Of the French fur traders’ old post here, all that remains are the charred ruins and cellars. Near the flats where the two rivers overflow in spring are the high scaffoldings of a Cree graveyard used during the smallpox plague of the eighties. Back from the swamp of the forks are half a dozen tents—Hudson’s Bay traders—that same Robert Goodwin whom Cameron tricked at Osnaburg, come up the Albany River and across country to Manitoba—forty days from the bay—with another trader, Brown.
The Nor’West brigades pause to divide again. A dozen canoes go up the Assiniboine for Portage la Prairie and Dauphin, and Swan Lake, and Lake Manitoba and Qu’Appelle, and Souris. Three or four groups of men are detailed to camp at the Forks (Winnipeg) and trade and keep an eye on the doings of the Hudson’s Bay—above all keep them from obtaining the hunt. When not trading, the men at the Forks are expected to lay up store of pemmican meat for the other departments, by buffalo hunting. Not till the winter of 1807-8 does MacDonald of Garth, a wiry Highlander of military family and military air, with a red head and a broken arm—build a fort here for the Nor’Westers, which he ironically calls Gibraltar because it will command the passage of both rivers, though there was not a rock the size of his hand in sight. Gibraltar is very near the site of the Cree graveyard and boasts strong palisades with storage cellars for liquors and huge warehouses for trade. Not to be outdone, the Hudson’s Bay look about for a site that shall also command the river, and they choose two miles farther down Red River, where their cannon can sweep all incoming and outgoing canoes. When this fort is built a few years later, it is called Fort Douglas.
Two brigades ascend the Red as far south as Pembina south of the Boundary, one to range all regions radiating from Grand Forks and Pembina, the other to cross country to the Mandanes on the Missouri.
Charles Chaboillez sends Antoine Larocque with two clerks and two voyageurs from the Assiniboine and the Red to the Missouri in 1804, where they meet the American explorers, Lewis and Clarke, with forty men on their way to the Pacific; and, to the Nor’Westers’ amazement, are also Hudson’s Bay traders. The American officers draw the Canadians’ attention to the fact—this is American territory. British flags must not be given to the Indians and no “derouines” are to take place—a trade term meaning that the drummers who come to beat up trade are not to draw the Indians away to British territory. Charbonneau, the Northwest voyageur, ignores his debt to the Company and deserts to become guide for Lewis and Clarke.
“I can hardly get a skin when the Hudson’s Bay trader is here,” complains Larocque, “for the Englishmen speak the Mandan language.” Nevertheless Larocque dispatches to the bourgeois Mr. Chaboillez on the Assiniboine, six packs worth £40 each. Charles MacKenzie, the clerk, remains three years trading among the Mandans for the Nor’Westers, and with true trader’s instinct chuckles within himself to hear Old Serpent, the Indian Chief, boast that if he had these forty Americans “out on the plains, his young warriors would do for them as for so many wolves.”
Two main trails ran from the Red River to the Missouri: one from Pembina, west; the other from the Assiniboine, by way of Souris, south. The latter was generally followed, and from the time that David Thompson, the Northwest surveyor, first led the way to the Mandans, countless perils assailed the traveler to the Missouri. Not more than $3000 worth of furs were won a year, but the traders here were the buffalo hunters that supplied the Northern departments with pemmican; and on these hunts was the constant danger of the Sioux raiders. Eleven days by pony travel was the distance from the Assiniboine to the Missouri, and on the trail was terrible scarcity of drinking water. “We had steered to a lake,” records MacKenzie of the 1804 expedition, “but found it dry. We dug a pit. It gave a kind of stinking liquid of which we all drank, which seemed to increase our thirst. We passed the night with great uneasiness. Next day, not a drop of water was to be found on the route and our distress became unsupportable. Lafrance (the voyageur) swore so much he could swear no more and gave the country ten thousand times to the Devil. His eyes became so dim or blurred we feared he was nearing a crisis. All our horses became so unruly we could not manage them. It struck me they might have scented water and I ascended the top of the hill where to my great joy I discovered a small pool. I ran and drank plentifully. My horse had plunged in before I could stop him. I beckoned Lafrance. He seemed more dead than alive, his face a dark hue, a thick scurf around his mouth. He instantly plunged in the water ... and drank to such excess I fear the consequences.”
In winter, though there was no danger of perishing from thirst where snow could be used as water, perils were increased a hundredfold by storm. The ponies could not travel fast through deep drifts. Instead of eleven days, it took a month to reach the Assiniboine, one man leading, one bringing up the rear of the long line of pack horses. If a snow storm caught the travelers, it was an easy matter for marauding Indians to stampede the horses and plunder packs. In March, they traveled at night to avoid snow glare. Sleeping wrapped in buffalo robes, the men sometimes wakened to find themselves buried beneath a snow bank with the horses crunched up half frozen in the blizzard. Four days without food was a common experience on the Mandane trail.
Of all the Nor’Westers stationed at Pembina, Henry was one of the most famous. Cheek by jowl with the Nor’Westers was a post of Hudson’s Bay men under Thomas Miller, an Orkneyman; and hosts of freemen—half-breed trappers and buffalo runners—made this their headquarters, refusing allegiance to either company and selling their hunt to the highest bidder. The highest bidder was the trader who would give away the most rum, and as traders do not give away rum for nothing, there were free fights during the drunken brawls to plunder the intoxicated hunters of furs. Henry commanded some fifty-five Nor’Westers and yearly sent out from Pembina one hundred and ten packs of furs by the famous old Red River ox carts made all of wood, hubs and wheels, that creaked and rumbled and screeched their way in long procession of single file to waiting canoes at Winnipeg.
Henry had come to the wilderness with a hard, cynical sneer for the vices of the fur trader’s life. Within a few years, the fine edge of his scorn had turned on himself and on all life besides, because while he scorned savage vices he could never leave them alone. Like the snare round the feet of a man who has floundered into the quicksands, they sucked him down till his life was lost on the Columbia in a drunken spree. One can trace Henry’s degeneration in his journals from cynic to sinner and sinner to sot, till he has so completely lost the sense of shame, lost the memory that other men can have higher codes, that he unblushingly sets down in his diary how, to-day, he broke his thumb thrashing a man in a drunken bout; how, yesterday, he had to give a squaw a tremendous pommelling before she would let him steal the furs of her absent lord; how he “had a good time last night with the H. B. C. man playing the flute and the drum and drinking the ten-gallon keg clean.” Henry’s régime at Pembina became noted, not from his character, but from legends of famous characters who gathered there.
One night in December, 1807, Henry came home to his lodge and found a young Hudson’s Bay clerk waiting in great distress. The Nor’Wester asked the visitor what was wanted. The intruder begged that the others present should be sent from the room. Henry complied, and turned about to discover a young white woman disguised in man’s clothes, who threw herself on her knees and implored Henry to take pity on her. Her lover of the Orkney Islands had abandoned her. Dressed in man’s garb, she had joined the Hudson’s Bay service and pursued him to the wilderness. In Henry’s log cabin, her child was born. Henry sent mother and infant daughter across to Mr. Haney of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who forwarded both to the recalcitrant Orkneyman—John Scart, at Grand Forks. Before her secret was discovered, according to legend, the woman had been in Hudson’s Bay service of Red River Department for four years. Mother and child were sent back to the Orkneys, where they came to destitution.