OLD FUR TRADERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 136, 10 June 1937, Page 5

OLD FUR TRADERS

WORK AT HUDSON'S BAY

THEIR ADVENTUROUS LIVES

RIVAL COMPANIES

c- To'the boys of the generation which jjl read R. M. Ballantyne there were few jj figures more enviable than a lone trapper in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company (writes Campbell Nairne in "John o' London's Weekly"). One fancied that it must be the grandest of adventures to hold out single-handed in the stockade against a swarm of Indians maddened by firewater. (If | they were not "friendly" they were usually maddened by firewater!) I am not surprised to read in Mr. Douglas Mackay's picturesque record of the company's development, "The Honourable Company," that scores of men in the service admit that they were first attracted to Canada by Ballantyne's books. History, however, does not need the touch of the romancer to make it every whit as thrilling as "The Young Fur Traders." The subject has plainly fired Mr. MacKay's imagination, but he does not allow enthusiasm to distort truth, and his chapters are carefully documented. The story he has to tell really begins with the granting of a charter by Charles II to the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay." The first adventurers, as it happened, were not English but French—a sergeant-major who varied soldiering with fur-trading, and his brother-in-law, who did not scruple to serve both flags in turn. The Charter signed by Charles—this was in 1670 —conferred imperial powers on the "adventurers" and a trade monopoly (not abolished until 1869) over 1,500,000 square miles. OVEKLAND TO THE ARCTIC. By 1720 the Hudson's Bay Company had twice trebled its stock, and by fhe middle of the century it was bringing to England every year furs valued at between £23,000 and £30,000 —a large sum for those days. Pioneering was still in favour, and the winter of 1769-70 saw an attempt by Samuel Hearne, who had entered the company's service three years earlier, to push his way overland as far as the Arctic. After many setbacks he reached the Coppermine River. Indian legend had promised a kind of El Dorado, but the Coppermine proved to be "no more than an entire jumble of rocks and gravel." The journey was not without its horrors. At a spot since known as Bloody Falls his friendly Indians fell upon an encampment of Sleeping Eskimo, i He attempted to hold them back, but ; quickly found they were fired with ( a blood thirst which for the time £ changed them from a rabble into a j disciplined, murderous crew with a ( unity of purpose he had never seen be- t fore. The Eskimo had no chance to c fight. Those who survived the first j knife blows rushed naked from their c tents to be struck down in the open. A girl died writhing and clutching at Hearne's feet, transfixed with two In- „ dian spears. The British conquest of Canada soon ~ had its repercussions on the company's i fortunes. A challenge was thrown down by the North-West Company of i: Montreal, and until the union in 1821 there was constant friction with the intruders. Mr. MacKay is not slow , jto acknowledge their worth:— I These men from Montreal took the continent in their stride; they reached ? out to the Arctic Ocean; they crossed ' the Rocky Mountains to build forts on the Pacific Coast. A FATEFUL MASSACRE. tl

Ambitious to the point of avarice and ruthless to the point of lawlessness, their reckless courage and energy brought its own destruction. But it was a magnificent effort for all that. On the front line of fur trading, where laws did not matter much, and in the courts, where law meant everything, they fought the great company and its Royal Charter. Always on the offensive, in the end they outstretched their own strength.

The friction came to a head with the

failure of the Earl of Selkirk's Red River colonisation scheme, which was intended to benefit immigrant Scottish families. Mr. MacKay gives a graphic picture of the Seven Oaks Massacre in 1816. It was this outrage—hard by the main street of modern Winnipeg —which finally broke the power of the North Westers.

On a June evening a party under Cuthbert Grant advanced on Fort Douglas, the heart of.tha Selkirk Settlement:—■

Warned of their coming, Semple (the Governor) quickly raised thirty volunteers and led them out on foot across the fields to meet the half-breeds. The mounted half-breeds spread into a semicircle, forestalling an attempt by the settlers to deploy in a loose, open order. The colonists were being manoeuvred around until their backs were to the open river. A Frenchman named Boucher rode out from the half-breed ranks, shouting unintelligibly in broken English. Governor Semple strode forward to meet him, and boldly seized the bridle of Boucher's horse. An angry interchange follov/cd; Semple seized the man's gun. A shot was fired. In an instant the shooting became general.

In a few minutes almost all the' settlers had been killed or wounded. | The murderous treachery of the. Indian blood sent the half-breeds among the wounded to kill with second shots and to mutilate the dead with knives. Semple had gone down wounded in the thigh in the first fusilade. Cuthbert Grant spared his life, but in the melee an Indian shot him fatally in the breast. Twenty-one settlers were killed; the others were nearly all captured, though a few escaped by swimming across the Red River in the gathering- darkness. The bodies lay on the plains, to be preyed upon by wolves during the days and nights that followed. THE GENIUS OF SIMPSON. The Hudson's Bay Company owes much to Scotsmen. Their names stud Mr. MacKay's pages, and it is significant that the two figures which dominate the later history of the company, Sir George Simpson and Lord Strathcona, were both Scotsmen. Simpson's career was typical of others except that he had a gift for leadership which amounted to genius. He was born — an illegitimate child—on the shores of Loch Broom, in the remote North-west Highlands. His early years were undistinguished, and he was thirty-three when he came to Canada in 1820. He had his share of hardship:—

"In the year 1820 our provisions fell short at the establishment, and on two or three occasions I went for two or three whole days and nights without having a single morsel to swallow, but then, again, I was one of a party of eleven men and one woman which discussed at one sitting meal no less than three ducks and twenty-two geese."

A permanent monument to the shrewdness of the "little Emperor" as a judge of men is his notebook of "Servants' Characters." with which he anticipated modern business methods. His energy was phenomenal;—

Day after day, throughout the years, he was for ever writing letters of encouragement, criticism, flattery. an<l news to his men. It was part of his power to command. Even when fur traders were groping from the Mackenzie River into the unknown interior.

of Alaska and sending out reports of their discoveries, Simpson's letters, enclosing the latest coastal maps, would reach them by carrier. He would compare their reports of rivers with the latest Admiralty charts and advise and encourage them, always ending up with some gossip and news of wars in Europe, or perhaps a report of the death of Sir WUter Scott, or the return of the Whigs to power.

With their singleness of purpose and their loyalty to an ideal, these men make a strange study for the historian. They had grave limitations, but their breed was truly heroic, and with changed conditions of upbringing and the ebb of the colonising impulse it is perhaps not liknly that the stock will ever be renewed,

For those of us who'can still remember Ballantyne's Indians with affection —Simpson, by the way, had no high opinion of him as an official—it is good news that the Indian population (now about 12,000) is increasing.