Next afternoon comes a Hudson’s Bay messenger from Selkirk asking for McGillivray. McLoughlin and Kenneth MacKenzie accompany McGillivray across the river. One hour passes; two hours! The women, watching from the loft windows above the trapdoor, began to hope that a truce had been arranged. At seven in the evening the partners had come from the watchtower to shut the gates when two boat loads of some sixty soldiers glide up to the wharf. Fraser and Alex McDonell and old drunken Daniel MacKenzie rush to slam the gates shut. One leaf is banged when a bugle sounds! Captain D’Orsonnens of the soldiers, shouts “To arms, to arms,” plants his foot in the gateway and with flourishing sword rushes his men into the courtyard “with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, shouting, cursing, swearing death and destruction to all persons.” One Nor’Wester rushes to ring an alarm bell. The others have dashed for their apartments to destroy papers. In a twinkling, Selkirk’s men have captured every cannon in Fort William and are knocking at the doors of the central building. Not a gun has been fired; not a blow struck; not a drop of blood shed; but the trampling feet terrify the women in the attic. They crowd above the trapdoor to hold it down, when, presto! the only tragedy of the semi-farce takes place! The crowding is too much for the trapdoor. Down it crashes spilling the women into the room below, just as the astonished De Meurons dash into the apartment to seal all desks and papers. It is a question whether the soldiers or the women received the greater shock; but the greatest surprise of all is across the river where the three Northwest partners are received by Selkirk between lines of armed soldiers and are promptly arrested, bail refused, for complicity in the massacre of Seven Oaks. Selkirk allows them to go back to the fort on parole for the night and orders the liberation of those Hudson’s Bay prisoners in the butter-vat prison—Lajimoniere and the survivors of Seven Oaks, who tell my lord a tale that sharpens his vengeance. The night passes in alarm. Soldiers on guard at the room of each partner detect the Nor’Westers burning papers that might be used as evidence; and the loaded muskets are found in the hay loft; and furs are discovered stamped R. R.—H. B. C.—which have been rifled from some Hudson’s Bay post.
Day dawns in a drizzling rain. Across the river comes my Lord Selkirk, himself, with the pomp of a war lord, bugles blowing, soldiers in the boats with muskets on shoulders, a guard to the fore clearing the way. The common voyageurs are forthwith ordered to decamp to the far side of the river. Lord Selkirk takes up quarters in the main house, the partners being marched at bayonet point to other quarters. For four days the farce lasts. Lord Selkirk as justice of the peace examines and commits for trial all the partners present. The partners present scorn his assumption of authority and formally demand that the voyageurs be sent West with supplies for the year. Selkirk’s answer is to seize the voyageurs’ canoes and set his soldiers to using the palisades of Fort William for firewood. Then, under pretense of searching for evidence on the massacre at Seven Oaks, he seizes all Northwest documents. Under pretense of searching for stolen furs, he examines all stores. On August 18th, everything is in readiness to conduct the prisoners to Eastern Canada, all except old Daniel MacKenzie.
Drunken old MacKenzie is remanded to the prison for special examination. MacKenzie had long since been incapacitated for active service, and he treasured a grudge against the other partners for forcing him to resign. Why is MacKenzie being held back by Selkirk? Before the other partners are carried off, their suspicions are aroused. Perhaps they see Miles MacDonell and the De Meurons plying the old man in his prison with whiskey. At all events, they command the clerks left in charge to ignore orders from Daniel MacKenzie. They protest he has no authority to act for the Northwest Company. It may be they remember how they had jockeyed John Jacob Astor out of his fort on the Pacific by a forced sale; and now guess the game that is being played with Daniel MacKenzie against them. The partners’ baggage is searched. The De Meurons turn even the pockets of the haughty partners inside out. Then the prisoners are embarked in four large canoes under escort of De Meuron soldiers. The canoes are hurriedly loaded and badly crowded. Near the Sault, on August 26th, one swamps and sinks, drowning seven of the people, including the partner, Kenneth MacKenzie. Allan McDonell and Doctor McLoughlin escape by swimming ashore. At what is now Toronto, the prisoners are at once given bail, and they dispatch a constable to arrest Selkirk at Fort William; but Selkirk claps the constable in gaol for the month of November and then ignominiously drums him from the fort. With Selkirk, law is to be observed only when it is English. Canadian courts do not count.
Fuddled with drink, crying pitiably for more, Daniel MacKenzie passed three weeks a prisoner in the butter vat, three more a prisoner in his own room. Six weeks of dissipation, or else his treasured spite against the other partners, now work so on MacKenzie’s nerves that he sends for Miles McDonell on September 19th, and offers to sell out the Nor’Westers’ possessions, worth £100,000, at Fort William, to Lord Selkirk for £50 down, £2,000 in a year, and the balance as soon as the whole price could be arbitrated by arbitrators appointed by the Lords Chief Justice of England. “I have been thinking,” runs his rambling letter in the hand-writing of Miles McDonell, “that as a partner of the North-West Company and the only one here at present that I can act for them myself, that all the company’s stores and property here are at my disposal; that my sale of them is legal by which I can secure to myself all the money which the concern owes me and keep the overplus in my hands until a legal demand be made upon me to pay to those entitled.... I can not only dispose of the goods but the soil on which they are built if I can find a purchaser.”
Naturally, MacKenzie finds a purchaser in my Lord Selkirk of the Hudson’s Bay and almost at once receives his liberty. Just as McDougall had sold out the Americans on the Columbia, so MacKenzie now sells out the Nor’Westers at Fort William.
Then the old man writes rambling confessions and accusations which—he boasts to Selkirk—contain evidence “that will hang McGillivray” for the massacre of Seven Oaks. Selkirk decides to send him to Eastern Canada as a witness against the partners, but before he is sent he writes circular letters to the wintering partners of the Northwest Company advising them to follow his example and save themselves from ruin by turning over their forts to Lord Selkirk. In October he is sent East, but by the time he reaches the Sault, his brain has cleared. He meets John McLoughlin and other Northwest partners returning to the Up Country and confesses what he has done. Instead of turning witness against them, he proceeds East to sue Selkirk for illegal imprisonment.
If Selkirk’s first mistake was trying to enforce feudalism on Red River and his second the raiding of Fort William, his third error must be set down as using an old drunkard for his tool. For the first error, he had the excuse that English law was on his side. For the second, he claimed that “Fort William had become a den of marauders and robbers and he was justified in holding it till the Nor’Westers restored Red River,” but for the trickery with old MacKenzie there existed no more excuse than for the lawlessness of the Nor’Westers. To say that Miles McDonell wrote the letters with MacKenzie’s signature and that he engineered the trick—no more clears Selkirk than to say that paid servants committed the most of the crimes for the Northwest partners. It is the one blot against the most heroic figure in the colonizing of the West. And the trick fooled no one. Not a voyageur, not a trader, flinched in his loyalty to the Northwest Company. Not a man would proceed west with the canoes for the Hudson’s Bay officers.
The Lords of the North had fallen and their glory had departed; but not a man of the service faltered in his loyalty. It was a loyalty strong as the serf for the feudal baron.