While the lords of finance are fighting for its stock, the old Company is floundering through a slough of distraction not far from bankruptcy. The Bank of England advances £50,000 credit, but the Company can barely pay interest on the advance. Two hundred and fifty servants came home in 1810, and not a recruit can be hired in the Orkneys, so terrible are the tales now current of brutality in the fur country. Corrigal and Russell and McNab came home from Albany with news of the McDonell clan’s murderous assaults and of Mowat’s forcible abduction to Montreal. All these are voted a bounty of £50 each from the Company. Joseph Howse sends home word of his wild wanderings in the Rockies on the trail of David Thompson, and the Company gives him a present of £150 “as encouragement” to hold the regions west of the Rockies. Governor Auld reports that the Canadians have stopped all trade west of Churchill. Governor Cook reports the same of York. Governor Thomas reports worse than loss from Albany—his men are daily murdered. They go into the woods and never return.
On Selkirk’s advice, the Company calls for Colin Robertson, the dismissed Northwest clerk. For three years Robertson remains in London and Liverpool, advisor to the Company. “If you cannot hire Orkneymen, get Frenchmen from Quebec as the Nor’Westers do,” he advises. “Fight fire with fire! Your Orkneymen are too shy, shy of breaking the law in a lawless land, shy of getting their own heads broken! Hire French bullies! I can get you three hundred of them!”
The old Company see-saws—is afraid of such advice, is still more afraid not to take it. They vote to reject “Mr. Robertson’s proposals” in January of 1810, and in December of the same year vote a complete turn-about “to accept Mr. Robertson’s suggestions,” authorizing Maitland, Garden & Auddjo, a legal firm of Montreal, to spend £1,000 a year and as high as £20,000 if necessary, to equip expeditions for the North. William Bachelor Coltman is appointed to look after the Company’s clients in Quebec city, and the Hudson’s Bay changes its entire system of trade. Barter is to be abolished. Accounts are to be kept. Each year’s outfit is to be charged against the factor, and that factor is to have his own standard of money prices. One-half of all net profits goes to the servants—one-sixth to the chief factor, one-sixth to the traveling traders, one-sixth to the general laborers. General superintendents are to have salaries of £400 a year; factors, £150; traders, £100; clerks, £50; and servants are to have in addition to their wages thirty acres of land, ten extra acres for every two years they serve.
It was as if the Governing Committee of London were the heart of a dying body and these proposals the spasmodic efforts to galvanize the outer extremities of the system into life. At this stage Lord Selkirk came into action with a scheme that not only galvanized the languid Company into life, but paralyzed the rival Nor’Westers with its boldness.
Lord Selkirk, Founder of the First Settlement on Red River, 1812, from a Photograph in the Ontario Archives.
After buying control in the Company, Selkirk had laid the charter before the highest legal critics of England. Was it valid? Did the Company possess exclusive rights to trade, exclusive rights to property, power to levy war? That was what the charter set forth. Did the Company possess the rights set forth by the charter? Yes or no—did they?”
The highest legal authorities answered unequivocally—Yes: the Company possessed the rights.
It was perfectly natural that legal minds trained in a country, where feudalism is revered next to God, should pronounce the chartered rights of the Hudson’s Bay Company valid.
One fact was ignored—the rights given by the charter applied only to regions not possessed by any other Christian subject. Before the Hudson’s Bay Company had ascended the Saskatchewan, French traders had gone west as far as the Rockies, south as far as the Missouri, and when French power fell, the Nor’Westers as successors to the French had pushed across the Rockies to the Pacific, north as far as the Arctic, south as far as the Snake.