The New North

by Agnes Deans Cameron

As we watch the trading goods being carried in the rain from warehouse to scows, we think how, weaving its cross-Atlantic way through the centuries and joining the periwigged days of the Stuarts to this day, the one man-made thing that has persisted is this commerce-shuttle of the H.B. Co.

In the days when The Company had its birth, the blind Milton was dictating his message and the liberated Bunyan preached the spoken word, the iniquitous Cabal Ministry was forming in England, and Panama was sacked by Morgan the buccaneer. New York merchants of Manhattan met every Friday at noon on the bridge over the Broad Street Canal for barter, South Carolina was settled on the Ashley River, Virginia enacted that "all servants not being Christians, imported into this country by shipping shall be slaves," and her Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was inspired to exclaim piously, "I hope we shall have neither free schools nor printing these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. God keep us from both!" It was not until two years later that Addison was born, and that Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi, even as we now are essaying the Athabasca.

Unique in commercial annals is the Royal Charter which gave, with power of life and death, to the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, less than twenty in number, "forever hereafter" possession and jurisdiction over a country as large as Europe. Liberty here for utter despotism, the widest of excesses. We marvel that from the first Prince Rupert of the Rhine to the latest Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Governors of the Ancient Company have, with Duncan-like demeanour, borne themselves so meek in their great office.

It has been fashionable to paint the H.B. Co. as an agrarian oligarchy. Organized for the purpose of "making fur" before the time of the Habeas Corpus, two decades ahead of the Bank of England, sixty-two years before Benjamin Franklin began publishing "Poor Richard's Almanac," and a century in advance of Watt's steam-engine, it is true that The Company, throughout the years, devoted itself to peltries and not to platting town sites. This was its business. From the beginning it has consistently kept faith with the Indians; the word of The Company has, for reward or for punishment, ever been worth its full face value. It was not an H.B. Scot who exclaimed feelingly, "Honesty is the best policy, I've tried baith."

The feeling of devotion to The Company is as strong today as it ever was. When the present Commissioner took office he penetrated the North on a tour of inspection. At Athabasca Landing, since it was not known just when the Head would arrive, the local official charged all his clerks and minions to be ready at the sound of a whistle to salute and fall into line for inspection. The call to arms came on Sunday morning during divine service. Every attaché of The Company with one exception obeyed the signal. Young Tom Helly, the paid organist, stuck to his post; and next day he was called on the carpet. "It was a special service; I was in the middle of the anthem, sir, and didn't like to leave the House of God." "Couldn't you show some respect?" roared the local officer. Man was near in Athabasca Landing and God far away. Down in the big office at Winnipeg is a Doomsday Book where the life-record of every servant of The Company is kept, for no man who has ever served The Company is lost sight of. When there is a good fur-winter, every employé of The Company is handed an envelope which contains a bonus-cheque,—ten per cent of his yearly salary.

C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.

The Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company and the head of one of Canada's big department stores were dining together at a Toronto Club. "After six o'clock I don't want to see or hear of an employé—he doesn't exist for me until eight o'clock next morning," said the head of the department store. "Well, I'm more curious than you," smiled the Commissioner of the H.B. Co., "I want to be reasonably assured of what every man-Jack of my people is doing all the time. I want to know what he reads, and if he treats his wife well, and how his last baby is getting along—you see, he's a working-partner of mine."

There came out of Northern British Columbia last year the Indian wife and half-breed daughters of an H.B. Co. Factor. They were bound for Montreal and it was their first trip "outside." The Commissioner at Winnipeg contradicts the old saw, and surely has "a soul above a beaver-skin"; like Mulvaney, too, he "has bowels." Quickly went forward a letter to a tactful woman in the border-town through which the visiting ladies must pass—"Meet them, and see that they get the proper things to wear in society circles in Montreal. I don't want them to feel ill at ease when they get there." Stories like these give us glimpses of the kind of paternalism exercised by the Ancient Company, the one trust that has never ground the faces of the poor, and in whose people to-day appears the "constant service of the Old World."