The Company had told the Parliamentary Committee of ’57 that it would willingly remit the burden of governing its enormous territory if adequate returns were made for its possessory rights. Without going into the question of these rights, a syndicate of capitalists, called the International Financial Association, jumped at the chance to buy out the old Hudson’s Bay. Chief negotiator was Edward Watkins, who was planning telegraph and railroad schemes for British America. “About what would the price be?” he had casually asked Ellice, now an old man—the same Ellice who had negotiated the union of Hudson’s Bay and Nor’Westers in ’21. “Oh, perhaps a million-and-a-half,” ruminated Ellice; but Berens, whose family had held Hudson’s Bay stock for generations, was of a different mind. “What?” he roared in a manner the quintessence of insult, “sequester our lands? Let settlers go in on our hunting ground?” But the cooler heads proved the wiser heads. It was “take what you can get now, or risk losing all later! Whether you will or not, charter or no charter, settlers are coming and can’t be stopped. Canadian politicians are talking of your charter as an outrage, as spoliation! Their surveyors are already on the ground! Judge for yourselves whether it is worth while to risk the repetition of Oregon; or attempt resisting settlement.”
Members of the International Financial Association met Berens, Colville—representative of the Selkirk interests—and two other Hudson’s Bay directors in the dark old office of the Board Room, Fenchurch Street, on the 1st of February, in 1862. Watkins describes the room as dingy with faded green cover on the long table and worn dust-grimed chairs. Berens continued to storm like a fishwife; but it was probably part of the game. On June 1, 1863, the International Association bought out the Hudson’s Bay Company for £1,500,000. The Company that had begun in Radisson’s day, two hundred years before, with a capital of $50,000 (£10,000) now sold to the syndicate for $7,500,000, and the stock was resold to new shareholders in a new Hudson’s Bay Company at a still larger capital. The question was what to do about the forty shares belonging to the chief factors and traders. When word of the sale came to them in Canada, they naturally felt as the minority shareholder always feels—that they had been sold out without any compensation, and the indignation in the service was universal. But this injustice was avoided by another unexpected move in the game.
While financiers were dickering for Hudson’s Bay stock, Canadian politicians brought about confederation of all the Canadian colonies in 1867, and a clause had been introduced in the British North America Act that it should “be lawful to admit Rupert’s Land and the Northwest Territories into the Union.” The Hon. William McDougall had introduced resolutions in the Canadian House praying that Rupert’s Land be united in the Confederation. With this end in view, Sir George Cartier and Mr. McDougall proceeded to England to negotiate with the Company. In October, 1869, the new Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished all charter and exclusive rights to the Dominion. The Dominion in turn paid over to the Company £300,000; granted it one-twentieth of the arable land in its territory, and ceded to it rights to the land on which its forts were built. From the £300,000, paid by Canada, £157,055 were set aside to buy out the rights of the wintering partners. How valuable one-twentieth of the arable land was to prove, the Company, itself, did not realize till recent days, and what wealth it gained from the cession of land where its forts stood, may be guessed from the fact that at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) this land comprised five hundred acres of what are now city lots at metropolitan values. Where its forts stood, it had surely won its laurels, for the ground was literally baptized with the blood of its early traders; just as the tax-free sites of rich religious orders in Quebec were long ago won by the blood of Catholic martyrs of whom newcomers knew nothing. Whether the rest of the bargain—the payment of £300,000 for charter rights, which Canadians repudiated, and the cession of one-twentieth of the country’s arable land—were as good a bargain for Canada as for the Hudson’s Bay Company, I must leave to be discussed by the writer who takes up the story where I leave off. Certainly both sides have made tremendous gains from the bargain.
A year later, Red River Settlement came into Confederation under the name which Spence had given the country of his Provisional Government—Manitoba, “the country of the people of the lakes.”
So passed the Company as an empire builder. In Oregon, its passing was marked by the terrible conflagration of Indian massacres. In British Columbia, the old order gave place to the new in a wild gold stampede. In Manitoba, the monopoly had not been surrendered before Riel put a match to the inflammable passions of his wild Plain Rangers, that set the country in a flame.
As for the Company, it had played its part, and its day was done. On that part, I have no verdict. Its history is its verdict, and it is only fair to judge it by the codes of feudalism rather than democracy. Judging by the codes of feudalism, there are few baronial or royal houses of two hundred years’ reign with as little to blush for or hide away among family skeletons as the “Gentlemen Adventurers Trading to Hudson’s Bay.” Trickery? To be sure; but then, it was an old order fighting a new, an old fencer trying to parry the fancy thrusts of an enemy with a new style of sword play. The old order was Feudalism. The new was Democracy.
The Company’s ships still ply the waters of the North. Its canoe brigades still bring in the furs to the far fur posts. Its mid-winter dog trains still set the bells tinkling over the lonely wastes of Northern snows and it still sells as much fur at its great annual sales as in its palmiest days. But the Hudson’s Bay Company is no longer a gay Adventurer setting sail over the seas of the Unknown. It is no longer a Soldier of Fortune, with laugh for life or death carving a path through the wilderness. It is now but a commercial organization with methods similar to other money-getting companies. Free traders over-run its hunting grounds. Rivals as powerful as itself are now on the field fighting the battle of competition according to modern methods of business rivalry. Three-quarters of its old hunting fields are already carved up in the checker-board squares of new provinces and fenced farm patches. The glories of the days of its empire as Adventurer, as Soldier of Fortune, as Pathfinder, as Fighter, as Gamester of the Wilderness—have gone forever to that mellow Golden Age of the Heroic Past.
Notes to Chapter XXXIV.—The authorities for this chapter are H. B. C. Archives; the Parl. Report of 1857; Canadian Hansard, and local data gathered on the spot when I lived in Winnipeg. Dr. George Bryce is the only writer who has ever attempted to tell the true inward story of the first Riel Rebellion. I do not refer to his hints of “priestly plots.” These had best been given in full or left unsaid, but I do refer to his reference to the danger of Red River going as Oregon had gone—over to a Provisional Government, which would have meant war; and I cannot sufficiently regret that this story is not given in full. In another generation, there will be no one living who can tell that story; and yet one can understand why it may have to remain untold as long as the leading actors are alive.