Hearne had not found “Far-Away-Metal-River,” nor the copper mines, nor the Northwest Passage, but he had found fresh tribes of Indians, and these were what Norton wanted. December 7, 1770, less than a month from his home-coming, Hearne was again dispatched by Norton. Matonabbee, a famous guide of the Chippewyans, accompanied the explorer with a retinue of the Indian’s wives to draw sleds and handle baggage. Almost as notable as Norton was Matonabbee, the Chippewyan chief—an Indian of iron constitution and iron will, pitiless to his wives, whom he used as beasts of burden; relentless in his aims, fearless of all Indians, a giant measuring more than six feet, straight as an arrow, supple as willow, hard as nails. Imperturbable and good-natured Matonabbee set the pace at winged speed, pausing for neither hunger nor cold. Christmas week was celebrated by fasting. Matonabbee uttered no complaint; and the white man could not well turn back when the Indian was as eager for the next day’s march as if he had supped sumptuously instead of going to bed on a meal of moss water. Self-pity, fear, hesitation, were emotions of which the guide knew nothing. He had undertaken to lead Hearne to “Far-Away-Metal-River,” and only death could stop him.
In the Barren Lands, caribou enough were killed to afford the whole company provisions for six months; and the marchers were joined by two hundred more Indians. Wood became scarcer and smaller as they marched north. Matonabbee halted in April and ordered his wives to camp while the men made dugouts for the voyage down stream. The boats were heavy in front to resist the ice jams. If Hearne had marveled at the large company now following Matonabbee to a hard, dangerous hunting field he quickly guessed good reasons when wives and children were ordered to head westward and await the warrior’s return at Lake Athabasca. Women are ordered away only when there is prospect of war, and Hearne could easily surmise whence the Chippewyans annually obtained eleven thousand of their best beaver pelts. The sun no longer set. It was continual day, and on June 12, 1771, the swamps of the Barrens converged to a narrow, rocky river bed whence roared a misty cataract—“Far-Off-Metal-River”—the Coppermine River, without any sign of the ebbing tide that was to lead to the South Sea. When Hearne came back to his Indian companions from the river bed, he found them stripped and daubed in war paint, gliding as if in ambush from stone to stone down the steep declivity of the waterfall. Then far below the rapids, like the tops of big bowlders, appeared the rounded leather tent-peaks of an Eskimo camp. The Eskimos were apparently sound asleep, for it was midnight though as light as day.
Before Hearne could collect his senses or alarm the sleeping victims, he had been left far to the rear by his villainous comrades. Then occurred one of the most deplorable tragedies in the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Such of the horrors as are tellable, I have told elsewhere in the account of Hearne’s travels. The raiders fell on the Eskimos like wolves on the sheepfold. Not content with plundering the camp of beaver pelts, they speared, stabbed, bludgeoned, men, women, children, old and young, till the river ran red with innocent blood. Rushing forward, Hearne implored Matonabbee to stop the slaughter. Matonabbee’s response was a shout of laughter. What were the weak for but to be the victims of the strong? What did these fool-Eskimos toil for but to render tribute of their toil to him, who had the force to take? The doctrine was not a new one. Neither is it yet old; only we moderns do our bludgeoning with financial coercion, competition, monopoly or what not, instead of the butt end of a gun, or stone spear; and it would be instructive to know if philosophers in a thousand years will consider our methods as barbarous as we consider the savages of two hundred years ago.
The tortures of that raid have no place in a history of the Hudson’s Bay Company. They are told in Hearne’s life, and they haunted the explorer like a bloody nightmare. One day later, on July 17, Hearne stood on the shores of the Arctic ocean—the first white man to witness the tossing ice floes of that green, lone, paleocrystic sea; but his vision was not the exaltation of an explorer. It was a hideous memory of young girls speared bodily through and through and left writhing pinioned to the ground; of young boys whose hearts were torn out and devoured while warm; of old men and women gouged, buffeted, beaten to death. It does not make a pretty picture, that doctrine of the supremacy of strength, the survival of the fit, the extermination of the weak—it does not make a pretty picture when you reduce it to terms of the physical. How quickly wild-beast savagery may reduce men to the level of beasts was witnessed as Hearne rested on the shores of the Arctic—a musk ox was shot. The warriors tore it to pieces and devoured it raw.
Retreating up the shelving rocks of the Coppermine twenty miles, Hearne found what he thought were the copper mines from which the Indians made their metal weapons. The company then struck westward for the famous Athabasca region where the wives were to camp for the winter. Athabasca proved a hunter’s paradise as it has been ever since Hearne discovered it. Beaver abounded in the swampy muskegs. Buffalo roamed to the south. Moose yards were found in the wooded bluffs; mink, marten, fox, every fur bearer which the English Adventurers sought. In spring, a flotilla carried the Indians down to Churchill, where Hearne arrived on June 30, 1772.
The geographical importance of Hearne’s discovery—the fact that he had found a region half the size of European Russia and proved that not a narrow strip of land lay between the Atlantic and Pacific but a vast continent—was eclipsed by the importance of his discoveries for the fur traders. The region must be occupied by the English Company before the French Canadians found it. Old Moses Norton sick unto death hastened to send word to the governing committee in London, and the governing committee voted Hearne a present of £200, £10 a year for a valet, £130 a year as a salary, and promotion as governor on Norton’s death, which occurred on December 29, 1773.
The death of Norton was of a piece with his life. The bully fell ill of some deadly intestinal trouble that caused him as excruciating tortures as ever his poisons had caused his victims. Calling the officers of the fort, he publicly made his will, leaving all his savings to his wife in England but directing that she should yearly set aside £10 for the clothing of his Indian wives at Churchill. As the Indian women stood round the dying tyrant’s bed his eye detected an officer whispering to one of the young Indian wives. With a roar, Norton leaped to his feet in the bed.
“You —— —— ——,” he roared, “I’ll burn you alive! I’ll burn you alive——”
The effort cost the bully his life. He fell back dead—he whose hand had tyrannized over the fort for fifty years, a mass of corrupting flesh which men hurriedly put out of sight. Hearne was called from the Saskatchewan to become governor and undertake the opening of the inland trade. Hearne’s report on his trip to the Coppermine and Athabasca was received at London in November, 1772. In May of 1773, the minutes recorded “that the company having under consideration the interruptions to the trade from the Canadian Pedlars as reported by Isaac Batts at Basquia, do decide on mature deliberation to send Samuel Hearne to establish a fort at Basquia with Mr. Cocking.” They were accompanied by Louis Primo, John Cole and half a dozen French renegades, who had been bribed to desert from the Canadians—in all seventeen men. Hearne did better than he was instructed. Leaving Batts, Louis Primo and the Frenchmen at Basquia to compete against the Canadians, he established Cumberland House far above, on the Saskatchewan, at Sturgeon Lake, where the Indians could be intercepted before they came down to the French posts. Traders inland were paid £40 a year with a bounty of £2 when they signed their contract and a bonus of a shilling for every twenty beaver.
When Hearne was recalled to Churchill to become governor, Matthew Cocking was left superintendent of inland trade. Cocking had earned laurels for himself by a voyage almost as important as Hearne’s. The very week that Hearne came back to Churchill at the end of June, 1772, from the Athabasca, Cocking had set out from York for the South Saskatchewan. He accompanied the Assiniboines returning from their yearly trip to the bay. By the end of July he had crossed the north end of Lake Winnipeg and gone up the Saskatchewan to Basquia. Louis Primo, the renegade Frenchman, was met leading a flotilla of canoes down to Hudson Bay, and it must have afforded Cocking great satisfaction to see that the activity of the Hudson’s Bay Company had forced the French Canadians to desert both their posts on the lower Saskatchewan. He passed the empty houses on the banks of the river where the leaders of the French-Canadians had had their forts, Findlay’s and Frobisher’s and Curry’s. Leaving canoes somewhere eastward of the Forks, Cocking struck south for the country of the Blackfeet at the foothills of the Rockies, near what is now the International Boundary. The South Saskatchewan was crossed at the end of August in bull-boats—tub-like craft made of parchment stretched on willows. In the Eagle Hills, Cocking met French traders, who had abandoned civilized life and joined the Indian tribes. The Eagle Hills were famous as the place where the Indians got tent poles and birch bark before crossing the plains to the east and south. Cocking spent the winter with the Blackfeet and the Bloods and the Piegans and the Sarcees, whom he names as the Confederacy of Waterfall Indians, owing to the numerous cataracts on the upper reaches of Bow River. He was amazed to find fields of cultivated tobacco among the Blackfeet and considered the tribe more like Europeans than any Indians he had ever met. The winter was spent hunting buffalo by means of the famous “pounds.” Buffalo were pursued by riders into a triangular enclosure of sticks round a large field. Behind the fences converging to a point hid the hunters, whose cries and clappings frightened the herds into rushing precipitately to the converging angle. Here was either a huge hole, or the natural drop over the bank of a ravine, where the buffalo tumbled, mass after mass of infuriated animals, literally bridging a path for the living across the bodies of the dead. The Blackfeet hunters thought nothing of riding for a hundred miles to round up the scattered herds to one of these “pounds” or “corrals.” All that Hendry had said of the Blackfeet twenty years before, Cocking found to be true. All were riders—men, women, children—the first tribes Cocking had yet met where women were not beasts of burden. The tribe had earthen pots for cooking utensils, used moss for tinder, and recorded the history of the people in rude drawings on painted buffalo robes. In fact, Cocking’s description of the tribal customs might be an account of the Iroquois. The Blackfeet’s entire lives were spent doing two things—hunting and raiding the Snakes of the South for horses. Men and women captives were tortured with shocking cruelty that made the Blackfeet a terror to all enemies; but young captives were adopted into the tribe after the custom followed by the Iroquois of the East. Of food, there was always plenty from the buffalo hunts; and game abounded from the Saskatchewan Forks to the mountains.