Читать книгу Canadians at Table - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 10

A Chain of Men Stretched Across the Continent

25 being Christmas, wee made merry remembering our Friends in England having for Liquor Brandy and strong beer and for Food plenty of Partridges and Venson besides what ye shipps provisions afforded.

THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION OF A CHRISTMAS DINNER in Canada was fortunately recorded by a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader, Thomas Gorst, in his journal in 1670. The guests seated at the table in the newly constructed Charles Fort (later called Rupert’s House and still later Fort Rupert) included Hudson’s Bay Company governor Charles Bayley, Médard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers, his brother-in-law, Pierre-Ésprit Radisson, and Captain Zachariah Gillam. The ships Wivenhoe and Prince Rupert were anchored nearby in James Bay.

The two Frenchmen, Radisson and Groseilliers, had a great deal to celebrate that day. They had both come to New France as young men and had worked and travelled in the St. Lawrence region and beyond as explorers, coureurs de bois, and fur traders among the Huron, Cree, and Sioux nations. They realized the untold wealth in furs to be found in the forests surrounding the “Bay of the North” (Hudson Bay) and lobbied both in the New World and in the Old World for permission to trade in the region. Finally, a few months before, on May 2, 1670, King Charles II of England had granted his cousin, Prince Rupert, a royal charter that gave trading rights to the area known as Rupert’s Land to the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” No one at that time knew the size of the land mass involved (it was actually 40 percent of present-day Canada, plus some territory that is now part of the United States of America), but the coveted “trading rights” were for furs, particularly beaver pelts.

At that time the demand for prime beaver pelts was at its height, with ready markets in Britain and the rest of Europe. The nobility was demanding fine furs for robes, jackets, capes, and muffs, and gentlemen who could afford a fine felt hat insisted that it be made of the soft downy undercoat of the beaver. As European beavers had been trapped out, it was imperative that a fresh source be found.

The fur merchants in Europe had learned from explorers such as Jacques Cartier that when he sailed into the Baie des Chaleurs in 1534 he was met by members of the Mi’kmaq nation waving furs on sticks to let him know they wanted to trade. In addition, the fishermen harvesting the Grand Banks confirmed that when they went ashore to dry their catch the First Nations continued to barter fine pelts with them. When the fishermen returned home, they often made more money from the pelts than from the fish. The pelts from Canadian beaver were particularly desirable because:

To be of good quality, thick and heavy, the beaver-pelt must come from an animal taken during the winter, and taken in as hard a climate as possible. Then the skin carries two kinds of fur; close to the skin is a thick mass of beaver-wool, down or duvet as the French called it; on top is a glossy fur of long guard hairs. It was the beaver wool above all which the felters wanted but it was difficult to get the beaver-wool out from a prime winter’s skin without also tearing out the guard hairs and thereby completely destroying the skin. English and French felters liked to get their beaver-wool from skins from which the guard hairs had already been removed and this made them dependent on coat beaver. These were skins which the Indians had worn for a season and in the process lost their guard hairs and become thoroughly greasy. The custom of wearing beaver, an art of doing so in such a way as to impart a maximum of grease, was particular to the northern Indians of Canada.[1]

This fascination with beaver pelts, to the exclusion of the rest of the animal, must have surprised the First Nations. They, too, coveted the beaver, because every part of it was important to them. The meat was tasty, with beaver tails a special treat. They skimmed off the fat as it cooked to be used as medicine. The teeth and claws were polished for ceremonial wear, and the Natives used the bitter orange-brown substance known as musk to reduce fevers and treat aching joints. Modern science has shown that Aspirin, which is used for the same purpose, contains some of the same ingredients.[2]

Alexander Henry, an experienced English trader, travelled up the Ottawa River in 1761 and observed the simple, compact rations of the voyageurs, and the way in which they were absolutely fundamental to the whole fur-trading system for, as he explains, regular food would have taken up too much space in the canoes:

The village of L’Arbre Croche [twenty miles west of Fort Michilimackinac] supplies, as I have said, the maize, or Indian corn, with which the canoes are victualled. This species of grain is prepared for use, by boiling it in a strong lie, after which the husk may be easily removed; and it is next mashed and dried. In this state, it is soft and friable, like rice. The allowance, for each man, on the voyage, is a quart a day; and a bushel, with two pounds of prepared fat, is reckoned to be a month’s subsistence. No other allowance is made, of any kind; not even salt; and bread is never thought of. The men, nevertheless, are healthy, and capable of performing their heavy labour. This mode of victualling is essential to the trade, which being pursued at great distances, and in vessels so small as canoes, will not admit of the use of other food. If the men were to be supplied with bread and pork, the canoe would not carry a sufficiency for six months; and the ordinary duration of the voyage is not less than fourteen. The difficulty which would belong to an attempt to reconcile any other man, than Canadians, to this fare, seems to secure to them, and their employers, the monopoly of the fur-trade…. I bought more than a hundred bushels, at forty livres per bushel…. I paid at the rate of a dollar per pound for the tallow, or prepared fat, to mix with it.[3]

Free traders (as the competitors of the Hudson’s Bay Company were called) became involved in this lucrative business, and many combined forces by forming partnerships and companies, but it was the North West Company that for many years challenged the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company and their decision to build their forts around the bay and let the First Nations come to them. The North West Company realized the importance of building their trading posts in the interior of the country, where the First Nations lived, trapped, and hunted. The rival company also recognized the importance of adequately provisioning the men involved in the trade, and not leaving their survival and the survival of the business to chance.

The North West Company partners dined in fine style every evening as they travelled by canoe between Montreal and the organization’s inland headquarters at Fort William in today’s Ontario. Fort William Historical Park, Thunder Bay, Ontario

To accomplish this, the company formed one of the most innovative partnerships ever seen in Canada, including an unlikely combination of Scottish and English merchants, French Canadian voyageurs, First Nation guides, canoe-makers, advisers, suppliers of survival foods, and Métis (offspring of a mixed white-Native marriage) labourers, trappers, traders, and voyageurs. This partnership solved the slow, complicated business of buying or bartering for furs from the First Nations in the northwestern regions of Canada and moving them to ships on the East Coast, by which they could then be shipped to markets overseas. The North West Company developed, and maintained, a long supply route that stretched from today’s Montreal to the Pacific Ocean, with an inland headquarters between the two. This plan was unique, and just as complex as the operation of a modern airline. A modern airline depends on gasoline, while the North West Company relied on specific provisions for each of the groups involved in the trade — all of which expected and enjoyed quite different fare. Their success also depended on the goodwill and cooperation of everyone involved to provide the fare in a timely manner.

The first inland headquarters for the North West Company was built at Grand Portage, and when the boundary between the United States and British territories was redrawn by the Treaty of Versailles in 1785, it moved to Fort William (at today’s Thunder Bay) on the north shore of Lake Superior. Fort William became the company’s trans-shipping centre, with forty-two buildings set in a rectangle and its own farm adjoining the fort to provide provisions such as grain, herbs, fresh vegetables, milk, and meat for both the regular staff and the Rendezvous that was held there annually during the summer months. The land behind the fort and on both sides of it was cleared and under tillage. Barley, peas, oats, Indian corn, potatoes, as well as other grains and vegetables were grown there. Seven horses, thirty-two cows and bulls, and a large number of sheep were kept on the farm, as well.[4]

How did this unique system work? To overcome the short summers and long winters in Canada, many of the partners of the company wintered in Montreal, spending their time assembling the trade goods, supervising the warehouses along the St. Lawrence River, and preparing for the year ahead. The rest of the partners manned the inland posts in the West and the far Northwest, trading and bartering directly with the First Nations for the pelts. They, too, were preparing for the year ahead. As soon as the ice was gone from the lakes and rivers, both groups started for Fort William. The inland traders used small canots du nord, which could be paddled by six men and portaged by two, and which held two tons of pelts and provisions for the thousand-mile journey. The Montreal merchants used Montreal canoes, or canots du maitre, which were large freight canoes, holding four tons of freight and each requiring ten French Canadian or Métis voyageurs as paddlers to cover approximately the same distance.

They [the canoes] reached lengths of forty feet, with a six-foot beam and a depth of two feet. The bow and stern curved upwards, often painted with animal or other designs. They weighed only five hundred pounds but they could carry as many as sixty men or fifty barrels of flour. They could be manufactured from cedar and pine and birch bark for as little as fifty dollars and would last for five or six years. First time travellers blanched when they saw their intended craft loaded to the gunwales perhaps a scant six inches from the water, but the Nor’westers calculated losses on voyages as low as one-half of one percent.

The canoe fleet carried a mess tent, 30 feet by 15 feet, and a separate sleeping tent and comfortable bed for each partner, carpets for their feet, beaver robes for their knees. The transport canoes went on ahead so that when the gentlemen reached the selected site for the night camp, a great fire was leaping, meat was sizzling, wine bottles were uncorked.[5]

American author Washington Irving, one of the guests of the North West Company, described the journey from Montreal:

They ascended the river in great state, like sovereigns making a progress, or rather like Highland chieftains navigating their subject lakes. They were wrapped in rich furs, their huge canoes freighted with every convenience and luxury, and manned by Canadian voyageurs, as obedient as Highland clansmen. They carried up with them cooks and bakers, together with delicacies of every kind, and abundances of choice wines for the banquets which attended this great convocation. Happy were they, too, if they could meet with some distinguished stranger; above all, some titled member of the British nobility, to accompany them on this stately occasion, and grace their high solemnities.[6]

In addition to the partners and the comforts they needed on the journey, here is a partial list of the commodities, particularly food and beverages, listed in the “Scheme for the NW Outfit” in 1794 that would have been transported to the inland headquarters to provision the fort: “10 kegs sugar, 8 kegs salt, 32 kegs butter, 80 kegs pork, 230 kegs grease, 40 kegs beef, 400 kegs high wines, 50 kegs rum, 10 kegs port wine, 10 kegs brandy, 20 kegs shrub, 3 kegs sausages, 17 bags green peas.”[7]

Meanwhile, Ross Cox, a Dublin-born fur trader who later became the Irish correspondent of the London Morning Herald, describes the French Canadian canoe men’s rations in 1817. They present a striking contrast to the food and beverages of the partners:

I know of no people capable of enduring so much hard labour as the Canadians, or so submissive to superiors. In voyages of six months’ duration, they commence at daybreak and from thence to night-fall hard paddling and carrying goods occupy their time without intermission…. Their rations at first view may appear enormous. Each man is allowed eight pounds of solid meat per diem, such as buffalo, deer, horse, etc., and ten pounds if there be bone in it. In the autumnal months, in lieu of meat, each man receives two large geese or four ducks. They are supplied with fish in the same proportion. It must, however, be recollected that these rations are unaccompanied by bread, biscuit, potatoes, or, in fact by vegetables of any description.

At Christmas and New Year they are served out with flour to make cakes or puddings, and each man receives half a pint of rum. This they call a regale, and they are particularly grateful for it.[8]

The Nor’Westers coming to Fort William from the inland posts also had to provision their teams. They soon learned that dried meat and fish, berries and greens from the forest, all took space in the canoes, and precious time could be wasted hunting and fishing. The First Nations introduced the newcomers to pemmican, made from dried buffalo, elk, or deer meat, pounded into a powder, mixed with dried berries, packed into a leather bag, then sealed with grease. Light, durable, and highly nourishing, the bags of pemmican were easily stored in a canoe, and thus pemmican became the staple diet of the canoe man. Small amounts of pemmican replaced large amounts of regular food, freeing up precious time and space to carry more furs and more trade goods in both directions.

Pemmican was used on voyages in the far interior. This was kind of pressed buffalo meat, pounded fine, to which hot grease was added, and the whole left to form a mould in a bag of buffalo skin. When properly made, pemmican would remain edible for more than one season. Its small bulk and great nutritional value made it highly esteemed by all voyageurs. From it they made a dish called “Rubbaboo” … it is a favourite dish with the northern voyageurs, when they could get it. It consists simply of pemmican made into a kind of soup by boiling water. Flour is added when it can be obtained, and it is generally considered more palatable with a little sugar.[9]

Pemmican initially gave the North West Company a great advantage over their Hudson’s Bay Company rivals, who continued to depend on bread, porridge, and meat cured with salt, instead of adapting to Native foods. However, as the story of Canadian food unfolds, we will soon learn that this dependence on pemmican, much of it produced by the buffalo hunters of the prairies and available at Pembina, the North West Company post on the Red River, would eventually be a major factor in the company’s demise.

In July the two groups began to assemble at the inland headquarters — the fur brigades from the west and the merchant partners from the east. It is not surprising then that the annual Rendezvous became a legendary time of feasting and celebration. The population of Fort William grew to about two thousand persons (at the same time the population of York, the capital of Upper Canada, was about six hundred) and included the English and Scottish merchants and their clerks; the French Canadian and Métis canoe men; and the men and women of the First Nations who were guides, advisers, and providers of specialized needs such as survival foods for the chain of forts and posts stretching into the interior.

The central building at Fort William was the Great Hall, and these descriptions tell us how it appeared to two travellers of the period:

In the middle of a gracious square rises a large building elegantly constructed, though of wood, with a long piazza or portico, raised about five feet from the ground, and surmounted by a balcony, extending along the whole front. In the centre is a saloon or hall, sixty feet in length by thirty in width, decorated with several pieces of painting and some portraits of the leading partners. It is in this hall that the agents, partners, clerks, interpreters and guides, take their meal together, at different tables. The kitchen and servants’ rooms are in the basement.[10]

The dining hall is a noble apartment, and sufficiently capacious to entertain two hundred. A finely executed bust of the late Simon McTavish is placed in it, with portraits of various Proprietors. A full-length likeness of Nelson, together with a splendid painting of the Battle of the Nile also decorate the walls.[11]

An 1844 account of dinner at Fort Vancouver, a North West Company post on the Pacific Slopes (the company firmly controlled this area, which stretched from San Francisco to the Alaska border), finds Governor (Dr. John) McLoughlin, who had served earlier as the doctor at Fort William, presiding at table:

At the end of a table twenty feet in length stands Governor McLoughlin (known as the Father of Oregon) directing guests and gentlemen from neighbouring posts to their places, and chief traders, the physician, clerks and the farmer slide respectfully to their places, at distances from the governor corresponding to the dignity of their rank and service. Thanks are given to God, and all are seated. Roast beef and pork, boiled mutton, baked salmon, boiled ham, beets, carrots, turnips, cabbage and potatoes, and wheaten bread, are tastefully distributed over the table among a dinner set of elegant Queen’s Ware, furnished with glittering glasses and decanters of various coloured Italian wines.[12]

During the month of the Rendezvous, dignity appears to have been set aside once the sun began to set. Days were spent in the Committee House at meetings, at which the business of the trade was carried out in great secrecy, but the nights were spent dining and roistering in the Great Hall. Dinners of “buffalo tongue and hump that had been either smoked or salted, thirty pound lake trout and whitefish that could be netted in the river at the gates to the Fort, venison, wild duck, geese, partridge and beaver tails would be augmented with confectioners’ delicacies that had been packed all the way from Montreal in those great canoes. They drank the wines of France and Portugal, whiskies from Scotland and the Canadas, rum by the hogshead and, on occasion, the finest champagne.”[13]

Cooks and bakers prepared imported delicacies for the elaborate banquets held at the annual July Rendezvous at Fort William. Fort William Historical Park, Thunder Bay, Ontario

Traditionally, five toasts were given, and these were presented in the following order: Mary, the Mother of all the Saints; the king; the fur trade in all its branches; the voyageurs, their wives, and their children; and absent brethren. When the dinner and toasts were over, the Great Hall witnessed one of the sights of the ages:

With the ten gallon kegs of rum running low and dawn fingering the windows of the Great Hall to find the partners of the North West Company, names that mark and brighten the map of Canada, leaping on benches, chairs, and oaken wine barrels to “shoot the rapids” from the tilted tables to the floor, and singing the songs of home. Mounting broad bladed paddles, the gentlemen in knee breeches and silver buckled shoes pounded around the hall in impromptu races, shoving boisterously, piling up at the corners, breaking off only to down another brimming bumper [of spirits].[14]

However, the Rendezvous was soon over, and by August 1 both groups left for home so they would not be caught on the frozen waterways. For the partners returning for the winter to Montreal, there was the Beaver Club’s fellowship and feasting to look forward to. The club was founded in February 1785 with nineteen members, all of whom had explored the Northwest. The object of the club was “to bring together at stated periods during the winter season, a set of men highly respectable in society who had passed their best days in a savage country and had encountered the difficulties and dangers incident to a pursuit peculiar to the fur trade of Canada.” Despite this restriction, an additional nineteen members were accepted by 1803.[15]

The club did not have its own headquarters but met every fortnight from December to April in one of Montreal’s famous eating establishments. It did have its own china, crystal, and plate, marked with the club’s insignia. At the meetings the members themselves had to wear their insignia if they wanted to avoid a fine. This medal was gold and bore the words “Beaver Club of Montreal instituted in 1785,” with a beaver gnawing the foot of a tree and the inscription “Industry and Perseverance.” The reverse side carried the name of the member, the date of his first voyage of exploration, and a bas-relief with the motto Fortitude in Distress and a canoe with three passengers in top hats being guided through rapids by canoe men.[16]

Colonel Landman, a guest of Sir Alexander Mackenzie and William McGillivray in the early nineteenth century, gives us a vivid description of one of the Beaver Club dinners that lasted twelve hours:

At this time, dinner was at four o’clock and after having lowered a reasonable quantity of wine, say a bottle each, the married men withdrew, leaving a dozen of us to drink to their health. Accordingly, we were able to behave like real Scottish Highlanders and by four in the morning we had all attained such a degree of perfection that we could utter a war cry as well as Mackenzie and McGillivray. We were all drunk like fish, and all of us thought we could dance on the table without disarranging a single one of the decanters, glasses or plates with which it was covered.

But on attempting this experiment, we found that we were suffering from a delusion and wound up by breaking all the plates, glasses and bottles and demolishing the table itself; worse than that, there were bruises and scratches, more or less serious on the heads and hands of everyone in the group…. It was told to me later that during our carouse 120 bottles of wine had been drunk, but I think a good part of it had been spilled.[17]

Other guests at the Beaver Club confirmed that description:

They served bear meat, beaver, pemmican and venison in the same way as in trading posts to the accompaniment of songs and dances during the events; and when wine had produced the sought-for degree of gaiety in the wee hours of the morning, the trading partners, dealers and merchants re-enacted the “grand voyage” to the Rendezvous in full sight of the waiters or voyageurs who had obtained permission to attend. For this purpose, they sat one behind another on a rich carpet, each equipping himself with a poker, tongs, a sword or walking stick in place of a paddle and roared out such voyageurs’ songs as Malbrouck or A la Claire Fontaine, meanwhile paddling with as much steadiness as their strained nerves would permit.[18]

The last Beaver Club dinner was held in 1827, but the event was resurrected in the twentieth century. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal brought it back to life in 1959, and it now has nine hundred members around the world. Once a year club members dine on a five-course dinner with appropriate wines. Each course is paraded through the club, led by costumed coureurs de bois, voyageurs, musicians, and a representative from the Kahnawake First Nation. Now, as then, five toasts are proposed to the Mother of All Saints, the queen, the fur trade in all its branches, the women and children of the fur trade (Heaven preserve them!), and absent brethren.

Beaver hats have been forgotten by the fashion world, fur-trading empires are a thing of the past, but once a year hundreds of men and women still gather to pay tribute to an unlikely team of men and women who ruthlessly pursued a small animal across this continent. Their success depended on their food supplies and the strength, skill, and stamina of a chain of men stretched across the continent. They came from different classes, languages, cultures, and standards, but they found a common cause, and until 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company merged, they were legends in their own time.