The hilly country around Fort Pitt was frequently the scene of Indian ambush and attack, and on more than one occasion the post itself has been captured by the Blackfeet. The surroundings are a favourite camping-ground of the Crees; and it was found difficult to persuade the Blackfeet that the factors and traders there are not the active friends and allies of their enemies. In fact, they regarded both Fort Pitt and Fort Carlton as places belonging to another company from that which ruled at Mountain House and Edmonton. "If it was the same company," they were wont to say, "how could they give our enemies, the Crees, guns and powder; for do they not give us guns and powder, too?"
The strength of the Company throughout the vast region where their rule was paramount, was rather a moral strength than a physical one. Its roots lay deep in the heart of the savage, who in time came to regard the great corporation as the embodiment of all that was good, and great, and true, and powerful. He knew that under its sway justice was secured to him; that if innocent he would be unharmed, that if guilty he would inevitably pay the penalty of his transgression. The prairie was wide, the forests were trackless, but in all those thousands of miles there came to be no haven for the horse-thief, the incendiary or the murderer, where he would be free, in his beleaguered fastness, to elude or defy Nemesis. The Company made it its business to find and punish the real offender; they did not avenge themselves on his friends or tribe. But punishment was certain—blood was paid for in blood, and there was no trial. Often did an intrepid factor, trader or clerk, enter a hostile camp, himself destitute of followers, walk up to the trembling malefactor, raise his gun or pistol, take aim, fire, and seeing his man fall, stalk away again to the nearest fort.
"This certainty of punishment," it was said, "acted upon the savage mind with all the power of a superstition. Felons trembled before the white man's justice, as in the presence of the Almighty."
That sense of injustice which rankled in the bosoms of the other Indians of the Continent, causing them to continually break out and give battle to their tormentors and oppressors—a warfare which, in 1870, had cost the United States more than five hundred million of dollars, could not exist. The Red men, as Red men, could have no well-founded grievance against the Company, which treated white and red with equity.
The Great Company's Policy.
"I have no hesitation in attributing the great success attendant for so many years upon the Indian policy of the Hudson's Bay Company," wrote an American Commissioner, Lieutenant Scott, in 1867, "to the following facts:—
"The savages are treated justly—receiving protection in life and property from the laws which they are forced to obey.
"There is no Indian Bureau with attendant complications.
"There is no pretended recognition of the Indian's title in fee-simple to the lands on which he roams for fish or game.
"Intoxicating liquors were not introduced amongst these people so long as the Hudson's Bay Company preserved the monopoly of trade.