"Show me proofs this country is yours," he answers. "Show me the title deed and I shall decamp."
Next night a band of Nor'westers, voyageurs well plied with rum, came down the strand to the intruder's tents. They cut his tents to ribbons, scatter his goods to the four winds, and beat his voyageurs into insensibility.
"Voila! there are our proofs," they say.
The French merchant hastens down to Montreal to bring lawsuit, but the judges, you must remember, are shareholders in the Northwest Company, and many of the Legislative Council are Nor'westers. What with real delays and sham delays and put-offs and legal fees, justice is a bit tardy. While the case is pending the French merchant tries again. This time he is not molested at Fort William. They let him proceed on his way up the old trail to Lake of the Woods, the trail found by La Vérendrye; and halfway through the wilderness, where the cataract offers only one path for portage, the Frenchman finds Nor'-westers building a barricade; he tears it down. They build another; he tears that down. They build a third; fast as he tears down, they build up. He must either go back baffled by these suave, smiling, lawless rivals, or fight on the spot to the death; but there is neither glory nor wealth being killed in the wilderness, where not so much as the sands of the shore will tell the true story of the crime. So the French merchant compromises, sells out to the Nor'westers at cost plus carriage, and retires to the St. Lawrence cursing British justice.
It may be guessed that the sudden eruption of "the peddlers," these bush banditti, these Scotch soldiers of fortune with French bullies for fighters, roused the ancient and honorable Hudson's Bay Company from its half-century slumber of peace. Anthony Hendry, who had gone up the Saskatchewan far as the Blackfoot country of the foothills, they had dismissed as a liar in the fifties because he had reported that he had seen Indians on horseback, whereas the sleepy factors of the bay ports knew very well they never saw any kind of Indians except Indians in canoes; but now in the sixties it is noted by the company that not so many furs are coming down from the Up Country. It is voted "the French Canadian peddlers of Montreal" be notified of the company's exclusive monopoly to the trade of these regions. One Findley is sent to Quebec to look after the Hudson's Bay Company's rights; but while the English company talks about its rights, the Nor'westers go in the field and take them.
The English company rubs its eyes and sits up and scratches its heavy head, and passes an order that Mr. Moses Norton, chief factor of Churchill, send Mr. Samuel Hearne to explore the Up Country. Hearne has heard of Far-Away-Metal River, far enough away in all conscience from the Canadian peddlers; and thither in December, 1770, he finds his way, after two futile attempts to set out. Matonabbee, great chief of the Chippewyans, is his guide,—Matonabbee, who brings furs from the Athabasca, and is now accompanied by a regiment of wives to act as beasts of burden in the sledge traces, camp servants, and cooks. Hearne sets out in midwinter in order to reach the Coppermine River in summer, by which he can descend to the Arctic in canoes. Storm or cold, bog or rock, Matonabbee keeps fast pace, so fast he reaches the great caribou traverse before provisions have dwindled and in time for the spring hunt. Here all the Indian hunters of the north gather twice a year to hunt the vast herds of caribou going to the seashore for summer, back to the Up Country for the winter, herds in countless thousands upon thousands, such multitudes the clicking of the horns sounds like wind in a leafless forest, the tramp of the hoofs like galloping cavalry. Store of meat is laid up for Hearne's voyage by Matonabbee's Indians; and a band of warriors joins the expedition to go down Coppermine River. If Hearne had known Indian customs as well as he knew the fur trade, he would have known that it boded no good when Matonabbee ordered the women to wait for his return in the Athabasca country of the west. Absence of women on the march meant only one of two things, a war raid or hunt, and which it was soon enough Hearne learned. They had come at last, on July 12, 1771, on Coppermine River, a mean little stream flowing over rocky bed in the Barren Lands of the Little Sticks (Trees), when Hearne noticed, just above a cataract, the domed tepee tops of an Eskimo camp. It was night, but as bright as day in the long light of the North. Instantly, before Hearne could stop them, his Indians had stripped as for war, and fell upon the sleeping Eskimo in ruthless massacre. Men were brained as they dashed from the domed tents, women speared as they slept, children dispatched with less thought than the white man would give to the killing of a fly. In vain Hearne, with tears in his eyes, begged the Indians to stop. They laughed him to scorn, and doubtless wondered where he thought they yearly got the ten thousand beaver pelts brought to Churchill. A few days later, July 17, 1771, Hearne stood on the shores of the Arctic, heaving to the tide and afloat with ice; but the horrors of the massacre had robbed him of an explorer's exultation, though he was first of pathfinders to reach the Arctic overland. Matonabbee led Hearne back to Churchill in June of 1772 by a wide westward circle through the Athabasca Bear Lake Country, which the Hudson's Bay people thus discovered only a few years before the Nor'westers came.
SAMUEL HEARNE
No longer dare the Hudson's Bay Company ignore the Up Country. Hearne is sent to the Saskatchewan to build Fort Cumberland, and Matthew Cocking is dispatched to the country of the Blackfeet, modern Alberta, to beat up trade, where his French voyageur, Louis Primeau, deserts him bag and baggage, to carry the Hudson's Bay furs off to the Nor'westers. No longer does the English company slumber on the shores of its frozen sea. Yearly are voyageurs sent inland,—"patroons of the woods," given bounty to stay in the wilds, luring any trade from the Nor'westers.