The conquest of the great Northwest, Volume 2 (of 2) /

by Agnes C. Laut

There was the Buffalo Wool Company of 1822, under Pritchard’s management, which set all the farmers scouring the plains as buffalo hunters with schemes as roseate as the South Sea Bubble; and like the South Sea Bubble the roseate scheme came to grief. It cost $12.50 a yard to manufacture cloth that sold for only $1.10; and the Hudson’s Bay Company wrote a loss of $12,000 off their books for this experiment.

Alex MacDonell, a bottle-loving Scotchman, who had acted as governor of the colony after Semple’s death, and who became notorious as “the grasshopper governor” because his régime caused the colonists as great grief as the grasshopper plague—now gave place to Governor Bulger. Over at the Company fort, John Clarke of Athabasca fame, now returned from Montreal with an aristocratic Swiss lady as his bride—acts as Chief Factor under Governor Simpson.

The next essay is to send Laidlaw down to Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi to buy a stock of seed wheat to be rafted up the Mississippi across a portage and down the Red River. He buys two hundred and fifty bushels at $2.40 a bushel, but what with rafting and incidentals before it reaches the colonist, it has cost the Hudson’s Bay Company £1,040. Next, an experimental farm must be tried to teach these new colonists how to farm in the new country. The same Mr. Laidlaw with the same grand ideas is put in charge of the Hayfield Farm. It is launched with the style of a baronial estate—fine houses, fine stables, a multitude of servants, a liberal tap in the wine cellar; and a total loss to the Hudson’s Bay Company of £2,000. There follow experiments of driving sheep to Red River all the way from Missouri, and of a Wool Company that ends as the Buffalo Company had, and of flax growing, the flax rotting in the fields for lack of a purchaser. What with disastrous experiments and a grasshopper plague and a flood that floats the houses of half the population down the ice-jammed current of the raging Red, the De Meurons and Swiss become discouraged. It was noticed during the flood that the De Meurons had an unusual quantity of hides and beef to sell; and that the settlers had extraordinary difficulty finding their scattered herds. What little reputation the De Meurons had, they now lost; and many of them with their Swiss neighbors deserted Red River for the new settlements of Minnesota. From ranging the plains with the buffalo hunters of Pembina, the Swiss came on south to Fort Snelling, near modern St. Paul, and so formed the nucleus of the first settlements in Minnesota. It has been charged that the Hudson’s Bay Company never meant any of these experiments to succeed; that it designed them so they would fail and prove to the world the country was unfit for settlement. Such a charge is far-fetched with just enough truth to give the falsity semblance. The Company were not farmers. They were traders, and it is not surprising that fur men’s experiments at farming should be a failure; but that the Hudson’s Bay Company deliberately went to work to throw away sums of money ranging from $5,000 to $17,000 will hardly be credited with those who know the inner working of an organization whose economy was so strict it saved nails when it could use wooden pegs.

Interior of Fort Garry or Winnipeg in 1870. The figure standing with arm extended a little to the left of the flag is Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, then but newly come from the wilds of Labrador and commissioned by the Canadian Government to try and pacify the Half-breed Rebels led by Riel.

American herdsmen as an experiment had driven up herds of cattle to sell to the Red River colonists. This was the beginning of trade with St. Paul. Henceforward, what produce Red River people could not sell to the Hudson’s Bay Company, was sent to St. Paul. Then the St. Paul traders paid higher prices than the Hudson’s Bay Company. Twice a year the long lines of Red River ox carts, like Eastern caravans, creaked over the looping prairie trail of Red River southward to St. Paul with buffalo hides and farm products. These carts were famous in their day. They were built entirely of wood, hub, spokes, rim and tire of wheel, pegs even taking the place of nails. Hence, if a cart broke down on the way, it could be mended by recourse to the nearest clump of brushwood. The Sioux were at this time the greatest danger to the cart brigades, and the settlers always traveled together for protection; but the Indians wished to stay on good terms with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and had the settlers carry an H. B. C. flag as a signal of friendship with the fur traders. Within a few years, twelve hundred Red River carts rumbled and creaked their way to St. Paul in June and September. Simpson had issued Hudson’s Bay Company notes of £1, 5 shillings and 1 shilling, to avoid the account system, and these notes were always redeemable at any fur post for Company goods, but in St. Paul, the settlers for the first time began using currency that was coin.

Early in the thirties, possibly owing to the dangers from the Sioux, Governor Simpson ordered the building of the stone forts—Upper Fort Garry as a stronghold for the Company, Lower Fort Garry near St. Andrew’s Rapids twenty miles north, as a residence for himself and trading post for the lake Indians. These were the last stone forts built by the fur trader in America. Of Upper Fort Garry there remains to-day only the old gray stone gate, to be seen at the south end of Main Street in Winnipeg. Lower Fort Garry yet stands as Simpson had it built—the last relic of feudalism in America—high massive stone walls with stores and residence in the court yard.

Other operations Simpson pushed for the Company. McLean is sent in ’37 to explore the interior of Labrador. John Clarke is dispatched to establish forts down MacKenzie River almost to the Arctic. Bell goes overland, in 1846, to the Yukon. Murray, later of Pembina, builds Fort Yukon, and Campbell between 1840 and 1848 explores both the Pelly and the Yukon, building Fort Selkirk.

The explorations that had begun when Radisson came to Hudson Bay in his canoe from Lake Superior, were now completed by the Company’s boats going down the MacKenzie to the Arctic and down the Yukon to Bering Sea. How big was the empire won from savagery by fur trader? Within a few thousand miles of the same size as Europe. Spain won a Mexico and a Peru from savagery; but her soldiers’ cruelty outdid the worst horrors of Indian warfare, steeped every mile of the forward march with the blood of the innocent natives, and reduced those natives to a state of slavery that was a hell upon earth. The United States won an empire from savagery, but she did it by an ever-shifting frontier, that was invariably known from Tennessee to Oregon, as “the Bloody Ground.” Behind that shifting frontier was the American pioneer with his sharp-shooter. In front of that frontier was the Indian with his tomahawk. Between them was the Bloody Ground. In the sixteen-hundreds, that Bloody Ground was west of the Alleghanies in Ohio and Tennessee and Kentucky. In the seventeen-hundreds, it had shifted forward to the Mississippi. In the eighteen-hundreds, it was on the plains and in the mountains and in Oregon. Always, the forward step of white man, the backward step of red man—had meant a battle, bloodshed; now the colonists wiped out by the Sioux in Minnesota; or the missionaries massacred by the Cayuse in Oregon; or the Indians shot down and fleeing to the caves of the mountains like hunted animals.

How many massacres marked the forward march of the Hudson’s Bay Company from Atlantic to Pacific? Not one. The only massacre, that of Seven Oaks, was a fight of fur trader against fur trader. The raids such as Hearne saw on the Coppermine were raids of tribe on tribe, not white man on Indian, nor Indian on white man. “Smug old lady,” enemies designated the Hudson’s Bay Company. “Oppressor, monopoly, intriguing aristocrats,” the early settlers of Oregon called her. Grant all the sins of omission common to smug, conservative old ladies! Grant all the sins of commission—greed, secrecy, craft, subterfuge—common the world over to monopolies! Of these things and more was the Hudson’s Bay Company guilty in its long despotic reign of two hundred years. But set over against its sins, this other fact, a record which no other organization in the world may boast—the bloodless conquest of an empire from savagery!