The rivalry between Hudson’s Bay and Nor’Westers had become lawless outrage. The Company in England is meantime having troubles of its own. The English government desires them in 1807 to state what “the boundaries of Louisiana ought to be” in the impending treaty with the United States, which is to give access for American traders to the country north of Louisiana in return for similar free access for British traders to American territory. The English traders state what the boundaries of Louisiana ought to be, and to the ignorance of the English shareholders do we owe in this case, as in a hundred others, the fifty years’ boundary dispute as to limits from the Lake of the Woods to Oregon.
As for reciprocity of access to each other’s hunting field, the Hudson’s Bay Company opposes it furiously. Access to American territory they already have without the asking and are likely to have for another fifty years, as there is no inhabitant to prevent them, but to grant the Americans access to Hudson’s Bay territory is another matter; so in the treaty of reciprocal favors across each other’s territory, My Lord Holland provides “always the actual settlements of the Hudson’s Bay Company excepted.”
If the Hudson’s Bay Company is to hold its monopoly by virtue of settlements, it must see to the welfare of those settlements, so in June, 1808, the first schoolmasters of the Northwest are sent out at salaries of £30 a year—James Clouston, and Peter Sinclair, and George Geddes. There is no dividend, owing to the embargo of war, and the Company is driven, in 1809, to petition the Lords of Trade for help. They aver there are six hundred families at their settlements, that the yearly outfits cost the Company £40,000; that the sales never exceed £30,000 and this year are only £3,000; they apply for remission of duty on furs and a loan of £60,000 from the imperial treasury. The duty is remitted but the loan is not granted, and My Lord Selkirk becomes, by virtue of having purchased nearly £40,000 of stock, a leading director in the Hudson’s Bay Company. My Lord Selkirk has been out to Montreal. He has been fêted and feasted and dined and wined by the Beaver Club of the Nor’Westers, whom he pumps to a detail about the fur trade. Also he meets John Jacob Astor and learns what he can from him. Also he meets that Northwest clerk who had been dismissed up the Saskatchewan and came over to the Hudson’s Bay Company—Colin Robertson. He brings Colin Robertson back with him to England, and the aforetime Northwest clerk is called on January 3, 1810, to give advice to the Hudson’s Bay directors on the state of the fur trade in Canada.
But to return to that Louisiana Boundary—it is as great a shock to the Nor’Westers as to the Hudson’s Bay. In the first place, as told elsewhere, the boundary treaty of 1798 has compelled them to move headquarters from Grand Portage to Fort William. The Nor’Westers suddenly awaken to the value of Alexander MacKenzie’s voyage to the Pacific. Supposing he had followed that great river on down to the sea, would it have led him where the American, Robert Gray, found the Columbia, and where the explorers, Lewis and Clarke, later coming overland from the Missouri, wintered? It was determined to follow MacKenzie’s explorations up with all speed. It became a race to the Pacific. Which fur traders should pre-empt the vast domain first—Hudson’s Bay, Astor’s Americans, or Nor’Westers?
It is barely twenty years since Peter Pond came to Athabasca and Peace River region, but already there are six forts between Athabasca Lake and the Rockies—Vermilion and Encampment Island under the management of the half-breed son of Sir Alexander MacKenzie, then Dunvegan and St. John’s and Rocky Mountain House managed by the McGillivrays and Archibald Norman McLeod. By 1797, James Finlay had followed MacKenzie’s trail across the Divide, then struck up the north branch of Peace River, now known as Finlay River; but it was not till 1805 that the fur traders, who made flying trips across the mountains, remained to build forts. In 1793, when MacKenzie crossed the mountain, there had joined the Northwest Company as clerk, a lad of nineteen, the son of a ruined loyalist in New York State, whose widow came to live in Cornwall, Ontario. This boy was Simon Fraser. Two years later, in 1795, there had come to the Northwest Company from Hudson Bay that English surveyor, David Thompson, whom the MacKenzies had met in Athabasca working for the Hudson’s Bay traders. David Thompson had been born in 1770 and was educated in the Blue Coat School, London. In 1789 he had come as surveyor to Churchill and York, penetrating inland as far as Athabasca; but Colen, chief factor of York, did not encourage purely scientific explorations. Thompson quit the English service in disgust, coming down to the Nor’Westers on Lake Superior.
These were the two young men—Fraser, son of the New York loyalist; Thompson, the English surveyor—that the Northwest Company appointed in 1805 to explore the wilderness beyond the Rockies.
Northwest Territories