To be sure, Sherbrooke, Governor General of Canada, had issued a Royal Proclamation commanding peace; but Williams, the new Hudson’s Bay governor, declared “the royal proclamation was all d—— nonsense!” He “would drive every Nor’Wester out of the country or perish in the attempt.” On the Nor’Westers’ side was equal defiance of the Proclamation. The most of the Northwest Eastern partners were either under bail or yet in confinement. Of their Western partners, Norman McLeod, the justice of the peace, was the ruling spirit; and his views of the Canadian Proclamation may be guessed from orders to his bullies in Athabasca: “Go it, my lads! Go it! You can do what you like here! There is no law in the Indian Territory!”
Down to Montreal, then, came Colin Robertson, full of fight as an Irishman of Tipperary. “The effusions of the Nor’Westers might have staggered my resolution to come to Montreal,” he writes in his letters of 1817 to officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company. “‘Robertson go to Montreal! No! He may find his way to the States if we don’t catch him!’ Such was the language held forth at Sault Ste. Marie, Lake Superior, which had no other effect on me than calling forth a little caution.... I was at the Sault when a fur trader made his appearance in a light canoe on his way from Red River to Montreal. With him, I embarked and arrived at the Lake of the Two Mountains on the 11th of August, 1817.... As soon as the fur trader pushed off, I requested a Frenchman to furnish me with a small Indian canoe and two faithful Iroquois ... I embarked at midnight ... and crossed the lake about an hour after sunrise.... M. de Lotbiniere ... furnished me with a calash at eleven that night.... I entered Montreal at five in the morning and drove to Dr. Monroe’s, the least suspicious place, his profession making early calls frequent. I was at once recognized by the doctor, who informed me that a partner of the North-West Company had apartments in the upper part of the house. I immediately muffled myself in my cloak and so entered.... As soon as I had breakfast, I made my appearance in the streets of Montreal, where I was stared at by friends of the Nor’Westers as if I were a ghost ... and my appearance gathered such a crowd, I was obliged to disappear inside a boarding house....”
“The residences of the Nor’Westers in London and Montreal are splendid establishments, the resorts of the first in society, the benefit from this ostentatious display of wealth being the friendship of legal authorities.... Even the prisons of Montreal are become places of public entertainment from the circumstance of yet holding some partners of the North-West Company.... Every other night, a ball or supper is given; and the Highland bagpipes utter the sound of martial music as if to deafen public censure. The most glaring instance of the Nor’Westers’ contempt for law is their attempt to attract public notice by illuminating all the prison windows every night. Strangers will naturally ask: ‘for what crimes are these gentlemen committed? For debt?’ No ... for murder ... arson ... robbery.... Our old friend, Mr. Astor, is here.... He is frequently in the society of the Nor’Westers ... and feels very sore toward them about Astoria.”
Robertson’s letters then tell of his trial for the seizure of Gibraltar and his acquittal. He frankly hints that his lawyers had to bribe the Montreal judge to secure “a fair” hearing. So passed the year. In 1818 came Selkirk back from Red River to Montreal, who agreed with Robertson that the only way to force the Nor’Westers to their knees was to send a second expedition to capture Athabasca, whence came the wealth of furs that enabled the rival Company to bribe the courts. In April, 1819, Robertson set out with a flotilla of nineteen canoes from Ste. Anne’s, each canoe with five French voyageurs, and went up the Ottawa across Lake Superior to Thunder Bay. “This place gave me a bad turn the other day,” he writes. “The wind blew fresh but the swell was by no means high. My Indians seemed reluctant to attempt the traverse. I imprudently ordered them a glass of rum, when the whoop was immediately given! In a moment, our canoe was in the swell. We came where a heavy sea was running. Here, we began to ship water. The guide ordered the bowman removed back to the second thwart. This lightened the head. An oilcloth was then thrown over the head of a canoe to avoid the breaking of the sea. The silence that prevailed, when one of those heavy swells was rolling upon us, was truly appalling. Paddles were lifted and all watched the approach with perfect composure. Our steersman kept balancing the slender bark by placing her in the best position to the waves.... The moment the roller passed, every paddle was in the water, every nerve stretched to gain the land! Although two men were employed bailing out water, fifty yards more would have swamped us....”
From Lake Superior, the brigade passed up to the Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg, where Robertson was joined by the same John Clarke who had suffered defeat in Athabasca on the first expedition. Here the forces were increased to one hundred and thirty men by the refugees of the first brigade, who had escaped from the North. Robertson’s letter from this point gives some particulars of the first brigade’s expulsion from Athabasca: “The Nor’Westers did not confine themselves to the seizure of persons and property. They administered an oath to our servants, threatening with starvation and imprisonment if they did not comply, that for the space of three years these Hudson’s Bay servants would not attempt to oppose the North-West Company. One of the guides, a witty rogue, who knew theology from the circumstance of his cousin being a priest, fell on a way of absolving his French countrymen from this oath ... to repair to the woods and cross themselves and ask pardon of their Maker for a false oath to a heretic; but some poor Scotchmen could not cheat their conscience so easily, and I have had to let them leave me on that account....”
The Nor’Westers had kept as a deadly secret from the Indians all knowledge of the fact they had been beaten by Lord Selkirk. Robertson’s next letter tells how the secret leaked out in Athabasca. Amidst the uproarious carousals of the Nor’Westers at Chippewyan, the Hudson’s Bay captives were brought to the mess room to be the butt of drunken jokes. On one occasion, Norman McLeod bawled out a song in celebration of the massacre of settlers at Red River, of which each verse ended in this couplet:
“The H. B. C. came up a hill, and up a hill they came,
The H. B. C. came up the hill, but down they went again!”
Roars of laughter were making the rafters ring when it suddenly struck one of the Hudson’s Bay prisoners that the brutal jeer might be paid back in kind.
“Y’ hae niver asked me for a song,” says the canny Hudson’s Bay McFarlane to his Nor’West tormentor. “If agreeable, I hae a varse o’ me ain compaesin’.”