his committee perceived the necessity for doing something to arrest the decay of their power and prestige. So it was the strange fate of the Red River colony to be bought back by the Hudson’s Bay Company, for a sum of £84,000, from the heirs of Lord Selkirk. In that colony the fur traders now established an autocratic government that aimed primarily at the vigorous suppression of all private trade in pelts. It was not long before the settlers were gasping for freedom. Vainly they demanded the representative government that had been secured under the American flag by their comrades in Minnesota. At the opening of the second half of the nineteenth century, indeed, the fate of the Red River settlement—the pioneer colony of the West—hung in the balance. Would it, like Oregon, join the Union? In that critical situation, an independent element of unrest was provided by the growing discontent of the Half-Breeds. For long years past, the fur traders—and more particularly the French Nor’-Westers—had intermarried with the Indians, and brought into existence that numerous, pathetic people, who inherited the conflicting traditions of two races.

In view of growing unrest in the Red River settlement, the Home Government instituted a Parliamentary inquiry into the affairs of the Hudson’s Bay Company. That inquiry seemed to effect nothing. But, hey presto! a change came over the position immediately afterwards. In 1863 a syndicate of capitalists, known as the International Financial Association, bought up the Hudson’s Bay Company for £1,500,000, and turned over the concern to new shareholders in a new Hudson’s Bay Company on a footing of increased capital. The tension was relieved; for public interests were represented by a wisely-controlled force working in the background. With the confederation in 1867 of Canada East, Canada West, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the creation of the Dominion of Canada commenced. The newly established Federal Government promptly arrived at an understanding whereby the Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished any rights of territorial administration it may anywhere have possessed; and in 1870 the Red River colony became the Province of Manitoba and an invaluable part of the Dominion of Canada.

But before suffering the Company to pass out of this narrative, I must satisfy the reader’s curiosity concerning the terms it secured. It received a money payment of £300,000; it was granted one-twentieth of the arable land in the country over which, at the date of the arrangement, it held dominion; and its title to all land on which its forts stood was confirmed. Probably the shareholders have never regretted the bargain made on their behalf. “How valuable one-twentieth of the arable land was to prove,” says Agnes Laut, “the company itself did not realise till recent days, and what wealth it gained from the cession of land where its forts stood may be guessed from the fact that at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) this land comprises five hundred acres of what are now city lots at metropolitan values.” Moreover, I understand that the business of collecting furs is still a lucrative one; while visitors to Canada will not fail to notice, in all the great cities, the magnificent general stores of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

OLD FORT GARRY, WINNIPEG

NEW UNION STATION, WINNIPEG

One regrettable fact has to be noted in connection with the creation of the Province of Manitoba. The anxious and bewildered Half-Breeds, fearing their interests were in peril, rose in rebellion under Louis Riel, the trouble not being repressed until Colonel (afterwards Viscount) Wolseley crossed the continent with an armed force. The growth of Manitoba under representative government has been one of the most inspiring achievements of modern times; but the history of that province merges at this point into the history of Western Canada, to which it had become the open door.

Western Canada provided the Federal Government with several problems, of which the most pressing concerned the status of the roving bands of Indians. In the States, civilisation was driving back the natives with fire and sword. In Canada, recourse was had to milder and more effective methods. But in one respect the Yankees and the Canadians acted in concert. They joined in a war of extermination against the buffalo. Of the number of those animals roaming the prairie, it is difficult for anybody nowadays to form a conception. One traveller recorded that he rode for twenty-five miles through an unbroken herd, which he estimated to include one million animals. In the States, “Buffalo Bill” (Colonel Cody) took an active part in the work of extermination. He is credited with shooting forty-eight of the poor creatures in fifty minutes. In a period of some eighteen months—when he was under contract to supply all the meat needed by the huge army of men engaged in constructing the Kansas Pacific Railway—he accounted for 4,280 buffaloes. On both sides of the international boundary line, the country was swept clean of these fine beasts. I have seen places on the prairie white with an accumulation of their bones, whereof the weathered relics may still be found.

When the Indians saw what was being done, they were filled with apprehension. The buffalo was their means of subsistence. Its flesh supplied them with meat, both fresh and, when pounded down and mixed with fat, as pemmican; its skin provided them with clothing, tents, canoes, bridle and reins; its sinews made strings for their bows; and its horns served them as powder flasks. But the Federal Government had no intention of permitting the Indians to starve. Their helplessness without the buffalo was the means of bringing them, willy-nilly, within the pale of civilisation. I have mentioned the pioneer compact with the red man achieved by the Selkirk settlers. That had been followed by similar understandings in Eastern Canada. And now the Federal Government effected a series of treaties with the North-West Indians, who surrendered any general claim they may have had to the country at large, and accepted a specific title to ample lands, or reserves, set apart for their exclusive use. Moreover, the Government agreed to make them annual money payments, and to grant them free rations until such time as they should be self-supporting—an end Canada is striving (and not without a very encouraging measure of success) to further by providing the tribes with schools, both general and agricultural, and with cattle, seed, and farming implements.

The interests of the natives were served in another way. American traders, in defiance of the law, were supplying them with intoxicants; and the fascinating, maddening “fire water” was a temptation wellnigh irresistible to the red man. To sweep that traffic from the prairie, the Government enrolled the North-West Mounted Police—a force that has won for itself a splendid reputation for tact, pluck and all-round efficiency. The suppression of the illicit liquor trade was one of the earliest and best of its achievements. The Riders of the Plains won the respect and confidence of the Indians, and carried through a treaty with the warlike Blackfeet—the last tribes to be won from a footing of irresponsible independence. When the Half-Breeds, again under Louis Riel, once more raised the flag of revolt, the mounted police rendered effective assistance in repressing the trouble; and this time it was repressed permanently.

The year of that rebellion witnessed the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the creation of modern Western Canada.