RETURN OF THE ENGLISH CAPTIVES (From a contemporary print)
So ended what is known as the Pontiac War. Up at Detroit in 1765 Pontiac, in council with the whites, explains that he has listened to bad advice, but now his heart is right. "Father, you have stopped the rum barrel while we talked," he says grimly; "as our business is finished, we request that you open the barrel, that we may drink and be merry."
Not a very heroic curtain fall to a dramatic life. But pause a bit: the Pontiac War was the last united stand of a doomed race against the advance of the conquering alien; and the Indian is defeated, and he knows it, and he acknowledges it, and he drowns his despair in a vice, and so he passes down the Long Trail of time with his face to the west, doomed, hopeless, pushed westward and ever west.
Pontiac goes down the Mississippi to his friends, the French fur traders of St. Louis. One morning in 1767, after a drinking bout, he is found across the river, lying in camp, with his skull split to the neck. By the sword he had lived, by the sword he perished. Was the murder the result of a drunken quarrel, or did some frenzied frontiersman with deathless woes bribe the hand of the assassin? The truth of the matter is unknown, and Pontiac's death remains a theme for fiction.
What with struggles for power and Indian wars, one might think that the few hundred English colonists of Quebec and Montreal had all they could do. Not so: their quarrels with the French Catholics and fights with the Indians are merely incidental to the main aim of their lives, to the one object that has brought them stampeding to Canada as to a new gold field, namely, quick way to wealth; and the only quick way to wealth was by the fur trade. In the wilderness of the Up Country wander some two or three thousand cast-off wood rovers of the old French fur trade. As the prodigals come down the Ottawa, down the Detroit, down the St. Lawrence, the English and Scotch merchants of Montreal and Quebec meet them. Mighty names those merchants have in history now,—McGillivrays and MacKenzies and McGills and Henrys and MacLeods and MacGregors and Ogilvies and MacTavishes and Camerons,—but at this period of the game the most of them were what we to-day would call petty merchants or peddlers. In their storehouses—small, one-story, frame affairs—were packed goods for trade. With these goods they quickly outfitted the French bushrover—$3000 worth to a canoe—and packed the fellow back to the wilderness to trade on shares before any rival firm could hire him. Within five years of Wolfe's victory in 1759 all the French bushrovers of the Up Country had been reëngaged by merchants of Montreal and Quebec.
MONTREAL (From a contemporary print)
Then imperceptible changes came,—the changes that work so silently they are like destiny. Because it is unsafe to let the rascal bushrovers and voyageurs go off by themselves with $3000 worth to the canoe load, the merchants began to accompany them westward. "Bourgeois," the voyageurs call their outfitters. Then, because success in fur trade must be kept secret, the merchants cease to have their men come down to Montreal. They meet them with the goods halfway, at La Vérendrye's old stamping ground on Lake Superior, first at the place called Grand Portage, then, when the United States boundary is changed in 1783, at Kaministiquia, or modern Fort William, named after William McGillivray. Pontiac's War puts a stop to the new trade, but by 1766 the merchants are west again. Henry goes up the Saskatchewan to the Forks, and comes back with such wealth of furs he retires a rich magnate of Montreal. The Frobisher brothers strike for new hunting ground. So do Peter Pond and Bostonnais Pangman, and the MacKenzies, Alexander and Roderick. Instead of following up the Saskatchewan, they strike from Lake Winnipeg northward for Churchill River and Athabasca, and they bring out furs that transform those peddlers into merchant princes. A little later the chief buyer of the Montreal furs is one John Jacob Astor of New York. Then another change. Rivalry hurts fur trade. Especially do different prices demoralize the Indians. The Montreal merchants pool their capital and become known as the Northwest Fur Company. They now hire their voyageurs outright on a salary. No man is paid less than what would be $500 in modern money, with board; and any man may rise to be clerk, trader, wintering partner, with shares worth 800 pounds ($4000), that bring dividends of two and three hundred per cent. The petty merchants whom Murray and Carleton despised became in twenty years the opulent aristocracy of Montreal, holding the most of the public offices, dominating the government, filling the judgeships, and entertaining with a lavish hospitality that put vice-regal splendor in the shade. The Beaver Club is the great rendezvous of the Montreal partners. "Fortitude in Distress" is the motto and lords of the ascendant is their practice. No man, neither governor nor judge, may ignore these Nor'westers, and it may be added they are a law unto themselves. One example will suffice. A French merchant of Montreal took it into his head to have a share of this wealth-giving trade. He was advised to pool his interests with the Nor'westers, and he foolishly ignored the advice. In camp at Grand Portage on Lake Superior he is told all the country hereabout belongs to the Nor'westers, and he must decamp.