The conquest of the great Northwest, Volume 2 (of 2) /

by Agnes C. Laut

Among the hunters of Pembina was a French Canadian named Trottier married to a Cree woman. The daughter—Marguerite, a girl of sixteen—was renowned for her beauty. Indian chiefs offered for her hand, but the father thought she would be better cared for as the wife of a white man and gave her in marriage to a hunter named Jutras, who left Pembina with Henry’s brigades in 1808. Jutras went up the Assiniboine. A year later, Daniel MacKenzie appointed him and five others to take the Qu’ Appelle furs down the Assiniboine to Red River. As usual, some of the partners accompanied the brigades for the annual meetings at Fort William. Daniel MacKenzie and McDonald of Garth—the bourgeois—were riding along the river banks some distances behind the canoes. Marguerite Trottier was in the canoe with Jutras, and the French were advancing, light of heart as usual, passing down Qu’ Appelle River toward the Assiniboine. A day’s voyage above the junction of the two rivers, the current shoaled, and just where brushwood came close to the water’s edge, Jutras was startled by a weird call like a Sioux signal from both sides. Another instant, bullets and arrows rained on the canoes! Four of the six voyageurs tumbled back wounded to the death. Jutras and the remaining man lost their heads so completely they sprang to mid-waist in the water, waded ashore, and dashed in hiding through the high grass for the nearest fort, forgetting the girl wife, Marguerite Trottier, and a child six months old. MacKenzie and McDonald of Garth sent scouts to rally help from Qu’ Appelle to recover the furs. When the rescue party reached the place of plunder—not very far from the modern Whitewood—they found the four voyageurs lying on the sand, the girl wife in the bottom of the canoe. All had been stripped naked, scalped and horribly mutilated. Two of the men still lived. MacKenzie had advanced to remove the girl’s body from the canoe when faint with horror at the sight—hands hacked, an eye torn out, the scalp gone—the old wintering partner was rooted to the ground with amazement to hear her voice asking for her child and refusing to be appeased till they sought it. Some distance on the prairie in the deep grass below a tree they found it—still breathing. The English mind cannot contemplate the cruelties of such tortures as the child had suffered. Such horrors mock the soft philosophies of the life natural, being more or less of a beneficent affair. They stagger theology, and are only explainable by one creed—the creed of Strength; the creed that the Powers for Good must be stronger than the Powers for Evil—stronger physically as well as stronger spiritually, and until they are, such horrors will stalk the earth rampant. The child had been scalped, of course! The Sioux warrior must have his trophy of courage, just as the modern grinder of child labor must have his dividend. It had then been suspended from a tree as a target for the arrows of the braves. Hardened old roué as MacKenzie was—it was too much for his blackened heart. He fell on his trembling knees and according to the rites of his Catholic faith, ensured the child’s entrance to Paradise by baptism before death. It might die before he could bring water from the river. The rough old man baptized the dying infant with the blood drops from its wounds and with his own tears.

Returning to the mother, he gently told her that the child had been killed. Swathing her body in cotton, these rough voyageurs bathed her wounds, put the hacked hands in splinters, and in all probability saved her life by binding up the loose skin to the scalp by a clean, fresh bladder. That night voyageurs and partners sat round the wounded where they lay, each man with back to a tree and musket across his knees. In the morning the wounded were laid in the bottom of the canoes. Scouts were appointed to ride on both sides of the river and keep guard. In this way, the brigade advanced all day and part of the following night, “the poor woman and men moaning all the time,” records McDonald of Garth. Coming down the Assiniboine to Souris, where the Hudson’s Bay had a fort under Mr. Pritchard, the Nor’Westers under Pierre Falçon, the rhyming minstrel of the prairie—the wounded were left here. Almost impossible to believe, Marguerite Trottier recovered sufficiently in a month to join the next brigade bound to Gibraltar (Winnipeg). Here she met her father and went home with him to Pembina. Jutras—the poltroon husband—who had left her to the raiders, she abandoned with all the burning scorn of her Indian blood. It seems after the Sioux had wreaked their worst cruelty, she simulated death, then crawled to hiding under the oilcloth of the canoe, where, lying in terror of more tortures, she vowed to the God of the white men that if her life were spared she would become a Christian. This vow she fulfilled at Pembina, and afterward married one of the prominent family of Gingras, so becoming the mother of a distinguished race. She lived to the good old age of almost a hundred.

Another character almost as famous in Indian legend as Marguerite had been with Henry at Pembina and come north to Harmon on the Assiniboine. This was the scout, John Tanner, stolen by Shawnees from the family of the Rev. John Tanner on the Ohio. The boy had been picking walnuts in the woods when he was kidnapped by a marauding party, who traded him to the Ottawas of the Up Country. Tanner fell in good hands. His foster mother was chief of the Mackinaw Indians and quite capable of exercising her authority in terms of the physical. Chaboillez, the wintering partner, saw the boy at the Sault and inquiries as to who he was put the foster mother in such a fright of losing him that she hid him in the Sault cellars. Among the hunters of Pembina were Tanner and his Indian mother, and later—his Indian wife. He will come into this story at a later stage with J. Ba’tiste Lajimoniere.

Notes to Chapter XXII.—I have purposely hung this chapter round Henry as a peg, because his adventures at Pembina, whence journeys radiated to the Missouri and the Assiniboine, merge into his life on the Saskatchewan and so across the Rockies to the Columbia—giving a record of all the N. W. C.’s departments, as if one traveled across on a modern railroad.

Henry’s Adventures are to be found in his Journals edited by Dr. Coues and published by Francis P. Harper. Several reprints of Harmon’s Journals have recently appeared. Harmon was originally from Vermont and one of his daughters until recently was prominent in Ottawa, Canada, as the head of a fashionable school. I can imagine how one of the recent reprints would anger Harmon’s family, where the introduction speaks glibly of Harmon having taken a “native wife ad interim.” What those words “ad interim” mean, I doubt if the writer, himself, knows—unless his own unsavory thought, for of all fur traders Harmon was one of the most saintly, clean, honorable, and gentle, true to his wife as to the finest white woman.

I have referred to Daniel MacKenzie as an old roué. The reasons for this will appear in a subsequent chapter on doings at Fort William.

The adventures of Tanner will be found in James’ life of him, in Major Long’s travels, in Harmon, and in the footnotes of Coues’s Henry, also by Dr. Bryce in the Manitoba History Coll., most important of all in the Minnesota Hist. Collections, where the true story of his death is recorded.

The adventures of Marguerite Trottier are taken from two sources: from McDonald of Garth’s Journal (Masson Journals) and from the Abbé Dugas’ Legends. I hesitated whether to give this shocking and terrible story, for the most thoughtless reader will find between the lines (and it is intended) more than is told. What determined me to give the story was this: Again and again in the drawing rooms of London and New York, I have heard society—men and women, who hold high place in social life—refer to those early marriages of the fur traders to native women as something sub rosa, disreputable, best hidden behind a lie or a fig leaf. They never expressed those delicate sentiments to me till they had ascertained that tho’ I had lived all my life in the West, I had neither native blood in my veins nor a relationship of any sort to the pioneer—not one of them. Then some such expressions as this would come out apologetically with mock modest Pharisaic blush—“Is it true that So and So married a native woman?” or “Of course I know they were all wicked men, for look how they married—Squaws!” I confess it took me some time to get the Eastern view on this subject into my head, and when I did, I felt as if I had passed one of those sewer holes they have in civilized cities. Of course, it is the natural point of view for people who guzzle on problem plays and sex novels, but what—I wondered—would those good people think if they realized that “the squaws” of whom they spoke so scornfully were to Northwest life what a Boadicea was to English life—the personification of Purity that was Strength and Strength that was Purity—a womanhood that the vilest cruelties could not defile. Then, to speak of fur traders who married native women as “all wicked” is a joke. Think of the religious mystic, Harmon, teaching his wife the English language with the Bible, and Alexander MacKenzie, who had married a native woman before he had married his own cousin, and the saintly patriot, Dr. McLoughlin—think of them if you can as “wicked.” I can’t! I only wish civilized men and women had as good records.

In this chapter I wished very much to give a detailed account of each N. W. C. department with notes on the chief actors, who were in those departments what the feudal barons were to the countries of Europe, but space forbids. It is as impossible to do that as it would be to cram a record of all the countries of Europe into one volume.

I have throughout referred to the waters as Hudson Bay; to the company as Hudson’s. This is the ruling of the Geographical societies and is, I think, correct, as the charter calls the company “Hudson’s Bay.” The N. W. C. were sometimes referred to as “the French.”