From Kelsey’s journal, it is impossible to follow the exact course of his wanderings. Enemies, who tried to prove that the English Company deserved no credit for exploration, declared that he did not go farther than five hundred miles from the bay, seventy-one by canoe, three hundred through woods overland, forty-six across a plain, then eighty-one more to the buffalo country. From his own journal, the distance totals up six hundred miles; but he does not mention any large river except the Hayes, or large lake; so that after striking westward he must have been north of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, but not so far north and west as Athabasca. This would place his wanderings in the modern province of Saskatchewan.
It was the 24th of August before he joined Washa, chief of the Assiniboines, and took up lodgings amid the eighty tents of the tribe. Solemnly, the peace pipe was smoked and, on the 12th of September, Kelsey presented the Assiniboine chief with the present of a lace coat, a cap, a sash, guns, knives, powder and shot, telling the Indians these were tokens of what the white men would do if the Indians proved good hunters; but on no account must the tribes war on one another, or the white man would give the enemy guns, which would exterminate all fighters. Washa promised to bring his hunt down to the bay, which tribal wars prevented for some years. Hudson’s Bay traders, who followed up Kelsey’s exploration—aimed for the region now known as Cumberland House, variously called Poskoyac and Basquia—westward of Lake Winnipeg, so there is little doubt it was in this land that the Hudson’s Bay boy first hunted and camped. With Kelsey, the result was instant promotion. His wife went home to England, where she was regularly paid his salary, and he rose to a position second only to the venerable old Governor Knight, commander of the entire bay.
Meanwhile, the French were having their own troubles in the captured forts. War had broken out again, and was going against France in Marlborough’s victories. The French might hold the bay, but not a pound of provisions could be sent across seas on account of English privateers. The French garrisons of Hudson Bay were starving. Indians, who brought down pelts from the Pays d’en Haut or upcountry—could obtain no goods in barter and having grown dependent on the whiteman’s firearms, were in turn reduced to straits.
Lagrange, a gay court adventurer, had come out in 1704 to Nelson, which the French called Bourbon, with a troop of pleasure-seeking men and women for a year’s hunting. For one year, the drab monotony of post life was enlivened by a miniature Paris. Wines from the royal cellars flowed like water. The reckless songs of court gallants rang among the rafters, and the slippered feet of more reckless court beauties tripped the light dance over the rough-timbered floors of the fur post. It was a wild age, and a wild court from which they came to this wilderness—reckless women and reckless men, whose God was Pleasure. Who knows what court intrigue was being hidden and acted out at Port Nelson? Poor butterflies, that had scorched their wings and lost their youth, came here to masquerade! Soldiers of fortune, who had gambled their patrimony in the royal court and stirred up scandal, rusticating in a little log fort in the wilderness! The theme is more romantic than the novelist could conceive.
But war broke out, and Lagrange’s gay troop scattered like leaves before the wind. Iberville was dead in Havana. La Fôrest of the Quebec Fur Company had gone back to the St. Lawrence. Jeremie, the interpreter, had gone to France on leave, in 1707, and now in 1708, when the French garrisons were starving and the high seas scoured by privateers—Jeremie came back as governor, under the king. He at once dispatched men to hunt. Nine bushrangers had camped one night near a tent of Crees. The Indians were hungry, sullen, resentful to the whitemen who failed to trade guns and powder as the English had traded. At the fort, they had been turned away with their furs on their hands. It is the characteristic of the French trader that he frequently descends to the level of the Indian. Jeremie’s nine men were, perhaps, slightly intoxicated after their supper of fresh game and strong brandy. Two Indian women came to the camp and invited two Frenchmen to the Indian tents. The fellows tumbled into the trap like the proverbial country jack with the thimblerigger. No sooner had they reached the Indian tepees than they were brained. Seizing the pistols and knives of the dead men, the Indians crept through the thicket to the fire of the bush-rovers. With unearthly yells they fell on the remaining seven and cut them to pieces. One wounded man alone escaped by feigning the rigor of death, while they stripped him naked, and creeping off into hiding of the bushes while the savages devoured the dead. Waiting till they had gone, the wounded man crawled painfully back by night—a distance of thirty miles—to Jeremie, at an outpost. Jeremie quickly withdrew the garrison from the outpost, retreated within the double palisades of Nelson (Bourbon) shot all bolts, unplugged his cannon and awaited siege; but Indians do not attack in the open. Jeremie held the fort till events in Europe relieved him of his charge.
In spite of French victories, as long as Mike Grimmington and Nick Smithsend were bringing home cargoes of thirty thousand beaver a year, the English Adventurers prospered. In fact, within twenty years of their charter’s grant, they had prospered so exceedingly that they no longer had the face to declare such enormous dividends, and on September 3, 1690, it was unanimously decided to treble their original stock from £10,500 to £31,500. The reasons given for this action were: that there were furs of more value than the original capital of the Company now in the Company’s warehouses; that the year’s cargo was of more value than the original capital of the Company; that the returns in beaver from Nelson and Severn alone this year exceeded £20,000; that the forts and armaments were of great value, and that the Company had reasons to expect £100,000 reparation from the French.
Immediately after the decision, a dividend of 25 per cent. was declared on the trebled stock.
Such prosperity excited envy. The fur buyers and pelt workers and skin merchants of London were up in arms. People began to question whether a royal house, which had been deposed from the English throne, had any right to deed away in perpetuity public domain of such vast wealth to court favorites. Besides, court favorites had scattered with the ruined Stuart House. Newcomers were the holders of the Hudson’s Bay Company stock. What right had these newcomers to the privileges of such monopoly? Especially, what was the meaning of such dividends, when the Company regularly borrowed all the money needed for working operations? As late as 1685, the Company had borrowed £2,000 at 6 per cent. from its own shareholders, and after French disasters began to injure its credit in the London market, it regularly sent agents to borrow money in Amsterdam.
The Company foresaw that the downfall of the Stuarts might affect its monopoly and in 1697 had applied for the confirmation of its charter by Parliament. Against this plea, London fur buyers filed a counter petition: (1) It was too arbitrary a charter to be granted to private individuals. (2) It was of no advantage to the public but a mere stockjobbing concern, £100 worth of stock selling as high as £300, £30 as high as £200. (3) Beaver purchased in Hudson Bay for 6d sold in London for 6s. (4) Monopoly drove the Indians to trade with the French. (5) The charter covered too much territory.