When Hendry had gone up the Saskatchewan in 1754, he had seen the houses of French traders. French power fell at Quebec in 1759, and the French wood-rovers scattered to the wilds; but when Cocking went up the Saskatchewan in 1772, what was his amazement to find these French rovers organized under leadership of Scotch merchants from Montreal—Curry, and Frobisher, and McTavish, and Todd, and McGill, and McGillivrays.
Under French rule, fur trade had been regulated by license. Under English rule was no restriction. First to launch out from Montreal with a cargo of goods for trade, was Alexander Henry, senior, in 1760. From the Michilimackinac region and westward, Henry in ten years, from 1765 to 1775, brought back to Montreal such a wealth of furs, that peltry trade became a fever. No capital was needed but the capital of boundless daring. Montreal merchants advanced goods for trade. One went with the canoes as partner and commander. Three thousand dollars worth of goods constituted a load. Frenchmen were engaged as hunters and voyageurs—eight to a canoe, and before the opening of the century, as many as five hundred canoes yearly passed up the Ottawa from Montreal for the Pays d’en Haut, west of Lake Superior, ten and twenty canoes in a brigade. In this way, Thomas Curry had gone from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, and Lake Winnipeg up the Saskatchewan, in 1766, as far as the Forks, bribing that renegade Louis Primo, to steal the furs bought by Cocking for the Hudson’s Bay, and to lead the brigade on down to Montreal. One voyage sufficed to yield Curry $50,000 clear, a sum that was considered a fortune in those days, and enabled him to retire. The fur fever became an epidemic, a mania. James Finlay of Montreal, in 1771, pushed up the Saskatchewan beyond the Forks, or what is now Prince Albert. Todd, McGill & Company outfitted Joseph and Benjamin Frobisher for a dash north of the Saskatchewan in 1772-5, where, by the luckiest chance in the world, they met the Chippewyan and Athabasca Indians on their way to Churchill with furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Frobishers struck up friendship with “English Chief”—leader of the Indian brigades—plied the argument of rum night and day, bade the Indians ignore their debts to the English company, offered to outfit them for the next year’s hunt and bagged the entire cargo of furs—such an enormous quantity that they could take down only half the cargo that year and had to leave the other half cached, to the everlasting credit of the Indian’s honesty and discredit of the white man’s. Henceforth, this post was known as Portage de Traite. It led directly from the Saskatchewan to the Athabasca and became a famous meeting place. Portage “of the Stretched Frog” the Indians called it, for the Frobishers had been so keen on the trade that they had taught the Indians how to stretch skins, and the Indians had responded in mischief by tacking a stretched frog skin on the door of the cabin. Pushing yet farther toward Athabasca, the Frobisher brothers built another post norwestward, Isle à la Crosse, on an island where the Indians met for the sport of lacrosse.
Besides the powerful house of McTavish, Frobisher, Todd, McGill and McGillivray, were hosts of lesser traders who literally peddled their goods to the Indians. In 1778, these pedlars pooled their stock and outfitted Peter Pond to go on beyond the Frobisher posts to Athabasca. Here, some miles south of the lake, Pond built his fort. Pond was a Boston man of boundless ambition and energy but utterly unscrupulous. While at Athabasca, he heard from the Indians rumors of the Russian fur traders on the Pacific Coast and he drew that famous map of the interior, which was to be presented to the Empress of Russia. He seems to have been cherishing secret designs of a great fur monopoly.
Fur posts sprang up on the waterways of the West like mushrooms. Rum flowed like water—50,000 gallons a year “the pedlars” brought to the Saskatchewan from Montreal. Disorders were bound to ensue. At Eagle Hills near Battleford, in 1780, the drunken Crees became so obstreperous in their demands for more liquor that the three terrified traders cooped up in their house tried to save themselves by putting laudanum in the liquor. An Indian was drugged to death. The sobered Crees sulky from their debauch, arose to a man, rammed the doors, stabbed the three whites and seven half-breed traders to death, burnt the fort and sent coureurs running from tribe to tribe across the prairie to conspire for a massacre of all white traders in the country. Down on the Assiniboine at what is now known as Portage la Prairie, where the canoemen portaged across to Lake Manitoba and so to Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, were three strong trading houses under two men called Brice and Boyer. With them were twenty-three Frenchmen. Three different companies had their rendezvous here. The men were scattered in the three houses and off guard when one night the darkness was made hideous by the piercing war cry of the Assiniboines. Before lights could be put out, the painted warriors had swooped down on two of the houses. The whites were butchered as they dashed out—eleven men in as many seconds. The third house had warning from the shots at the others. Brice and Boyer were together. Promptly, lights were put out, muskets rammed through the parchment windows and chinks of the log walls, and a second relay of loaded weapons made ready. When the Assiniboines attempted to rush the third house, they were met with a solid crash of musketry that mowed down some thirty warriors and gave the assailants pause. With checked ardor, the Indians retreated to the other houses. They could at least starve the white men out, but the white men wisely did not wait. While the Assiniboines rioted, drunk on the booty of rum in the captured cabins, Brice ordered all liquor spilt in his house. Taking what peltries he could, abandoning the rest, Brice led a dash for the river. Darkness favored the fugitive whites. Three only of the retreating men fell under the shower of random arrows—Belleau, Facteau, Lachance. Launching canoes with whispers and muffling their paddles, the white men rowed all night, hid by day, and in three days were safe with the traders at the Forks, or what is now Winnipeg.
Up at Athabasca, Pond, the indomitable, was setting a bad example for lawless work. Wadin was his partner; Le Sieur, his clerk. No greater test of fairness and manhood exists than to box two men in a house ten by ten in the wilderness, with no company but their own year in, year out. Pond was for doing impossibles—or what seemed impossibles at that day. He had sent two traders down Big River (the MacKenzie) as far as Slave Lake. The Indians were furiously hostile. Wadin, the Swiss partner, opposed all risks. Lonely, unstrung and ill-natured, Pond conceived that hatred for his partner which men, who have been tied too close to an alien nature, know. The men had come to blows. One night the quarrel became so hot, Le Sieur withdrew from the house. He had gone only a few steps when he heard two shots. Rushing back, he found the Swiss weltering in his blood on the floor. “Be off! Never let me see your face again,” shouted the wounded man, catching sight of Pond. Those were his last words. It is a terrible commentary on civilization that the first blood shed in the Athabasca was that of a white man slain by a white man; but the Athabasca was three thousand miles away from punishment and the merry game had only begun. Later, Pond was tried for this crime, but acquitted in Montreal.
Roving Assiniboines had visited the Mandanes of the Missouri, this year. They brought back with them not only stolen horses, but an unknown, unseen horror—the germ of smallpox—which ran like a fiery scourge for three years, from Red River and the Assiniboine to the Rockies, sweeping off two-thirds of the native population. Camp after camp, tribe after tribe, was attacked and utterly destroyed, leaving no monument but a heap of bleaching bones scraped clean by the wolves. Tent leather flapped lonely to the wind, rotting on the tepee poles where Death had spared not a soul of a whole encampment. In vain the maddened Indians made offerings to their gods, slew their children to appease this Death Demon’s wrath, and cast away all their belongings. Warriors mounted their fleetest horses and rode like mad to outrace the Death they fancied was pursuing them. Delirious patients threw themselves into the lakes and rivers to assuage suffering. The epidemic was of terrible virulence. The young and middle-aged fell victims most readily, and many aged parents committed suicide rather than live on, bereft of their children. There was an end to all conspiracy for a great uprising and massacre of the whites. The whites had fled before the scourge as terrified as were the Indians and for three years there was scarcely a fur trader in the country from the Missouri to the Saskatchewan.
During the interval, the merchants of Montreal had put their heads together. Division and internecine warfare in the face of Indian hostility and the Hudson’s Bay traders steady advancement inland, were folly. The Montrealers must unite. The united traders were known as the Northwest Company. The Company had no capital. Montreal partners who were merchants outfitted the canoes with goods. Men experienced in the trade led the brigades westward. The former gave credit for goods, the latter time on the field. The former acted as agents to sell the furs, the latter as wintering partners to barter for the furs with the Indians. To each were assigned equal shares—a share apiece to each partner, or sixteen shares in all, in the first place; later increased to twenty and forty-six and ninety-six shares as the Company absorbed more and more of the free traders. As a first charge against the proceeds were the wages of the voyageurs—£100 a year, five times as much as the Hudson’s Bay Company paid for the same workers. Then the cost of the goods was deducted—$3,000 a canoe—and in the early days ninety canoes a year were sent North. Later, when the Nor’Westers absorbed all opposition, the canoes increased to five hundred. The net returns were then divided into sixteen parts and the profits distributed to the partners. By 1787, shares were valued at £800 each. At first, net returns were as small as £40,000 a year, but this dividend among only sixteen partners gave what was considered a princely income in those days. Later, net returns increased to £120,000 and £200,000, but by this time the number of partners was ninety-six. Often the yearly dividend was £400 a share. As many as 200,000 beaver were sold by the Nor’Westers in a year, and the heaviest buyer of furs at Montreal was John Jacob Astor of New York. Chief among the Eastern agents, were the two Frobisher brothers, Benjamin and Joseph—McGill, Todd, Holmes, and Simon McTavish, the richest merchant of Montreal, nicknamed “the Marquis” for his pompous air of wearing prosperity. Chief among the wintering partners were Peter Pond, the American of Athabasca fame, the McGillivrays, nephews of McTavish; the MacLeods, the Grants, the Camerons, MacIntoshes, Shaws, McDonalds, Finlays, Frasers, and Henry, nephew of the Henry who first went to Michilimackinac.
Not only did the new company forthwith send ninety canoes to the North by way of Lake Superior, but one hundred and twenty men were sent through Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to Detroit, for the fur region between Lake Huron and the Mississippi. It was at this period that the Canadian Government was besieged for a monopoly of trade west of Lake Superior, in return for which the Nor’Westers promised to explore the entire region between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean. When the Government refused to grant the monopoly, the Nor’Westers stopped asking for rights. They prepared to take them.
In Montreal, the Nor’Westers were lords in the ascendant, socially and financially, living with lavish and regal hospitality, keeping one strong hand on their interests in the West, the other hand on the pulse of the government. Some of the partners were members of the Assembly. All were men of public influence, and when a wintering partner retired to live in Montreal, he usually became a member of the governing clique. The Beaver Club with the appropriate motto, “Fortitude in Distress,” was the partners’ social rendezvous, and coveted were the social honors of its exclusive membership. Governors and councillors, military heroes and foreign celebrities counted it an honor to be entertained at the Beaver Club with its lavish table groaning under weight of old wines from Europe and game from the Pays d’en Haut. “To discuss the merits of a beaver tail, or moose nose, or bear’s paw, or buffalo hump”—was the way a Nor’West partner invited a guest to dinner at the Beaver Club, and I would not like to testify that the hearty partners did not turn night into day and drink themselves under the mahogany before they finished entertaining a guest. Most lordly of the grandees was, of course, “the Marquis,” Simon McTavish, who built himself a magnificent manor known as “the Haunted House,” on the mountain. He did not live to enjoy it long, for he died in 1804. Indeed, it was a matter of comment how few of the ninety-six partners lived to a good old age in possession of their hard-earned wealth. “No wonder,” sarcastically commented a good bishop, who had been on the field and seen how the wealth was earned, “when the devil sows the seed, he usually looks after the harvest.”
But it was not all plain sailing from the formation of the Company. Pond and Pangman, the two Boston men, who had been in the North when the partnership was arranged, were not satisfied with their shares. Pond was won over to the Nor’Westers, but Pangman joined a smaller company with Gregory, and MacLeod, and Alexander MacKenzie, and Finlay. MacKenzie, who was to become famous as a discoverer, was sent to Isle à la Crosse to intercept furs on the way to Hudson Bay. Ross was sent up to oppose Peter Pond of the Nor’Westers in Athabasca. Bostonnais Pangman went up the Saskatchewan to the Rockies, with headquarters at what is now Edmonton, and the rest of what were known as the Little Company faithfully dogged the Nor’Westers’ footsteps and built a trading house wherever Indians gathered.