The next few years were devoted to devising and considering schemes to counteract these two growing competitors—to oppose the further progress of the Russians on the one hand, and to combat the North-Westers on the other.
For twenty-seven years Baranoff continued to be the controlling mind of the new Russian trading enterprise. Shelekoff died in 1795; and his widow continued the business, and upon combining with the Milnikoff Company it increased gradually in wealth. The charter of these joint enterprises, to which the name of the Russian-American Fur Company was given, was signed in August, 1798, and confirmed at St. Petersburg in 1799. That year witnessed the settlement of New Archangel, on the island of Sitka.
The consequences of this increased output were not, however, felt in the fur-markets at Leipsic. Europe was convulsed by war, and Napoleon had laid an embargo on British goods. The furs, therefore, accumulated for several years in the stores of the Hudson's Bay Company without finding a mart.
From 1787 to 1817, for only a portion of which time the Russian Company existed, the Unalaska district yielded upwards of 2,500,000 seal skins alone. The number of other skins reported at times was prodigious.
But the time had not come for the Company to actively assert itself in opposition to the Russians.
It was paying dearly now for its short-sightedness in not availing itself of the opportunities afforded by the conquest of Canada to penetrate into its chartered domain. In the second year of the century the Honourable Adventurers had been obliged to borrow £20,000 from the Bank of England, hoping that the cessation of war in Europe, and the quarrels of the rival Montreal traders in North America, would permit the Company to regain the advantage it had lost. For in the autumn of 1798 the Company had received advices that its prosperous Canadian rival had taken a new step in the conduct of its affairs.
Rival factions in the North-West Company.
Difficulties and dissensions had begun to breed in the ranks of the Northmen. A few disaffected spirits spoke of secession and carried their intentions into effect, but the stronger partners were reluctant to break up an alliance which had proved so prosperous. But in the closing year, but one of the century, the situation became intolerable and when the partners met, as was their custom at the Grand Portage, Mackenzie bluntly told his associates that he had resolved to quit the Company. He was led to this decision by a personal quarrel between himself and Simon McTavish, the chief of the North-West Company. Opposing factions sprang into being, attaching themselves to both Mackenzie and McTavish, the latter of whom strongly resented the way in which he was treated at the annual meeting by the partisans of the former, and each now determined to take his course thenceforward untrammelled by the other. Mackenzie went to England, where he published an account of his travels in the north-west and obtained the honour of knighthood, and in 1801 returned to Canada. Here his friends flocked about him, and there saw the light of a new organization, officially entitled the New North-West Company, or Sir Alexander Mackenzie & Co., but more popularly as the X. Y. Co. The two rival Canadian associations now put forth all their strength to establish their commerce in the unknown and unfrequented regions. One of the old North-West employees, Livingston, who had already, in 1796, established a post nearly 100 miles north of Slave Lake, undertook to carry the trade still farther north. But this he was never destined to accomplish. A few days out on this journey he was confronted by the aborigines, who slew him and his companions. An expedition to the Bow River, however, was more successful, and in the midst of many hostile Indians a trading post was established there. Other proofs of enterprise on the part of McTavish and his associates were not wanting.
The dissensions between the two companies so far do not appear to have had a prejudicial effect on the traffic, for on the 30th October, 1802, Lieutenant Governor Milnes, in a dispatch to Lord Hobart,[86] gives an account of the flourishing state of the fur-trade which so far, he says, from diminishing, appears to increase. New tracts of country had been visited by the merchants employed in this traffic, which had furnished new sources of supply, a large proportion of the furs taken in the North-West being brought to Quebec for shipment.[87]