CHAPTER EIGHT.
Retrospective--The North-west Passage--The Bay of Hudson--Rival Claims--The Old French Fur Trade--The North-west Company--How the Half-breeds came--The Highlanders defeated-Progress--Old Feuds.
WE who have seen in our times the solution of the long-hidden secret worked out amidst the icy solitudes of the Polar Seas cannot realize the excitement which for nigh 400 years vexed the minds of European kings and peoples--how they thought and toiled over this northern passage to wild realms of Cathay and Hindostan--how from every port, from the Adriatic to the Baltic, ships had sailed out in quest of this ocean strait, to find in succession portions of the great world which Columbus had given to the human race.
Adventurous spirits were these early navigators who thus fearlessly entered the great unknown oceans of the North in craft scarce larger than canal-boats. And how long and how tenaciously did they hold that some passage must exist by which the Indies could be reached! Not a creek, not a bay, but seemed to promise the long-sought-for opening to the Pacific.
Hudson and Frobisher, Fox, Baffin, Davis, and James, how little thought they of that vast continent whose presence was but an obstacle in the path of their discovery! Hudson had long perished in the ocean which bears his name before it was known to be a cul-de-sac. Two hundred years had passed away from the time of Columbus ere his dream of an open sea to the city of Quinsay in Cathay had ceased to find believers. This immense inlet of Hudson Bay must lead to the Western Ocean. So, at least, thought a host of bold navigators who steered their way through fog and ice into the great Sea of Hudson, giving those names to strait and bay and island, which we read in our school-days upon great wall-hung maps and never think or care about again. Nor were these anticipations of reaching the East held only by the sailors.
La Salle, when he fitted out his expeditions from the Island of Montreal for the West, named his point of departure La Chine, so certain was he that his canoes would eventually reach Cathay. And La Chine still exists to attest his object. But those who went on into the great continent, reaching the shores of vast lakes and the banks of mighty rivers, learnt another and a truer story. They saw these rivers flowing with vast volumes of water from the north-west; and, standing on the brink of their unknown waves, they rightly judged that such rolling volumes of water must have their sources far away in distant mountain ranges. Well might the great heart of De Soto sink within him when, after long months of arduous toil through swamp and forest, he stood at last on the low shores of the Mississippi and beheld in thought the enormous space which lay between him and the spot where such a river had its birth.
The East--it was always the East. Columbus had said the world was not so large as the common herd believed it, and yet when he had increased it by a continent he tried to make it smaller than it really was. So fixed were men's minds upon the East, that it was long before they would think of turning to account the discoveries of those early navigators. But in time there came to the markets of Europe the products of the New World. The gold and the silver of Mexico and the rich sables of the frozen North found their way into the marts of Western Europe. And while Drake plundered galleons from the Spanish Main, England and France commenced their career of rivalry for the possession of that trade in furs and peltries which had its sources round the icy shores of the Bay of Hudson. It was reserved however for the fiery Prince Rupert to carry into effect the idea of opening up the North-west. Through the ocean of Hudson Bay.
Somewhere about 200 years ago a ship sailed away from England bearing in it a company of adventurers sent out to form a colony upon the southern shores of James's Bay. These men named the new land after the Prince who sent them forth, and were the pioneers of that "Hon. Company of Adventurers from England trading into Hudson Bay."
More than forty years previous to the date of the charter by which Charles II. conferred the territory of Rupert's Land upon the London company, a similar grant had been made by the French monarch, Louis XIII, to "La Compagnie de la Nouvelle France." Thus there had arisen rival claims to the possession of this sterile region, and although treaties had at various times attempted to rectify boundaries or to rearrange watersheds, the question of the right of Canada or of the Company to hold a portion of the vast territory draining into Hudson Bay had never been legally solved.
For some eighty years after this settlement on James's Bay, the Company held a precarious tenure of their forts and factories. Wild-looking men, more Indian than French, marched from Canada over the height of land and raided upon the posts of Moose and Albany, burning the stockades and carrying off the little brass howitzers mounted thereon. The same wild-looking men, pushing on into the interior from Lake Superior, made their way into Lake Winnipeg, up the great Saskatchewan River, and across to the valley of the Red River; building their forts for war and trade by distant lake-shore and confluence of river current, and drawing off the valued trade in furs to France; until all of a sudden there came the great blow struck by Wolfe under the walls of Quebec, and every little far-away post and distant fort throughout the vast interior continent felt the echoes of the guns of Abraham. It might have been imagined that now, when the power of France was crushed in the Canadas, the trade which she had carried on with the Indian tribes of the Far West would lapse to the English company trading Into Hudson Bay; but such was not the case.
Immediately upon the capitulation of Montreal, fur traders from the English cities of Boston and Albany appeared in Montreal and Quebec, and pushed their way along the old French route to Lake Winnipeg and into the valley of the Saskatchewan. There they, in turn, erected their little posts and trading-stations, laid out their beads and blankets, their strouds and cottons, and exchanged their long-carried goods for the beaver and marten and fisher skins of the Nadow, Sioux, Kinistineau, and Osinipoilles. Old maps of the North-west still mark spots along the shores of Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan with names of Henry's House, Finlay's House, and Mackay's House. These "houses" were the Trading-posts of the first English free-traders, whose combination in 1783 gave rise to the great North-west Fur Company, so long the fierce rival of the Hudson Bay. To picture here the jealous rivalry which during forty years raged throughout these immense territories would be to fill a volume with tales of adventure and discovery.
The zeal with which the North-west Company pursued the trade in furs quickly led to the exploration of the entire country. A Mackenzie penetrated to the Arctic Ocean down the immense river which bears his name--a Frazer and a Thompson pierced the tremendous masses of the Rocky Mountains and beheld the Pacific rolling its waters against the rocks of New Caledonia. Based upon a system which rewarded the efforts of its employees by giving them a share in the profits of the trade, making them partners as well as servants, the North-west Company soon put to sore straits the older organization of the Hudson Bay. While the heads of both companies were of the same nation, the working men and voyageurs were of totally different races, the Hudson Bay employing Highlanders and Orkney men from Scotland, and the North-west Company drawing its recruits from the hardy French inhabitants of Lower Canada. This difference of nationality deepened the strife between them, and many a deed of cruelty and bloodshed lies buried amidst the oblivion of that time in those distant regions. The men who went out to the North-west as voyageurs and servants in the employment of the rival companies from Canada and from Scotland hardly ever returned to their native lands. The wild roving life in the great prairie or the trackless pine forest, the vast solitudes of inland lakes and rivers, the chase, and the camp-fire had too much of excitement in them to allow the voyageur to return again to the narrow limits of civilization. Besides, he had taken to himself an Indian wife, and although the ceremony by which that was effected was frequently wanting in those accessories of bell, book, and candle so essential to its proper well-being, nevertheless the voyageur and his squaw got on pretty well together, and little ones, who jabbered the smallest amount of English or French, and a great deal of Ojibbeway, or Cree, or Assineboine, began to multiply around them.
Matters were in this state when, in 1812, as we have already seen in an earlier chapter, the Earl of Selkirk, a large proprietor of the Hudson Bay Company, conceived the idea of planting a colony of Highlanders on the banks of the Red River near the lake called Winnipeg.
Some great magnate was intent on making a deer forest in Scotland about the period that this country was holding its own with difficulty against Napoleon. So, leaving their native parish of Kildonan in Sutherlandshire, these people established another Kildonan in the very heart of North America, in the midst of an immense and apparently boundless prairie. Poor people! they had a hard time of it-inundation and North-west Company hostility nearly sweeping them off their prairie lands. Before long matters reached a climax. The North-west Canadians and half-breeds sallied forth one day and attacked the settlers; the settlers had a small guard in whose prowess they placed much credence; the guard turned out after the usual manner of soldiers, the half-breeds and Indians lay in the long grass after the method of savages. For once the Indian tactics prevailed. The Governor of the Hudson Bay Company and the guard were shot down, the fort at Point Douglas on the Red River was taken, and the Scotch settlers driven out to the shores of Lake Winnipeg.
To keep the peace between the rival companies and the two nationalities was no easy matter, but at last Lord Selkirk came to the rescue; they were disbanding regiments after the great peace of 1815, and portions of two foreign corps, called De Muiron's and De Watteville's Regiments, were induced to attempt an expedition to the Red River.
Starting in winter from the shores of Lake Superior, these hardy fellows traversed the forests and frozen lakes upon snow-shoes, and, entering from the Lake of the Woods, suddenly appeared in the Selkirk Settlement, and took possession of Fort Douglas.
A few years later the great Fur Companies became amalgamated, or rather the North-west ceased to exist, and henceforth the Hudson Bay Company ruled supreme from the shores of the Atlantic to the frontiers of Russian America.
From that date, 1822, the progress of the little colony had been gradual but sure. Its numbers were constantly increased by the retired servants of the Hudson Bay Company, who selected it as a place of settlement when their period of active service had expired. Thither came the voyageur and the trader to spend the winter of their lives in the little world of Assineboine. Thus the Selkirk Settlement grew and flourished, caring little for the outside earth-"the world forgetting, by the world forgot."
But the old feelings which had their rise in earlier years never wholly died out. National rivalry still existed, and it required no violent effort to fan the embers into flame again. The descendants of the two nationalities dwelt apart; there were the French parishes and the Scotch and English parishes, and, although each nationality spoke the same mother tongue, still the spread of schools and churches fostered the different languages of the fatherland, and perpetuated the distinction of race which otherwise would have disappeared by lapsing into savagery. In an earlier chapter I have traced the events immediately pre ceding the breaking out of the insurrectionary movement among the French half-breeds, and in the foregoing pages I have tried to sketch the early life and history of the country into which I am about to ask the reader to follow me. Into the immediate sectional disputes and religious animosities of the present movement it is not my intention to enter; as I journey on an occasional arrow may be shot to the right or to the left at men and things; but I will leave to others the details of a petty provincial quarrel, while-I have before me, stretching far and wide, the vast solitudes which await in silence the footfall of the future.