"Imagine a man who had crossed the Atlantic and rounded Cape Horn in a hundred-ton sailing vessel on a fur-trading venture looking at a savage coast and planning to found a family!"
"He had vision," Laska supplied.
"He needed to have, those days," Rod grinned. "The North Pacific was a fur-trader's paradise, but it was several thousand miles from anything like civilization. Old Roderick knew that well enough. He knew a good deal about this region before he came here on his own hook, you see. He happened out here first when Captain George Vancouver made his voyage of exploration in 1792. He was a petty officer on the Discovery. He had the journal habit, even in those days. He tells about the surveys they made that year and the next. The idea of this country—after he'd seen a lot of it—took such a hold of him that three or four years later he got out of the British navy, scraped up all the money he could beg and borrow, outfitted a barque called the Hermes and sailed for the Northwest to make a fortune trading beads and brass wire and Sheffield knives to the Indians for sea-otter skins.
"On that first voyage he got the idea of settling here. It evidently grew on him, because when he came out the second time—the first venture was a very profitable one—he brought a couple of dozen extra men, artisans of different trades, and set up a trading post here just as Captain John Meares tried to do at Nootka Sound a few years earlier—you'll find a very interesting account of Meares and his clash with the Spaniards over that post in Begg's 'History of British Columbia.' Meares and Don Martinez between them very nearly got Spain and Great Britain into war. Vancouver came out here to look into that squabble as much as for anything else.
"But ancestor Norquay had this spot pretty much to himself. He bought Big Dent from a local chief for six sheets of copper, an old cutlass, and a pint of glass beads. Think of it! He built a blockhouse of logs with a sixteen-foot stockade. His men cultivated some land for vegetables. He had cattle and pigs and sheep—brought 'em out in the Hermes, like Noah with the animals aboard the Ark. But fur-trading was the chief business. He traded for sea otter as far north as Sitka. Here at home he got beaver, mink, marten, whatever the Indians brought in. The Northwest Fur Company claimed this territory. They were carrying on a big scrap with the Hudson's Bay Company at the time. Finally the Hudson's Bay swallowed the Northwest concern and got a free hand. They tried for years to make all North America their private fur preserve. But they didn't scare old Roderick off. Apparently he wasn't afraid of them. Too well-equipped, I suppose, to be driven off.
"On his fourth voyage in 1804 he took a cargo of twenty-two hundred sea otter which netted him fifty-six thousand dollars—so you can see what the fur trade meant in those times. On that trip he made off with the daughter of a country gentleman of Northumberland—he was Scotch himself, you know—an English girl named Dorothy Grosvenor. Her people considered him a low-class adventurer. So they took the bit in their teeth, boarded the Hermes and sailed away. Sounds quaint. They brought out three or four families with them. The men stationed here had mostly gotten Indian wives by that time. Dorothy sailed with great-great-grandfather wherever he went with the barque for three or four years. But their first child was born here on Big Dent in 1807.
"The next year the Chilcotins came down. They're a fighting tribe from the interior. They had a way of coming down a river to the head of Bute Inlet, killing as many coast Indians as they could, taking the loot and the young women back across the mountains. I suppose they had heard of this white man who had lots of goods. So they organized a surprise attack on Hawk's Nest, as it was already called.
"There was quite a scrimmage, by all accounts. The Chilcotins were beaten off. We lost six men in the fight. Those small headstones are for them," Rod indicated a compact row of graves.
"So the following year old Roderick, who had never given up for a moment the idea of making this his permanent home, started the stone house. He built one wing. His son added a wing. Grandfather can tell you how he built the last addition, and another story, and how he put on a roof of tiles in 1860 after the Cariboo gold rush.
"The Chilcotins pulled off another surprise party in 1826, but they got such a hot reception they never tried again. By that time old Roderick had two sons and two daughters. The youngest son was the only man killed on our side. He led a party to destroy the Chilcotin canoes while they were attacking the house. He was killed by an arrow. But they smashed the canoes and only two Chilcotins out of forty got away. In fact, they were spared to go back and tell the rest of the tribe that it was bad medicine to molest the white men who lived at Hawk's Nest.