Throughout—with the exception of four chapters, I may say altogether—I have relied for the thread of my narrative on the documents in Hudson’s Bay House, London; the Minute Books of some two hundred years, the Letter Books, the Stock Books, the Memorial Books, the Daily Journals kept by chief factors at every post and sent to London from 1670. These documents are in tons. They are not open to the public. They are unclassified; and in the case of Minute Books are in duplicates, “the Foule Minutes”—as the inscription on the old parchment describes them—being rough, almost unreadable, notes jotted down during proceedings with interlinings and blottings to be copied into the Minute Books marked “Faire Copie.” In some cases, the latter has been lost or destroyed; and only the uncorrected one remains. It is necessary to state this because discrepancies will be found—noted as the story proceeds—which arise from the fact that some volumes of the corrected minutes have been lost. The Minute Books consist variously from one to five hundred pages each.
Beside the documents of Hudson’s Bay House, London, there is a great mass of unpublished, unexploited material bearing on the Company in the Public Records Office, London. I had some thousands of pages of transcripts of these made which throw marvelous side light on the printed records of Radisson; of Iberville; of Parl. Report 1749; of the Coltman Report and Blue Book of 1817-22; and the Americans in Oregon.
In many episodes, the story told here will differ almost unrecognizably from accepted versions and legends of the same era. This is not by accident. Nor is it because I have not consulted what one writer sarcastically called to my attention as “the secondary authorities”—the words are his, not mine. Nearly all these authorities from earliest to latest days are in my own library and interlined from many readings. Where I have departed from old versions of famous episodes, it has been because records left in the handwriting of the actors themselves compelled me; as in the case of Selkirk’s orders about Red River, Ogden’s discoveries in Nevada and Utah and California, Thompson’s explorations of Idaho, Howse’s explorations in the Rockies, Ogden’s robbery of the Americans, the Americans’ robbery of him.
I regret I have no clue to any Spanish version of why Glen Rae blew out his brains in San Francisco. On this episode, I have relied on the legends current among the old Hudson’s Bay officers and retold so well by Bancroft.
To Mr. C. C. Chipman, commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to Mr. William Ware, the secretary, and Lord Strathcona-and-Mount-Royal, the Governor—I owe grateful thanks for access to the H. B. C. documents.
On the whole, the record of the Adventurers, is not one to bring the blush of regret to those jealous for the Company’s honor. It is a record of daring and courage and adventuring and pomp—in the best sense of the words—and of intrigue and statecraft and diplomacy, too, not always in the best sense of the words—which must take its place in the world’s history far above the bloody pageantry of Spanish conqueror in Mexico and Peru. It is the one case where Feudalism played an important and successful rôle in America, only in the end to be driven from the stage by Young Democracy.
PART I
1610-1631