CHAPTER IV
THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP
Those eighty[21] Astorians and Nor' Westers who set inland with their ten canoes and boats under protection of two swivels encountered as many dangers on the long trip across the continent as they had left at Fort George.
Following the wandering course of the Columbia, the traders soon passed the international boundary northward into the Arrow Lakes with their towering sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the Columbia where the river becomes a tumultuous torrent milky with glacial sediment, now raving through a narrow cañon, now teased into a white whirlpool by obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of some great glacier, and always mountain-girt by the tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.
"A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Bellefeuille," wrote the mighty MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-sixth year for a son; but the old trader's tale needed no varnish of rhetoric. "Nearing the mountains we got scarce of provisions; ... bought horses for beef.... Here (at the Great Bend) we left canoes and began a mountain pass (Yellow Head Pass).... The river meanders much, ... and we cut across, ... holding by one another's hands, ... wading to the hips in water, dashing in, frozen at one point, thawed at the next, ... frozen before we dashed in, ... our men carrying blankets and provisions on their heads; ... four days' hard work before we got to Jasper House at the source of the Athabasca, sometimes camping on snow twenty feet deep, so that the fires we made in the evening were fifteen or twenty feet below us in the morning."
They had now crossed the mountains, and taking to canoes again paddled down-stream to the portage between Athabasca River and the Saskatchewan. Tramping sixty miles, they reached Fort Augustus (Edmonton) on the Saskatchewan, where canoes were made on the spot, and the voyageurs launched down-stream a trifling distance of two thousand miles by the windings of the river, past Lake Winnipeg southward to Fort William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters on Lake Superior.
Here the capture of Astoria was reported, and bales to the value of a million dollars in modern money sent east in fifty canoes with an armed guard of three hundred men.[22] Coasting along the north shore of Lake Superior, the voyageurs came to the Sault and found Mr. Johnston's establishment a scene of smoking ruins. It was necessary to use the greatest caution not to attract the notice of warring parties on the Lakes.
Indian voyageurs "packing" over long portage, each packet containing from fifty to one hundred pounds.
"Overhauled a canoe going eastward, ... a Mackinaw trader and four Indians with a dozen fresh American scalps," writes MacDonald, showing to what a pass things had come. Two days later a couple of boats were overtaken and compelled to halt by a shot from MacDonald's swivels. The strangers proved to be the escaping crew of a British ship which had been captured by two American schooners, and the British officer bore bad news. The American schooners were now on the lookout for the rich prize of furs being taken east in the North-West canoes. Slipping under the nose of these schooners in the dark, the officer hurried to Mackinac, leaving the Nor' Westers hidden in the mouth of French River. William MacKay, a Nor' West partner, at once sallied out to the defence of the furs.