CHAPTER XXVII
1813-1820
THE COMING OF THE COLONISTS CONTINUED—MACDONELL ATTEMPTS TO CARRY OUT THE RIGHTS OF FEUDALISM ON RED RIVER—NOR’WESTERS RESENT—THE COLONY DESTROYED AND DISPERSED—SELKIRK TO THE RESCUE—LAJIMONIERE’S LONG VOYAGE—CLARKE IN ATHABASCA.
Yearly the Hudson’s Bay boats now brought their little quota of settlers for Red River. On June 28, 1813, more than ninety embarked in The Prince of Wales at Stromness. Servants and laborers took passage on The Eddystone. On the third ship—a small brig—went missionaries to Labrador, Moravian Brethren. More diverse elements could not have made up a colony. There were young girls coming out alone to a lawless land to make homes for aged parents the next year. Sitting disconsolate on all their earthly belongings done up in canvas bags, were an old patriarch and his wife evicted from Scottish home, coming to battle in the wilderness without children’s aid. Irish Catholics, staid Scotch Presbyterians, dandified Glasgow clerks, rough, gruff, bluff, red-cheeked Orkneymen, younger sons of noble families taking service in the wilds as soldiers of fortune, soft speaking, shy, demure Moravian sisters and brethren—made up the motley throng crowding the decks of the vessels at Stromness.
As the capstan chains were clanking their singsong of “anchor up,” there was the sudden confusion of a conscription officer rushing to arrest a young emigrant. He had been the lover of a Highland daughter and had deserted following her to Red River. Then sails were spread to a swelling breeze. While the young girl was still gazing disconsolately over the railing toward the vanishing form of her lover, the shores began to recede, the waters to widen. The farewell figures on the wharf huzzahed. Men and women on deck waved their bonnets—all but the old couple sitting alone on the canvas sacks. Tears blurred their vision when they saw the hills of their native land fade and sink forever on the horizon of the sea.
Two days later, there was a cry of “Sail Ho!” and the little fleet pursued an American privateer towing a British captive. The privateer cuts the tow rope and shows heels to the sea. Darkness falls, and when morning comes neither captive nor captor is in sight. The passage is swift across a remarkably easy sea—good winds, no gales, no plots, no mutinies; and the ships are in the straits of Hudson’s Bay by the end of July; but typhus fever has broken out on The Prince of Wales. Daily the bodies of the dead are lowered over decks to a watery grave. At the straits the boat with the Moravian missionaries strikes south for Labrador. August 12th, the other ships run up the narrow rock-girt harbor of Churchill, past the stone-walled ruins of the fort destroyed by La Perouse to the new modern fur post.
It is not deemed wise to keep the ill and the well together. The former are given quarters under sheeting tents in the ruins of the old stone fort. The rest go on by land and boat south to York. The forests that used to surround Churchill have been burnt back for twenty miles, and when the fever patients recover, they retreat to the woods for the winter; all but the old couple who winter in the stone fort whose ruins are typical of their own lives. Fine weather favors the settlers’ journey south, though this wilderness travel with ridge stones that cut their feet and swamps to mid-waist, gives them a foretaste of the trail leading to their Promised Land. Fifty miles distant from York, they run short of food and must boil nettle leaves; but hunger spurs speed. Next night they are on the shores of Nelson River round a huge bonfire kindled to signal York Fort for boats to ferry the Nelson.
April, 1814, the colonists are again united. Those who wintered at Churchill sled down to York. On the way over the snow, Angus McKay’s wife gives birth to a child. There are not provisions enough for the other colonists to wait with McKay, but they put up his sheeting tent for him, and bank it warmly with buffalo robes, and give him of their scant stores, and leave the lonely Highlander with musket and a roaring fire, on guard against wolves. What were the thoughts of the woman within the tent only the pioneer heart may guess. June 1st, all the colonists were welcomed to Red River by Miles MacDonell, who gave to each two Indian ponies, one hundred acres, ammunition and firearms. Of implements to till the soil, there is not one. There was no other course but to join the buffalo hunters of Pembina and lay up a supply of meat for the year. Then began a life of wandering and suffering. Those families that could, remained at the Colony Buildings while the men hunted. Those who had neither the money nor the credit to buy provisions, followed hunters afield. The snow was late in falling, but the winter had set in bitterly cold. There was neither canoeing nor sleighing. Over the wind-swept plains trudged the colonists, ill-clad against such cold, camping at nights in the hospitable tepee of wandering Indians or befriended with a chance meal by passing hunters. At Pembina log cabins with sod roofs were knocked up for wintering quarters, and the place was called Fort Daer after one of Selkirk’s names. No matter what happened afterward, let it be placed to the everlasting credit of the buffalo hunters; their kindness this winter of 1814-15 saved the settlers from perishing of starvation. Settlers do not make good buffalo runners. The Plain Rangers shared their hunt with the newcomers, loaned them horses, housed men and women, helped to build cabins and provided furs for clothing.
They had arrived in June. The preceding January of 1814, Miles MacDonell had committed the cardinal error of the colony. He was, of course, only carrying out Selkirk’s ideas. What the motive was matters little. The best of motives paves the way to the blackest tragedies. Old World feudalism threw down its challenge to New World democracy. Selkirk had ordered that intruders on his vast domain must be treated as poachers, “resisted with physical force if you have the means.” Conscientiously, Selkirk believed that he had the same right to exclude hunters from the fenceless prairies as to order poachers from his Scottish estates.
On January 8, 1814, Miles MacDonell, in the name of Lord Selkirk, forbade anyone, “the Northwest Company or any persons whatsoever,” taking provisions, dried meat, food of any sort by land or water from Assiniboia, except what might be needed for traveling, and this only by license. This meant the stoppage of all hunting in a region as large as the British Isles. It meant more. All the Northwest brigades depended on the buffalo meat of Red River for their food. It meant the crippling of the Northwest Company.