It was woman’s wit saved the captive Douglas. Quick as flash glided Nellie Connolly to the old chief, knowing well the Indian custom of “potlatch,” gift-giving, appeasing for bloodshed with costly presents. She offered old Kwah all he might ask to spare the life of her husband. Then dashing upstairs, the two women began throwing down tobacco, handkerchiefs, clothing. The Indians scrambled for the gifts. Douglas wrenched free, and Old Chief Kwah bade his followers come away. He had done all he meant—taught Douglas a lesson, though those so-called lessons have a ghastly sudden way with angry Indians of turning to tragedy, as the massacre at Red River testifies.
An event that has gone down to history at Fort St. James, was the visit of Governor Simpson, in 1828. Simpson was young, but what he lacked in years, he made up in hard horse-sense and pomp to impress the Indians. Music boxes, bugles, drums, fifes—all were used in Simpson’s pow-wow of state with the Indians. September 17th, his scouts sighted Stuart Lake. The guide to the fore unfurled a British flag. Buglers and bagpipes struck up a lively march that set the echoes flying among the mountains and brought the Carrier Indians out agape. First, clad in all the regalia of beaver hat, ruffled choker, velvet cape lined with red silk, leather leggings and gorgeous trappings to his saddle—rode Governor Simpson. Behind came his doctor and a chief factor riding abreast. Twenty men followed with camp kit, then one of the McGillivrays to the rear. In all, Simpson traveled with a retinue of sixty. A musket shot notified the fort of the ruler’s approach. Fort St. James roared back a welcome with cannon and musketry, all hands standing solemnly in line, while Douglas advanced to meet his lord, Connolly being absent on the Fraser. What with a band playing and the cannon booming, such wild echoes were set dancing in the mountains as almost frightened the Carrier Indians out of their senses. Was the great white lord coming to be avenged on them for the attack on Douglas? But the great white lord, who was nothing more nor less than a clever little gentleman bent on business, kept his band marching up and down the inner gallery of the palisades, chests puffed out, pipers skirling, while he as lord ascendant of the mighty mountains shook hands with the Indians and treated them to tobacco. Simpson passed south to Vancouver.
New Year’s Day, 1829, the clerks of St. James determined to punish the Carriers for their raid. Bounteous was the régale of rum dealt out. When the Carriers lay drunk, out sallied the voyageurs and gave the Indians such a pummeling as stirred up bad blood for a year. Douglas’ life was no longer safe in Caledonia. In 1830, he left Fraser River to join McLoughlin in Oregon. He had come to New Caledonia, raw, impulsive, violent in his forcefulness to succeed. He went down to Oregon, still young, but a drilled disciplinarian of life’s hard knocks—reserved to a fault, deliberate to a degree, cautious and tactful in a way that must have delighted McLoughlin’s heart. When Connolly left New Caledonia for Montreal, where he rose to eminence, there came as Chief Factor, Peter Skene Ogden, fresh from leading the southern brigades.
McLoughlin needed Douglas in Oregon. The Company, that had begun two centuries before with one little fort on a frozen sea, had not only stretched its tentacles across the continent but was reaching out to Hawaii, to Mexico, to Alaska. And this galvanizing energy resulted directly from the energy of that little man, George Simpson. “If” is a word that opens the door of lost opportunities. If Sir George Simpson had been seconded in his aims by the Governing Board of the Hudson’s Bay Company; and if those gentlemen who lived fat on their fur dividends had mended their ignorance sufficiently to know what Sir George was driving at; and if the Company had bought over the bonded debts of Mexico—as Simpson advised—and traded the debts for the grant of California to the English; and if the Company had been less niggardly and paid down promptly the $30,000 asked for Russia’s holdings in California—if all these things, then, one wonders whether the southern bounds of British Columbia to-day would be the northern bounds of modern Mexico. But man’s blunders are destiny’s plays; and the opportunities missed by one nation the prizes seized by another.
Far reaching and statesmanlike in grasp were the schemes McLoughlin had in hand.
Baranoff, the famous old governor of Alaska, had died just a few years before the union of the two English companies, and from the time of his death the grip of the Russian Fur Company slackened on Alaska. Naval officers came out as governors. Naval officers knew nothing of the tricks of the fur trade. Returns to the St. Petersburg company began to decrease. Was Alaska worth holding? That was the question Russians were asking.
As the Hudson’s Bay Company pressed toward the Pacific from New Caledonia, their traders and trappers came in violent collision with Russians working inland from the coast. There ensued the usual orgies of rum and secret raid. It became apparent that it would be cheaper for the Hudson’s Bay Company to ship some of its New Caledonia furs by sea south to the Columbia than to send the packs inland and south by the horse brigades. The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1825 had granted the Hudson’s Bay Company free navigation of streams across Russian territory to the interior of northern British Columbia.
Year by year, English forts had been creeping up the west coast toward Russian Alaska. Fort Langley had been built on the Fraser by McMillan and twenty-five men, in 1827. The party had come from the Columbia overland to Puget Sound. There Captain Simpson on The Cadboro met them and carried all some thirty miles up Fraser River to a point on the south bank. The Indians were notoriously hostile, but McMillan kept men on guard day and night, and had his builders sleep in midstream on board The Cadboro. By autumn, an oblong fort with the regular palisades, inner gallery for artillery and corner bastions, had been completed; and the men scattered afield to hunt. Expresses were regularly sent overland to Fort Vancouver and one of these led by a MacKenzie with four men, was murdered on an island in the straits in January, 1828. In October, comes Governor George Simpson in pompous estate with band and outriders and retinue of twenty men. McMillan went down to the Columbia with the governor and was succeeded by little James Yale of Caledonia, who promptly sought to render himself secure with the natives by marrying an Indian wife. Gradually, this post became the great fishing station of the Company for the salmon shipped to Hawaii.