FROM 1812 TO 1846

When Sir Alexander MacKenzie, the discoverer, went home to retire on an estate in Scotland, he found the young nobleman and philanthropist, Lord Selkirk, keenly interested in accounts of vast, new, unpeopled lands, which lay beyond the Great Lakes. A change in the system of farming, which dispossessed small farmers to turn the tenantries into sheep runs, had caused terrible poverty in Scotland at this period. Here in Scotland were people starving for want of land. There in America were lands idle for lack of people. Selkirk had already sent out some colonists to the Lake St. Clair region of Ontario and to Prince Edward Island, but what he heard from MacKenzie turned his attention to the new empire of the prairie. Then in Montreal, where he had been dined and wined by the Northwest Company’s “Beaver Club,” he had heard still more of this vast new land, of its wealth of furs, of its untimbered fields, where man had but to put in the plowshare to sow his crop. The one great obstruction to settlement there would be the claims of the Hudson’s Bay Company to exclusive monopoly of the country; but as Selkirk listened to the descriptions of the Red River Valley given by Colin Robertson, who had been dismissed by the Nor’westers, he thought he saw a way of overcoming all difficulties which the fur traders could put in the way of settlement.

Owing to competition Hudson’s Bay stock had fallen from two hundred and fifty to fifty pounds sterling a share. On returning to Scotland Lord Selkirk had begun buying up Hudson’s Bay stock in the market, along with Sir Alexander MacKenzie; but when MacKenzie learned that Selkirk’s object was colonization first, profits second, he broke in violent anger from the partnership in speculation, and besought William MacGillivray to go on the open market and buy against Selkirk to defeat the plans for settlement. What with shares owned by his wife’s family of Colville-Wedderburns, and those he had himself purchased, Selkirk now owned a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Early in 1811 the Company deeds to Lord Selkirk the country of Red River Valley, exceeding in area the British Isles and extending, through the ignorance of its donors, far south into American territory. Colin Robertson, the former Nor’wester, who first interested Selkirk in Red River, has meanwhile been gathering together a party of colonists. Miles MacDonell, retired from the Glengarry Regiment, has been appointed by Selkirk governor of the new colony.

What of the Nor’westers while these projects went forward? Writes MacGillivray from London, where he has been stirring up enmity to Selkirk’s project, “Selkirk must be driven to abandon his project at any cost, for his colony would prove utterly destructive of our fur trade.” How he purposed doing this will be seen. Writes Selkirk to the governor of his colony, Miles MacDonell: “The Northwest Company must be compelled to quit my lands. If they refuse, they must be treated as poachers.” Selkirk believed that the Hudson’s Bay Company charter to the Great Northwest was legal and valid. He believed that the vast territory granted to him was legally his own as much as his parks in Scotland. He believed that he possessed the same right to expel intruders on this territory as to drive poachers from his own Scotch parks. It was the spirit of feudalism. As for the Nor’westers, let us look at their rights. They disputed that the charter of the Hudson’s Bay Company applied beyond the bounds of Hudson Bay. Even if it did so apply, they pointed out that by the terms of the charter it applied only to lands not possessed by any other Christian power; and who would dispute that French fur traders and Nor’westers, as their successors, had ascended the streams of the interior long before the Hudson’s Bay men? It was the spirit of democracy. It needed no prophet to foresee when these two sets of claims came together there would be a violent clash.

It is evening in the little harbor of Stornoway, off the Hebrides, north of Scotland, July 25, 1811. Waning midsummer has begun to shorten the long days; and lying at anchor in the twilight a few yards offshore are the three Hudson’s Bay Company boats, outward bound. For a week the quiet little fishing hamlet has been in a turmoil, for Governor Miles MacDonell and Colin Robertson have ordered the Selkirk settlers here 129 of them, 70 farmers, 59 clerks to join the Hudson’s Bay boats as they swing out westward on their far cruise to the north, and the atmosphere has literally been on fire with vexations created by spies of the Northwest Company. In the first place, as the settlers wait for the ships coming up from London, trouble makers pass from group to group scattering a miserable little sheet called “The Highlander,” warning “the deluded people” against going to “a polar land of Indian hostiles.” Besides, dark hints are uttered that the settlers are not wanted for colonists at all, but for armed battalions to fight the Nor’westers for the Hudson’s Bay Company, in proof whereof the prophets of evil point ominously to the cannon and munitions of war on board the three old fur boats. Then there is too much whisky afloat in Stornoway that week. Settlers are taken ashore and farewelled and farewelled and farewelled till unable to find their way down to the rowboats, and then they are easily frightened into abandoning the risky venture altogether. On the settlers who have come as clerks to the Company Governor MacDonell can keep a strong hand, for they have been paid their wages in advance and are seized if they attempt to desert. Then the excise officer here is a friend of the Nor’westers, and he creates endless trouble rowing round and round the boats, bawling . . . bawling out . . . to know “if all who are embarking are going of their own free will,” till the ship’s hands, looking over decks, become so exasperated they heave a cannon ball over rails, which goes splash through the bottom of the harbor officer’s rowboat and sends him cursing ashore to dispatch a challenge for a duel to Governor MacDonell. MacDonell sees plainly that if he is to have any colonists left, he must sail at once. Anchors up and sails out at eleven that night, the ships glide from shore so unexpectedly that one faint-heart, desperately resolved on flight, has to jump overboard and swim ashore, while two other settlers, who have been lingering over farewells, must be rowed across harbor by Colin Robertson to catch the departing ships. Then Robertson is back on the wharf trumpeting a last cheer through his funneled hands. The Highlanders on decks lean over the vessel railings waving their bonnets. The Glasgow and Dublin lads indentured as clerks give a last huzza, and the Selkirk settlers are off for their Promised Land.

As long ago Cartier’s first colonists to the St. Lawrence had their mettle tested by tempestuous weather and pioneer hardships, so now the first colonists to the Great Northwest must meet the challenge that fate throws down to all who leave the beaten path. Though the season was late, the weather was extraordinarily stormy. Sixty-one days the passage lasted, the tubby old fur ships lying water-logged, rolling to the angry sea. MacDonell was furious that colonists had been risked on such unseaworthy craft, but those old fur-ship captains, with fifty years ice battling to their credit, probably knew their business better than MacDonell. The fur ships had not been built for speed and comfort, but for cargoes and safety, and when storms came they simply lowered sails, turned tails to the wind, and rolled till the gale had passed, to the prolonged woe of the Highland landsmen, who for the first time suffered seasick pangs. Then, when Governor MacDonell attempted drills to pass the time, he made the discovery that seditious talk had gone the rounds of the deck. “The Hudson’s Bay had no right to this country.” “The Nor’westers owned that country.” “The Hudson’s Bay could n’t compel any man to drill and fight.” Selkirk could not give clear deed to their “lands,” and much more to the same effect, all of which proved that some Nor’wester agent in disguise had been busy on board.

September 24, amid falling snow and biting frost, the ships anchored at Five Fathom Hole off York Factory, Port Nelson.

The Selkirk settlers had been sixty-one days on board, and they were still a year away from their Promised Land. Champlain’s colonists of Acadia and Quebec had come to anchorage on a land set like a jewel amid silver waters and green hills, but the Selkirk settlers have as yet seen only rocks barren of verdure as a billiard ball, vales amidst the domed hills of Hudson Straits, dank with muskeg, and silent as the very realms of death itself, but for the flacker of wild fowl, the roaring of the floundering walrus herds, or the lonely tinkling of mountain streams running from the ice fields to the mossy valleys bordering the northern sea. It needed a robust hope, or the blind faith of an almost religious zeal, to penetrate the future and see beyond these sterile shores the Promised Land, where homes were to be built, and plenty to abound. If pioneer struggles leave a something in the blood of the race that makes for national strength and permanency, the difference between the home finding of the West and the home finding of the East is worth noting.

There were, of course, no preparations for the colonists at York Fort, for the factor could not know they were coming, or anything of Selkirk’s plans, till the annual ships arrived. On the chance of finding better hunting farther from the fort, MacDonell withdrew his people from Hayes River, north across the marsh to a sheltered bank of the River Nelson. Winter had set in early. A whooping blizzard met the pilgrims as they marched along an Indian trail through the brushwood. There is a legend of Miles MacDonell, the governor, becoming benighted between York Fort and Nelson River, and losing his way in the storm. According to the story, he beat about the brushwood for twenty-four hours before he regained his bearings. Rude huts of rough timber and thatch roof with logs extemporized for berths and benches were knocked up for wintering quarters on Nelson River, and the next nine months were passed hunting deer for store of provisions, and building flatboats to ascend the interior. All winter a mutinous spirit was at work among the young clerks, which MacDonell, no doubt, ascribed to the machinations of Nor’westers; but the chief factor quickly quelled mutiny by cutting off supplies, and all hands were ready to proceed when the fur brigades set out for the interior on the 21st of June, 1812.

Up Hayes River, up the whole length of Winnipeg Lake, then in August the flatboats are ascending the muddy current of Red River, through what is now Manitoba, and for the first time the people see their Promised Land. High banks fringed with maple and oak line the river at what is now Selkirk. Then the cliffs lower, and through the woods are broken gleams of the rolling prairie intersected by ravines, stretching far as eye can see, where sky and earth meet. From the lateness of the season one can guess that the river was low at the bowlder reach known as St. Andrew’s Rapids, and that while the boats were tracked upstream the people would disembark and walk along the Indian trails of the west bank. There was no Fort Garry near the rapids, as a few years later. Buffalo-skin tepees alone broke the endless sweep of russet prairie and sky, clear swimming blue as the purest lake. Then the people are back aboard, laboring hard at the oar now, for they know they are nearing the end of their long pilgrimage. The river banks rise higher. Then they drop gradually to the flats now known as Point Douglas. Another bend in the sinuous red current, looping and curving and circling fantastically through the prairie, and the Selkirk settlers are in full view of the old Cree graveyard, bodies swathed in skins on scaffolding, down at the junction of the Assiniboine. Hard by they see the towered bastions of the Northwest Company’s post, Fort Gibraltar. Somewhere between what are known to-day as Broadway Bridge and Point Douglas, the Selkirk settlers land on the west side. Chief Peguis and his Cree warriors ride wonderingly among the white-faced newcomers, marveling at men who have crossed the Great Waters “to dig gardens and work land.” The barracks knocked up hastily is known after Selkirk’s family name as Fort Douglas; but the store of deer meat has been exhausted, and the colonists are on the verge of a second winter. They at once join the Plain Rangers, or Bois Brules (Burnt Wood Runners), half-breed descendants of French and Nor’west fur traders, who have become retainers of the Montreal Company. With them the Selkirk settlers proceed south to Pembina and the Boundary to hunt buffalo. No instructions had yet come to Red River of the Northwest Company’s hostility to the colony, and the lonely Scotch clerks of Fort Gibraltar were glad to welcome men who spoke their own Highland tongue. Volumes might be written of this, the colonists’ first year in their Promised Land: how the rude Plain Rangers conveyed them to the buffalo hunt in their creaking Red River carts, carts made entirely of wood, hub, tire, axle, and all, or else on loaned ponies; how when storm came the white settlers were welcomed to the huts and skin tents of the French half-breeds, given food and buffalo blankets; how many a young Highlander came to grief in the wild stampede of his first buffalo hunt; how when the hunters returned to Fort Gibraltar (Winnipeg), on Red River, with store enough of pemmican for all the fur posts of the Nor’westers, many a wild happy winter night was passed dancing mad Indian jigs to the piping of the Highland piper and the crazy scraping of some Frenchman’s fiddle; how when morning came, in a gray dawn of smoking frost mist, a long line of the colonists could be seen winding along the ice of Red River home to Fort Douglas, Piper Green or Hector McLean leading the way, still prancing and blowing a proud national air; how when spring opened, ten-acre plots were assigned to each settler, close to the fort at what were known as the Colony Buildings, and one hundred-acre farms farther down the river. All this and more are part of the story of the coming of the first colonists to the Great Northwest. The very autumn that the first settlers had reached Red River in 1812 more colonists had arrived on the boats at Hudson Bay. These did not reach Red River till October of 1812 and the spring of 1813. By 1813, and on till 1817, more colonists yearly came. The story of each year, with its plot and counterplot, I have told elsewhere. Spite of Nor’westers’ threats, spite of the fact there would be no market for the colonists when they had succeeded in transforming wilderness prairie into farms, Selkirk’s mad dream of empire seemed to be succeeding.

The cardinal mistake in the contest between Hudson’s Bay Company and Nor’westers, between feudalism and democracy, was now committed by the governor of the colony, Miles MacDonell. The year 1813 had proved poor for the buffalo hunters. Large numbers of colonists were coming, and provisions were likely to be scarce. Also, note it well, while the War of 1812 did not cut off supplies through Hudson Bay to the English Company, it did threaten access to the West by the Great Lakes, and cut off all supplies by way of Detroit and Lake Huron for the Nor’westers. Was MacDonell scoring a point against the Nor’westers, when they were at a disadvantage? Who can answer? Selkirk had ordered him to expel the Nor’westers from his lands, and if the violent contest had not begun in this way, it was bound to come in another. What MacDonell did was issue a proclamation in January of 1814, forbidding taking provisions from Selkirk’s territory of Assiniboia. It practically meant that the Plain Rangers must not hunt buffalo in the limits of modern Manitoba, and must not sell supplies to the Nor’westers. It also meant that all the upper posts of the Nor’westers the fur posts of Athabasca and British Columbia, which depended on pemmican for food would be without adequate provisions. The Plain Rangers were enraged beyond words, and doubly outraged when some Hudson’s Bay men began seizing buffalo meat at Pembina River, which was beyond the limits of Selkirk’s territory. Writes Peter Fidler, one of the Hudson’s Bay factors, “If MacDonell only perseveres, he will starve the Nor westers out.”

One can guess the anger in the annual meeting of the Nor’westers at Fort William in July of 1814. Like generals on field of war they laid out their campaign. Duncan Cameron, a United Empire Loyalist officer of the 1812 War, is to don his red regimentals and proceed to Red River, where his knowledge of the Gaelic tongue may be trusted to win over Selkirk settlers. “Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony will satisfy some,” wrote one of the fiery Nor’westers to a brother officer. Such was the mood of the Nor’westers when they came back from their annual meeting on Lake Superior to Red River, and MacDonell fanned this mood to dangerous fury by threatening to burn the Nor’westers’ forts to the ground unless they moved from Selkirk’s territory. For the present Duncan Cameron contents himself with striking up a warm friendship with the Highlanders of the settlement and offering to transport two hundred of them free of cost to Eastern Canada. MacDonell seizes still more provisions from northwest forts. Cameron, the Nor’wester, comes back from the annual meeting of 1815 still more bellicose. He carries the warrant to arrest Governor Miles MacDonell for the seizure of those provisions. MacDonell, safe behind the palisades of Fort Douglas, laughs the warrant to scorn; but it is another matter when the Plain Rangers ride across the prairie from Fort Gibraltar armed, and pour such hot shot into Fort Douglas that the colonists, frenzied with fear, huddle to the fort for shelter. To insure the safety of his colonists, MacDonell surrenders to the Nor’westers and is sent to Eastern Canada for a trial which never takes place. No sooner has Governor MacDonell been expelled than Cuthbert Grant, warden of the Plain Rangers, rides over to the colony and warns the colonists to flee for their lives, from Indians enraged at “these land workers spoiling the hunting fields.” What the Indians thought of this defense of their rights is not stated. They were silent and unacting witnesses of the unedifying spectacle of white men ready to fly at each other’s throats. It was too late for the colonists to reach Hudson Bay in time for the annual ships of 1815, so the houseless people dispersed amid the forests of Lake Winnipeg, where they could be certain of at least fish for food.

Word of the two hundred settlers having been moved from Red River by the Nor’westers, of MacDonell’s forcible expulsion, and of the dispersion of the rest of the colony had, of course, been sent to Selkirk and his agents in both Montreal and London. Swift retaliation is prepared. Colin Robertson, who speaks French like a Canadian and knows all the Nor’west voyageurs of the St. Lawrence, is sent to gather up two hundred French boatmen under the very noses of the Nor’westers at Montreal. With these Robertson is to invade the far-famed Athabasca, whence come the best furs, the very heart of the Nor’westers’ stamping ground. Robert Semple is appointed governor of the colony on Red River, with instructions to resist the aggressions of the Nor’westers even to the point of “a shock that may be felt from Montreal to Athabasca.” Selkirk himself comes to Canada to interview the Governor General about military forces to protect his colony.

Robertson, with his two hundred voyageurs for Athabasca, follows the old Ottawa trail of the French explorers, from the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and from the Great Lakes to Red River by way of Winnipeg Lake. Whom does he find on the shores of the lake but Selkirk’s dispersed colonists! Ordering John Clarke, an old campaigner of Astor’s company on the Columbia, to lead the two hundred French voyageurs on up to Athabasca, Colin Robertson rallies the colonists together and leads them back to Red River for the winter of 1815-1816. Feeling sure that he had destroyed Selkirk’s scheme root and branch, Cameron has remained at Fort Gibraltar with only a few men, when back to the field comes Robertson, stormy, capable, robust, red-blooded, fearless, breathing vengeance on Selkirk’s foes.

By the spring of 1816 the tables have been turned with a vengeance. Cameron, the Nor’wester, has been seized and sent to Hudson Bay to be expelled from the country. Fort Gibraltar has been pulled down and the timbers used to strengthen Fort Douglas, whose pointed cannon command all passage up and down Red River. It was hardly to be supposed that the haughty Nor’westers would submit to expulsion without a blow. From Athabasca, from New Caledonia, from Qu’Appelle . . . they rally their doughtiest fighters under Cuthbert Grant, the half-breed Plain Ranger. From Montreal and Fort William come spurring the leading partners, with one hundred and seventy French-Canadian bullies, and a brass cannon concealed under oilcloth in a long boat. The object of the Plain Rangers is to meet the up-coming partners with supplies for the year; but is that any reason for the riders who are striking eastward from Assiniboine to Red River, decking themselves out in war paint and stripping like savages before battle? The object of the partners is to meet the Plain Rangers on Red River; but is that any reason for bringing a cannon concealed under oilcloth all the way from Lake Superior? Or do men fighting a life-and-death struggle for the thing the world calls success ever acknowledge plain motives within themselves at all? Is it not rather the blind brute instinct of self-protection, forfend what may?

“Listen, white men! Beware! Beware!” the Cree chief Peguis warns Governor Semple. What means the spectacle of white brothers, who preach peace, preparing for war over a few beaver pelts? Chief Peguis cannot understand, except this is the way of white men.

Still Semple talks peace, which is a good thing in its place; but this is n’t the place.

“My Governor! My Governor!” pleads an old hunter of the Hudson’s Bay with Semple; “are you not afraid? The half-breeds are gathering to kill you!”

Semple laughs. Pshaw! He has law on his side. Law! What is law? The old hunter of the lawless wilds does n’t know that word. That word does n’t come as far west as the Pays d’en Haut.

It is sunset of June 18, 1816. Old chief Peguis comes again to the Hudson’s Bay fort on Red River.

“Governor of the gard’ners!” he solemnly warns; “governor of the land workers and gard’ners, listen! . . .” Not much does he add, after the fashion of his race. Only this, “Let me bring my warriors to protect you!”

Semple laughs at such fears.

It is sunset of June 19. A soft west wind has set the prairie grass rippling like a green sea between the fort and the sun hanging low at the western sky line. A boy on the lookout above one of the bastion towers of Fort Douglas suddenly shouts, “The half-breeds are coming!”

Semple ascends the tower and looks through a field glass. There is a line of sixty or seventy horsemen, all armed, not coming to the fort, but moving diagonally across from the Assiniboine to the Red towards the colony. And then, north towards the colony, is wildest clamor, people in ox carts, people on horseback, people on foot, stampeding for the shelter of the fort. And up to this moment absolutely nothing has occurred to create this terror.

“Let twenty men follow me,” orders Semple; and he marches out, followed by twenty-seven armed men.

As they wade through the waist-high hay fields they meet the fleeing colonists.

“Keep your back to the river!” shouts one colonist, convoying his family. “They are painted, Governor! Don’t let them surround you.”

Semple sends back to the fort for a cannon to be trundled out.

Young Lieutenant Holte’s gun goes off by mistake. Semple turns on him with fury and bids him have a care: there is to be no firing.

The half-breeds have turned from their trail and are coming forward at a gallop.

“There ’s Grant, the Plain Ranger, Governor! Let me shoot him,” pleads one Hudson’s Bay man.

“God have mercy on our souls!” mutters one of the colonists, counting the foe; “but we are all dead men.”

All the world knows the rest. At a knoll where grew some trees, a spot now known in Winnipeg on North Main Street as Seven Oaks, Grant, the Ranger, sent a half-breed, Boucher, forward to parley.

“What do you want?” demands Semple.

“We want our fort!”

“Go to your fort, then!”

“Rascal! You have destroyed our fort!”

“Dare you to speak so to me? Arrest him!”

Boucher slips from his saddle. The Plain Rangers think he has been shot. Instantaneously from both sides crashes musketry fire. Semple falls with a broken thigh. Before Grant can control his murderous crew or obtain aid for the wounded governor, a scamp of a half-breed has slashed the fallen man to death. Two or three Hudson’s Bay men escape through the long grass and swim across Red River. Two or three more save themselves by instant surrender. For the rest of the twenty-seven, they lie where they have fallen. They are stripped, mutilated, cut to pieces. Only one Nor’wester is killed, only one wounded.

Later, in order to save the lives of the settlers, Fort Douglas is surrendered. For a second time the colonists are dispersed. Before going down Red River in flatboats two of the Hudson’s Bay people go out with Chief Peguis by night and bury the dead; but they have no time to dig deep graves, and a few days later the wolves have ripped up the bodies.

Near Lake Winnipeg the fleeing colonists meet the Northwest partners with their one hundred and seventy men. No need to announce what the spectacle of the terrified colonists means. A wild whoop rends the air. “Thank Providence it was all over before we came,” writes one devout Nor’wester; “for we intended to storm the fort.” Both crews pause. The Nor’westers interrogate the settlers. Semple’s private papers are seized. Also, two Hudson’s Bay men who took part in the Seven Oaks fight are arrested, to be carried on down to Northwest headquarters on Lake Superior. Then the settlers go on to Lake Winnipeg.

At the various camping places on the way down to Fort William, those two Hudson’s Bay prisoners overhear strange threats. It is night on the Lake of the Woods. Voices of Northwest partners sound through the dark. They are talking of Selkirk coming to the rescue of his people with an armed force. Says the wild voice of a Nor’wester whose brother had been killed by a Hudson’s Bay man some years before, “There are fine quiet places along Winnipeg River if he comes this way.” . . . Then scraps of conversation. . . . Then, “The half-breeds could capture him when he is asleep.” . . . Then words too low to be heard. . . . Then, “They could have the Indians shoot him.” . . . Then in voice of authority restraining the wild folly of a bloodthirst for vengeance, “Things have gone too far, but we can throw the blame on the Indians.”

The wild words of a man gone mad for revenge must not be taken as the policy of a great commercial company.

Thereupon, Selkirk gathers up some two hundred of the De Meuron and De Watteville regiments, mercenaries disbanded after the War of 1812, and sets out for the west. Not aware that Robertson has left Red River, he sends him word to keep the colonists together and to expect help by way of the states from the Sault in order to avoid touching at the Nor’westers’ post at Fort William. The coureur with this message is waylaid by the Nor’westers, but Selkirk himself, preceded by his former governor, Miles MacDonell, has gone only as far as the Sault when word comes back of the Seven Oaks massacre. What to do now? He can obtain no justice in Eastern Canada. Two justices of the peace at the Sault refuse to be involved in the quarrel by accompanying him. Selkirk goes on without them, accompanied by the two hundred hired soldiers; but instead of proceeding to Red River by Minnesota, as he had first planned, he strikes straight for Fort William, the headquarters of the Nor’westers.

He arrives at the fort August 12, only a few days after the Northwest partners had come down from the scene of the massacre at Red River. Cannon are planted opposite Fort William. Things have “gone too far.” The Nor’westers capitulate without a stroke. Then as justice of the peace, my Lord Selkirk arrests all the partners but one and sends them east to stand trial for the massacre of Seven Oaks. The one partner not sent east was a fuddled old drunkard long since retired from active work. This man now executes a deed of sale to my Lord Selkirk for Fort William and its furs. The man was so intoxicated that he could not write, so the afore-time governor, Miles MacDonell, writes out the bargain, which one could wish so great a philanthropist as Selkirk had not touched with tongs. Before midwinter of 1817 has passed, the De Meuron soldiers have crossed Minnesota and gone down Red River to Fort Douglas. One stormy night they scale the wall and bundle the Northwest usurpers out, bag and baggage.

July of 1817 comes Selkirk himself to the Promised Land. There is no record that I have been able to find of his thoughts on first nearing the ground for which so much blood had been shed, and for which he himself was yet to suffer much; but one can venture to say that his most daring hope did not grasp the empire that was to grow from the seed he had planted. He meets the Indians in treaty for their lands. He greets his colonists in the open one sunny August day, speaking personally to each and deeding over to them land free of all charge. “This land I give for your church,” he said, standing on the ground which the cathedral now occupies. “That plot shall be for your school,” pointing across the gully; “and in memory of your native land, let the parish be called Kildonan.”

Of the trials and counter trials between the two companies, there is not space to tell here. Selkirk was forced to pay heavy damages for his course at Fort William, but the courts of Eastern Canada record not a single conviction against the Nor’westers for the massacre of Seven Oaks. Selkirk retired shattered in health to Europe, where he died in 1820. The same year passed away Alexander MacKenzie, his old-time rival.

The truth is, each company had gone too far and was on the verge of ruin. From Athabasca came the furs that prevented bankruptcy, and whichever company could drive the other from Athabasca could practically force its rival to ruin or union. When Colin Robertson had rallied the dispersed colonists from Lake Winnipeg, he had left John Clarke to conduct the two hundred Canadian voyageurs to Athabasca for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Clarke had been a Nor’wester before he joined Astor, and was a born fighter, idolized by the Indians. So confident was he of success now that he galloped his canoes up the Saskatchewan without pause to gather provisions. Once on the ground on Athabasca Lake, he divided his party into two or three bands and sent them foraging to the Nor’westers’ forts and hunting grounds up Peace River, down Slave Lake, at Athabasca itself. Weakened by division and without food to keep together, his men fell easy prey to the wily Nor’westers. Of those on Slave Lake eighteen died from starvation. Those on Peace River were captured and literally whipped out of the country, signing oaths never to return. Those at Athabasca being leading officers were held prisoners. Meanwhile the Hudson’s Bay Company is defeated at Seven Oaks and victorious at Fort William. The Nor’westers at Athabasca were keen to keep the frightened Indians of the north ignorant that Selkirk had triumphed at Fort William, but the news traveled over the two thousand miles of prairie in that strange hunter fashion known as “moccasin telegram,” and the story is told how the captured Hudson’s Bay officers let the secret out for the benefit of the Indians now afraid to carry their hunt to a Hudson’s Bay man.

Revels and all-night carousals marked the winter with the triumphant Nor’westers of Athabasca Lake. Often, when wild drinking songs were ringing in the Nor’westers’ dining hall, the Hudson’s Bay men would be brought in to furnish a butt for their merciless victors. One night, when the hall was full of Indians, one of the Northwest bullies began to brawl out a song in celebration of the Seven Oaks affair.

“The H.B.C. came up a hill, and up a hill they came,
The H.B.C. came up the hill, but down they went again.”

Tired of their rude horseplay, one of the Hudson’s Bay officers spoke up: “Y’ hae niver asked me for a song. I hae a varse o’ me ain compaesin.”

Then to the utter amaze of the drunken listeners and astonishment of the Indians, the game old officer trolled off this stave:

“But Selkirk brave went up a hill, and to Fort William came!
When in he popped and out from thence could not be driven again.”

The thunderstruck Nor’wester leaped to his feet with a yell: “A hundred guineas for the name of the men who brought that news here.”

“A hundred guineas for twa lines of me ain compaesin! Extravagant, sir,” returns the canny Scot.

From accounts held by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Montreal lawyers it is seen that Clarke’s expedition cost the Company 20,000 pounds.

Presently Robertson finds himself behind the bars for his part in destroying Fort Gibraltar and arresting Duncan Cameron. He too is acquitted, and he tells us frankly that a private arrangement had been made beforehand with the presiding judge. Probably if the Nor’westers had been as frank, the same influence would explain their acquittal.

Robertson found himself free just about the time Lord Selkirk came back from Red River by way of the Mississippi in order to avoid those careful plans for his welfare on the part of the Nor’westers at “the quiet places along Winnipeg River.” The Governor of Canada had notified members of both companies unofficially that the English government advised the rivals to find some basis of union, which practically meant that if the investigations under way were pushed to extremes, both sides might find themselves in awkward plight; but the fight had gone beyond the period of pure commercialism. It was now a matter of deadly personal hate between man and man, which, I am sorry to say, has been carried down by the descendants of the old fighters almost to the present day. Each side hoped to drive the other to bankruptcy; and the last throes of the deadly struggle were to be in Athabasca, the richest fur field. While Selkirk is fighting his cause in the courts, he gives Robertson carte blanche to gather two hundred more French voyageurs and proceed to the Athabasca.

Midsummer of 1819 finds the stalwart Robertson crossing Lake Winnipeg to ascend the Saskatchewan. At the mouth of the Saskatchewan a miserable remnant of terrified men from the last Athabasca expedition is added to Robertson’s party; and John Clarke, breathing death and destruction against the Nor’westers, goes along as lieutenant to Robertson. Everywhere are signs of the lawless conditions of the fur trade. Not an Indian dare speak to a Hudson’s Bay man on pain of horsewhipping. Instead of canoes gliding up and down the Saskatchewan like birds of passage, reign a silence and solitude as of the dead. Though Robertson bids his voyageurs sing and fire off muskets as signals for trade, not a soul comes down to the river banks till the fleet of advancing traders is well away from the Saskatchewan and halfway across the height of land towards the Athabasca.

The change of spirit on the part of the Nor’westers was easily explained. The most of their men were absent on the hunting field. In a few weeks Robertson had his huts in order and had dispatched his trappers down to Slave Lake and westward up Peace River. Then, in October, came more Nor’west partners from Montreal. The Nor’westers were stronger now and not so peacefully inclined. Nightly the French bullies, well plied with whisky, would come across to the Hudson’s Bay fort, bawling out challenge to fight; but Robertson held his men in hand and kept his powder dry.

Early on the morning of October the 11th, Robertson’s valet roused him from bed with word that a man had been accidentally shot. Slipping a pistol in his pocket and all unsuspicious of trickery, Robertson dashed out. It happened that the most of his men were at a slight distance from his fort. Before they could rally to his rescue he was knocked down, disarmed, surrounded by the Nor’westers, thrown into a boat, and carried back to their fort a captive. In vain he stormed almost apoplectic with rage, and tried to send back Indian messengers to his men. The Nor’westers laughed at him good-naturedly and relegated him to quarters in one room of a log hut, where sole furnishings were a berth bed and a fireplace without a floor. Robertson’s only possessions in captivity were the clothes on his back, a jackknife, a small pencil, and a notebook; but he probably consoled himself that his men were now on guard, and, outnumbering the Nor’westers two to one, could hold the ground for the Hudson’s Bay that winter. As time passed the captive Robertson began to wrack his brains how to communicate with his men. It was a drinking age; and the fur traders had the reputation of capacity to drink any other class of men off their legs. Robertson feigned an unholy thirst. Rapping for his guard, he requested that messengers might be sent across to the Hudson’s Bay fort for a keg of liquor. It can be guessed how readily the Nor’westers complied; but Robertson took good care, when the guard was absent and the door locked, to pour out most of the whisky on the earth floor. Then taking slips of paper from his notebook, he cut them in strips the width of a spool. On these he wrote cipher and mysterious instructions, which only his men could understand, giving full information of the Nor’westers’ movements, bidding his people hold their own, and ordering them to send messages down to the new Hudson’s Bay governor at Red River, William Williams, to place his De Meuron soldiers in ambush along the Grand Rapids of the Saskatchewan to catch the Northwest partners on their way to Montreal the next spring. These slips of paper he rolled up tight as a spool and hammered into the bunghole of the barrel. Then he plastered clay over all to hide the paper, and bade the guard carry this keg of whisky back to the H.B.C. fort; it was musty, Robertson complained; let the men rinse out the keg and put in a fresh supply!

All that winter Robertson, the Hudson’s Bay man, captive in the Nor’westers’ fort, sent weekly commands to his men by means of the whisky kegs; but in the spring his trick was discovered, and the angry Nor’westers decided he was too clever a man to be kept on the field. They would ship him out of the country when their furs were sent east.

On the way east he succeeded in escaping at Cumberland House. Waiting only a few hours, he launched out in his canoe and followed on the trail of the Northwest partners, on down to see what would happen at Grand Rapids, where the Saskatchewan flows into Lake Winnipeg. A jubilant shout from a canoe turning a bend in the river presently announced the news: “All the Northwest partners captured!” When Robertson came to Grand Rapids he found Governor Williams and the De Meurons in possession. Cannon pointed across the river below the rapids. The Northwest partners were prisoners in a hut. The voyageurs were allowed to go on down to Montreal with the furs. This last act in the great struggle ended tragically enough. What was to be done with the captured partners? They could not be sent to Eastern Canada. Pending investigations for the union of the companies, Governor Williams sent them to York Factory, Hudson Bay, whence some took ship to England, others set out overland on snowshoes for Canada; but in the scuffle at Grand Rapids, Frobisher, one of the oldest partners, with a reputation of great cruelty in his treatment of Hudson’s Bay men, had been violently clubbed on the head with a gun. From that moment he became a raving maniac, and the Hudson’s Bay people did not know what to do with such a captive. He must not be permitted to go home to England. His condition was too terrible evidence against them; so they kept him prisoner in the outhouses of York Factory, with two faithful Nor’wester half-breeds as personal attendants.

One dark cold night towards the first of October Frobisher succeeded in escaping through the broken bars of his cell window. A leap took him over the pickets. By chance an old canoe lay on Hayes River. With this he began to ascend stream for the interior, paddling wildly, laughing wildly, raving and singing. The two half-breeds knew that a voyage to the interior at this season without snowshoes, food, or heavy clothing, meant certain death; but they followed their master faithfully as black slaves. Wherever night found them they turned the canoe upside down and slept under it. Fish lines supplied food, and the deserted hut of some hunter occasionally gave them shelter for the night. Winter set in early. The ice edging of the river cut the birch canoe. Abandoning it, they went forward on foot. From York Fort, Hudson Bay, the nearest Northwest post was seven hundred miles. By the end of October they had not gone half the distance. Then came one of those changes so frequent in northern climes, a sunburst of warm weather following the first early winter, turning all the frozen fields to swimming marshes, and the travelers had no canoe. By this time Frobisher was too weak to walk. As his body failed his mind rallied, and he begged the two half-breeds to go on without him, as delay meant the death of all three; but the faithful fellows carried him by turns on their backs. They themselves were now so emaciated they were making but a few miles a day. Their moccasins had been worn to tatters, and all three looked more like skeletons than living men. Then, the third week of November, Frobisher could go no farther, and the servants’ strength failed. Building a fire in a sheltered place for their master, the two faithful fellows left Frobisher somewhere west of Lake Winnipeg. Two days later they crept into a Northwest post too weak to speak, and handed the Northwesters a note scrawled by Frobisher, asking them to send a rescue party. Frobisher was found lying across the ashes of the fire. Life was extinct.

In 1820 the union of the companies put an end to the ruinous and criminal struggle. George Simpson, afterwards knighted, who has been sent to look over matters in Athabasca, is appointed governor, and Nicholas Garry, one of the London directors, comes out to appoint the officers of the united companies to their new districts. The scene is one for artist brush, the last meeting of the partners at Fort William, Hudson’s Bay men and Nor’westers, such deadly enemies they would not speak, sitting in the great dining hall, glowering at each other across tables: George Simpson at one end of the tables, pompously dressed in ruffles and satin coat and silk breeches, vainly endeavoring to keep up suave conversation; Nicholas Garry at the other end of the table, also very pompous and smooth, but with a look on his face as if he were sitting above a powder mine, the Highland pipers dressed in tartans, standing at each end of the hall, filling the room with the drone and the skurl of the bagpipes.

By the union of the companies both sides avoided proving their rights in the law courts. Most important of all, the Hudson’s Bay Company escaped proving its charter valid; for the charter applied only to Hudson Bay and adjacent lands “not occupied by other Christian powers”; but on the union taking place, the British government granted to the new Hudson’s Bay Company license of exclusive monopoly to all the Indian territory, meaning (1) Hudson Bay Country, (2) the interior, (3) New Caledonia as well as Oregon. In fact, the union left the fur traders ten times more strongly intrenched than before. By the new arrangement Dr. John McLoughlin was appointed chief factor of the western territories known as Oregon and New Caledonia. When the War of 1812 closed, treaty provided that Oregon should be open to the joint occupancy of English and American traders till the matter of the western boundary could be finally settled. Oregon roughly included all territory between the Columbia and the Spanish fort at San Francisco, namely, Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, parts of Montana and Wyoming. It was cheaper to send provisions round by sea to the fur posts of New Caledonia, in modern British Columbia, than across the continent by way of the Saskatchewan; so McLoughlin’s district also included all the territory far as the Russian possessions in Alaska.

This part of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s history belongs to the United States rather than Canada, but it is interesting to remember that just as the French fur traders explored the Mississippi far south as the Gulf of Mexico, so English fur traders first explored the western states far south as New Spain. This western field was perhaps the most picturesque of all the Hudson’s Bay Company’s possessions.

Fort Vancouver, ninety miles inland from the sea on the Columbia, was the capital of this transmontane kingdom, and yearly till 1846 the fur brigades set out from Fort Vancouver two or three hundred strong by pack horse and canoe. Well-known officers became regular leaders of the different brigades. There was Ross, who led the Rocky Mountain Brigade inland across the Divide to the buffalo ranges of Montana. There was Ogden, son of the Chief Justice in Montreal, who led the Southern Brigade up Snake River to Salt Lake and the Nevada desert and Humboldt River and Mt. Shasta, all of which regions except Salt Lake he was first to discover. There was Tom McKay, son of the McKay who had crossed to the Pacific with MacKenzie, who, dressed as a Spanish cavalier, led the pack-horse brigades down the coast past the Rogue River Indians and the Klamath Lakes to San Francisco, where Dr. Glen Rae had opened a fort for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Then there was the New Caledonia Brigade, two hundred strong, which set out from Fort Vancouver up the Columbia in canoes to the scream of the bagpipes through the rocky canyons of the river. Close to the boundary, shift was made from canoe to pack horse, and, leaving the Columbia, the brigade struck up the Okanogan Valley to Kamloops, bound for the bridle trail up Fraser River. This brigade, in later days, was under Douglas, who became the knighted governor of British Columbia. Tricked out in gay ribbons, the long file of pack ponies, two hundred with riders, two hundred more with packs, moved slowly along the forest trail with a drone as of bees humming in midsummer. So well did ponies know the way that riders often fell asleep, to be suddenly jarred awake by the horses jamming against a tree, or running under a low branch to brush riders off, or hurdle-jumping over windfall. Each of these brigades has its own story, and each story would fill a book. For instance, Glen Rae at San Francisco has a difficult mission. The company has a plan to take over the debts of Mexico to British capitalists and exchange them for California. Glen Rae is sent to watch matters, but he commits the blunder of furnishing arms to the losing side of a revolution. The debt for the arms remains unpaid. Glen Rae suicides, and the company withdraws from California.

When settlers come, fur-bearing animals leave. Long ago the Hudson’s Bay Company had foreseen the end and moved the capital of its Pacific Empire up to Victoria. A string of fur posts extends up Fraser River to New Caledonia.