[CHAPTER XXX.]
THE LIFE OF THE TRADERS.
Lonely trading posts—Skilful letter writers—Queer old Peter Fidler—Famous library—A remarkable will—A stubborn Highlander—Life at Red River—Badly-treated Pangman—Founding trading houses—Beating up recruits—Priest Provencher—A fur-trading mimic—Life far north—"Ruled with a rod of iron"—Seeking a fur country—Life in the canoe—A trusted trader—Sheaves of letters—A find in Edinburgh—Faithful correspondents—The Bishop's cask of wine—Red River, a "land of Canaan"—Governor Simpson's letters—The gigantic Archdeacon writes—"MacArgrave's" promotion—Kindly Sieveright—Traders and their books.
It was an empire that Governor Simpson established in the solitudes of Rupert's Land. The chaos which had resulted from the disastrous conflict of the Companies was by this Napoleon of the fur trade reduced to order. Men who had been in arms against one another—Macdonell against Macdonell, McLeod against McLeod—learned to work together and gathered around the same Council Board. The trade was put upon a paying basis, the Indians were encouraged, and under a peaceful rule the better life of the traders began to grow up.
It is true this social life was in many respects unique. The trading posts were often hundreds of miles apart, being scattered over the area from Labrador to New Caledonia. Still, during the summer, brigades of traders carried communications from post to post, and once or twice in winter the swift-speeding dog-trains hastened for hundreds of miles with letters and despatches over the icy wastes. There grew up during the well-nigh forty years of George Simpson's governorship a comradeship of a very strong and influential kind.
Leading posts like York Factory on Hudson Bay, Fort Garry in the Red River settlement, Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River, and Fort Victoria on the Pacific Coast, were not only business centres, but kept alive a Hudson's Bay Company sentiment which those who have not met it can hardly understand. Letters were written according to the good old style. Not mere telegraphic summaries and business orders as at the present day, but real news-letters—necessary and all the more valuable because there were no newspapers in the land. The historian of to-day finds himself led back to a very remarkable and interesting social life as he reads the collection of traders' letters and hears the tales of retired factors and officers. Specimens and condensed statements from these materials may help us to picture the life of the period.
QUEER OLD PETER FIDLER.
Traditions have come down from this period of men who were far from being commonplace in their lives and habits. Among the most peculiar and interesting of these was an English trader, Peter Fidler, who for forty years played his part among the trying events preceding Governor Simpson's time, and closed his career in the year after the union of the Companies. The quaint old trader, Peter Fidler, is said to have belonged to the town of Bolsover, in the County of Derby, England, and was born August 16th, 1769. From his own statement we know that he kept a diary in the service of the Company beginning in 1791, from which it is inferred that he arrived in Rupert's Land about that time and was then engaged in the fur trade. Eight years afterwards he was at Green Lake, in the Saskatchewan district, and about the same time in Isle à la Crosse. In this region he came into active competition with the North-West Company traders, and became a most strenuous upholder of the claims of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Promoted on account of his administrative ability, he is found in the early years of the new century at Cumberland House, the oldest post of the Company in the interior. His length of service at the time of the establishment of the Selkirk colony being above twenty years, he was entrusted with the conduct of one of the parties of settlers from Hudson Bay to Red River.