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

by Agnes C. Laut

It was the end of June, in 1811, before the Hudson’s Bay ships sheered out from the Thames on their annual voyage. Of the three vessels—The Prince of Wales, The Edward and Anne, The Eddystone—destined to convey the colonists to the Great Northwest—The Eddystone was the ship which the Nor’Westers had formerly sent to the bay. Furious gales drove the ships into Yarmouth for shelter, and while he waited, Miles MacDonell spent the time buying up field pieces and brass cannon for the colony. “I have learned,” he writes to Selkirk, “that Sir Alexander MacKenzie has pledged himself so opposed to this project that he will try every means in his power to thwart it.” He might have added that Simon McGillivray, the Nor’Wester, was busy in London in the same sinister conspiracy. Writes McGillivray to his Montreal partners from London on June 1, 1811, that he and Ellice “will leave no means untried to thwart Selkirk’s schemes, and being stockholders of the Hudson’s Bay Company we can annoy him and learn his measures in time to guard against them.”

Soon enough MacDonell learned what form the sinister plot was to take. Colonists enlisted were waiting at Stornoway in the Hebrides. In all were one hundred and twenty-five people, seventy settlers, fifty-nine clerks and laborers, made up of Highlanders, Orkneymen, Irish farmers and some Glasgow men. MacDonell was a Catholic. So were many of the Highlanders; and Father Bourke, the Irish priest, comes as chaplain.

The first sign of the Nor’Westers’ unseen hand was the circulation of a malicious pamphlet called “The Highlander” among the gathered colonists, describing the country as a Polar region infested with hostile Indians. To counteract the spreading panic, MacDonell ordered all the servants paid in advance. Then, while baggage was being put aboard, the men were allured on shore to spend their wages on a night’s spree. MacDonell called on the captain of a man-of-war acting as convoy to seize the servants bodily, but five had escaped.

Next came the customs officer, a relative of Sir Alexander MacKenzie’s, called Reid, a dissipated old man, creating bedlam and endless delay examining the colonists’ baggage. MacDonell saw clearly that if he was to have any colonists left he must put to sea that very night; but out rows another sham officer of the law, a Captain MacKenzie, to bawl out the Emigration Act from his boat alongside “to know if every man was going of his own free will.” Exasperated beyond patience, some of the colonists answered by heaving a nine-pound cannon ball into the captain’s rowboat. It knocked a hole through the bottom, and compelled MacKenzie to swim ashore. Back came another rowboat with challenge to a duel for this insult; but the baggage was all on board. By the grace of Heaven, a wind sprang up. At 11 P. M. on the 25th of July, the three Hudson’s Bay ships spread their sails to the wind and left in such haste they forgot their convoy, forgot two passengers on land whom Robertson rowed out like mad and put on board, forgot to fire farewell salutes to the harbor master; in fact, sailed with such speed that one colonist, who had lost his courage and wanted to desert, had to spring overboard and swim ashore. Such was the departure of the first colonists for the Great Northwest.

The passage was the longest ever experienced by the Company’s ships. Sixty-one days it took for these Pilgrims of the Plains to cross the ocean. Storm succeeded storm. The old fur freighters wallowed in the waves like water-logged tubs, straining to the pounding seas as if the timbers would part, sails flapping to the wind tattered and rotten as the ensigns of pirates. MacDonell was furious that the colonists should have been risked on such old hulks, and recommended the dismissal of all three captains—Hanwell, Ramsey and Turner; but these mariners of the North probably knew their business when they lowered sails and lay rolling to the sea. In vain MacDonell tried to break the monotony of the long voyage, by auctioning the baggage of the deserters, by games and martial drill. One Walker stood forward and told him to his face that “they had not come to fight as soldiers for the Hudson’s Bay Company: they had come as free settlers”; besides, he spread the report that the country did not belong to the Hudson’s Bay anyway; the country had been found by the French and belonged to the Nor’Westers. MacDonell probably guessed the rest—the fellow had been primed.

On September the 6th, the ships entered the straits. There was not much ice, but it was high, “like icebergs,” MacDonell reported. On September 24th, after a calm passage across the bay, the colonists anchored off York and landed on the point between Hayes and Nelson Rivers. Snow was falling. The thermometer registered eight degrees below zero. No preparations had been made to house the people at the fort. It was impossible to proceed inland, and in the ships’ cargoes were provisions for less than three months. Having spent two months on the sea, the colonists were still a year away from their Promised Land.

Nelson and Hayes Rivers—it will be remembered—flow into Hudson Bay with a long, low point of wooded marsh between. York was on Hayes River to the south. It was thought better hunting would be found away from the fort on Nelson River to the north. Hither MacDonell sent his colonists on October 7th, crossing the frozen marsh himself two days later, when he was overtaken by a blinding blizzard and wandered for three hours. On the north side of the river, just opposite that island, where Ben Gillam and Radisson had played their game of bravado, were camped the colonists in tents of leather and sheeting. The high cliff of the river bank sheltered them from the bitter north wind. Housed under thin canvas with biting frost and a howling storm that tore at the tent flaps like a thing of prey, the puny fire in mid-tent sending out poor warmth against such cold—this was a poor home-coming for people dreaming of a Promised Land; but the ships had left for England. There was no turning back. The door that had opened to new opportunity had closed against retreat. Cold or storm, hungry or houseless, type of Pioneers the world over, the colonists must face the future and go on.

By the end of October, MacDonell had his people housed in log cabins under shelter of the river cliff. Moss and clay thatched the roofs. Rough hewn timbers floored the cabins and berths like a ship’s were placed in tiers around the four walls. Bedding consisted of buffalo skins and a gray blanket. Indian hunters sold MacDonell meat enough to supply the colonists for the winter; and in spring the people witnessed that wonderful traverse of the caribou—three thousand in a herd—moving eastward for the summer. Meat diet and the depression of homesickness brought the scourge of all winter camps—scurvy; but MacDonell plied the homely remedy of spruce beer and lost not a man from the disease.

Winter was passed deer hunting to lay up stock of provisions for the inland journey. All would have gone well had it not been for the traitors in camp, with minds poisoned by Northwest Company spies. On Christmas day, MacDonell gave his men a feast and on New Year’s day the chief factor of York, Mr. Cook, sent across the usual treat. Irish rowdies celebrated the night by trying to break the heads of the Glasgow clerks. Then the discontent instilled by Nor’West agents began to work. If this country did not belong to the Hudson’s Bay, why should these men obey MacDonell? On February 12th, one put the matter to the test by flatly refusing to work. MacDonell ordered the fellow confined in a hut. Fourteen of the Glasgow clerks broke into the hut, released the rebel, set fire to the cabin and spent the night in a riotous dance round the blaze. When MacDonell haled the offenders before Mr. Hillier, a justice of the peace, they contemptuously walked out of the extemporized court. The Governor called on Mr. Auld of Churchill for advice, and learned from him that by a recent parliamentary act known as 43rd Geo. III, all legal disputes of the Indian country could be tried only in Canada. “If that is so,” writes the distracted MacDonell, seeing at a glance all the train of ills that were to come when Hudson’s Bay matters were to be tried in Canadian courts made up of Northwest partners, “then adieu to all redress for us, my lord.”

But Auld and Cook, the two factors, knew a trick to bring mutineers to time. They cut off all supplies. The men might as well have been marooned on a desert island. By the time boats were ready to be launched in June, the rebels were on their knees with contrition. Wisely, MacDonell did not take such unruly spirits along as colonists. He left them at the forts as clerks.