Semple said, "Are you not Mr. Grant?"
"Yes," said the other.
"I am not mortally wounded," said the Governor, "and if you could get me conveyed to the fort, I think I should live."
But when Grant left his side an Indian named Ma-chi-ca-taou shot him, some say through the breast, and some have it that he put a pistol to the Governor's head. Grant could not stop the savages. The bloodshed had crazed them. They slaughtered all the wounded, and, worse yet, they terribly maltreated the bodies. Twenty-two Hudson Bay men were killed, and one on the other side was wounded.
There is a story that Alexander McDonnell shouted for joy when he heard the news of the massacre. One witness, who did not hear him shout, reports that he exclaimed to his friends: "Sacré nom de Dieu! Bonnes nouvelles; vingt-deux Anglais tués!" (——! Good news; twenty-two English slain!) It was afterwards alleged that the slaughter was approved by every officer of the Northwest Company whose comments were recorded.
It is a saying up in that country that twenty-six out of the sixty-five in the attacking party died violent deaths. The record is only valuable as indicating the nature and perils of the lives the hunters and half-breeds led. First, a Frenchman dropped dead while crossing the ice on the river, his son was stabbed by a comrade, his wife was shot, and his children were burned; "Big Head," his brother, was shot by an Indian; Coutonohais dropped dead at a dance; Battosh was mysteriously shot; Lavigne was drowned; Fraser was run through the body by a Frenchman in Paris; Baptiste Morallé, while drunk, was thrown into a fire by inebriated companions and burned to death; another died drunk on a roadway; another was wounded by the bursting of his gun; small-pox took the eleventh; Duplicis was empaled upon a hay-fork, on which he jumped from a hay-stack; Parisien was shot, by a person unknown, in a buffalo-hunt; another lost his arm by carelessness; Gardapie, "the brave," was scalped and shot by the Sioux; so was Vallée; Ka-te-tee-goose was scalped and cut in pieces by the Gros-Ventres; Pe-me-can-toss was thrown in a hole by his people; and another Indian and his wife and children were killed by lightning. Yet another was gored to death by a buffalo. The rest of the twenty-six died by being frozen, by drowning, by drunkenness, or by shameful disease.
It is when things are at their worst that they begin to mend, says a silly old proverb; but when history is studied these desperate situations often seem part of the mending, not of themselves, but of the broken cause of progress. There was a little halt here in Canada, as we shall see, but the seed of settlement had been planted, and thenceforth continued to grow. Lord Selkirk came with all speed, reaching Canada in 1817. It was now an English colony, and when he asked for a body-guard, the Government gave him two sergeants and twelve soldiers of the Régiment de Meuron. He made these the nucleus of a considerable force of Swiss and Germans who had formerly served in that regiment, and he pursued a triumphal progress to what he called his territory of Assiniboin, capturing all the Northwest Company's forts on the route, imprisoning the officers, and sending to jail in Canada all the accessaries to the massacre, on charges of arson, murder, robbery, and "high misdemeanors." Such was the prejudice against the Hudson Bay Company and the regard for the home corporation that nearly all were acquitted, and suits for very heavy damages were lodged against him.
