Hearne’s picture will be found in “Pathfinders of the West.”
CHAPTER XX
1760-1810
“THE COMING OF THE PEDLARS”—A NEW RACE OF WOOD-ROVERS THRONGS TO THE NORTHWEST—BANDITS OF THE WILDS WAR AMONG THEMSELVES—TALES OF BORDER WARFARE, WASSAIL AND GRANDEUR—THE NEW NORTHWEST COMPANY CHALLENGES THE AUTHORITY AND FEUDALISM OF THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY
La Perouse’s raid on Churchill and York was the least of the misfortunes that now beset the English Adventurers. Within a year from the French victory, the English prisoners had been ransomed from France and the dismantled forts were rebuilt. It was a subtler foe that menaced the Hudson’s Bay Company. Down at Abbittibbi, halfway to Quebec—in at Henley House and Martin’s Falls and Osnaburg House on the way from Albany to the modern Manitoba—up the Saskatchewan, where Cocking and Batts and Walker held the forts for trade—between Churchill and Athabasca, where Longmore and Ross had been sent on Hearne’s trail—yes, even at the entrance to the Rockies, where Mr. Howse and the astronomer Turner had found a pass leading from the headwaters of the Saskatchewan, constantly there emerged from the woods, or swept gayly up in light birch canoes, strange hunters, wildwood rovers, free-lances, men with packs on their backs, who knocked nonchalantly at the gates of the English posts for a night’s lodging and were eagerly admitted because it was safer to have a rival trader under your eye than out among the Indians creating bedlam by the free distribution of rum.
“Pedlars,” the English called these newcomers, who overran the sacred territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company as though royal charters were a joke and trading monopolies as extinct as the dodo. It was all very well to talk of the rights of your charter, but what became of your rights if interlopers stole them while you talked about them? And what was the use of sending men to drum up trade and bring Indians down to the bay with their furs, if pedlars caught the Indians halfway down at portage, carrying place and hunting rendezvous, and in spite of the fact that those Indians owed the English for half-a-dozen years’ outfit—rifled away the best of the furs, sometimes by the free distribution of rum, sometimes by such seditious talk as that “the English had no rights in this country anyway and the Indians were fools to become slaves to the Hudson’s Bay Company?”
This was a new kind of challenge to feudalism. Sooner or later it was bound to come. The ultimate umpire of all things in life is—Fact. Was the charter valid that gave this empire of trade to a few Englishmen, or was it buncombe? “The Pedlars” didn’t talk about their rights. They took them. That was to be supreme test of the English Company’s rights. Somebody else took the rights, and there were good reasons why the Hudson’s Bay Company did not care to bring a question of its rights before the courts. When the charter was confirmed by act of Parliament in 1697, it was specified for only seven years. At the end of that period the Company did not seek a renewal. Request for renewal would of itself be acknowledgment of doubt as to the charter. The Company preferred “to have and to hold,” rather than risk adverse decision. They contented themselves with blocking the petitions of rivals for trade privileges on the bay, but the eruption of these wildwood rovers—“The French Canadian Pedlars”—was a contingency against which there seemed to be no official redress.
It remained only for the old Company to gird itself to the fray—a fight with bandits and free-booters and raiders in a region where was law of neither God nor man. Sales had fallen to a paltry £2,000 a year. Dividends stopped altogether. Value of stock fell from £250 to £50. The Company advertised for men—more men. Agents scoured the Orkneys and the Highlands of Scotland for recruits, each to sign for five years, a bounty of £8 to be paid each man. Five ships a year sailed to the bay. Three hundred “patroons” were yearly sent into the woods, and when their time expired—strange to relate—they did not return to Scotland. What became of them? Letters ceased to come home. Inquiries remained unanswered. The wilderness had absorbed them and their bones lay bleaching on the unsheltered prairie where the arrow of Indian raider inspired by “the Pedlars” had shot them as they traversed the plains. No wonder service with the Hudson’s Bay Company became ill-omened in the Orkneys and the Highlands! In spite of the bounty of £8 a man, their agents were at their wits’ ends for recruits.