For many years the fireside legends of rural hamlets on the frontier were made up in a great measure from narratives of startling adventures, hazards, fatigues, and privations encountered by the clerks, agents, voyageurs, and coureurs des bois employed by this most energetic and enterprising, if at the same time most unscrupulous, corporation. Its schemes were devised with masterly skill, and executed with reckless daring. Not content to limit its transactions within the extensive regions allotted to its sway, it extended them north into territories over which the Hudson's Bay Company had long held control, and south into a large domain belonging to the United States, and occupied to some extent by traders under the protection of our government.
These invasions of the rights of others brought the servants of the company into frequent collision with its rivals; but the men appointed to such posts were selected from a large band of trained and tried veterans in the service, and the dashing promptitude with which they met or evaded opposition and obstacles seemed like magic to the opposing parties of trappers, free-traders, and half-breeds thus encountered, and gained them the reputation, among that superstitious class, of being in league with the father of all evil.
These collisions and outbreaks among the disciples of Mammon, as well as the pernicious influence gained and exercised by them over the savage tribes with whom they were engaged in traffic, were the occasion of great grief and anxiety to a widely different class of men, who had long occupied those territories, and braved the difficulties, dangers, and hardships of those bleak and desolate regions, on a widely different errand. Dauntless sons of Loyola, they had steadfastly pursued their vocation, "in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of the wilderness, in labor and painfulness, in much watching, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness," proving their allegiance to the Prince of Peace and their claim to his apostolic mission, while proclaiming the Gospel of salvation to the native children of those boundless deserts.
And so it befell that the servants of lucre, who traversed the same districts, at later periods, in pursuance of their vocation, not unfrequently took advantage of the openings thus prepared, and pitched their outposts side by side with the humble chapel and lodge of the missionary. Then the conflict between good and evil, between avarice and generosity, selfishness and benevolence, which had always agitated the Old World, was renewed in the wilderness, and carried on as earnestly as if rival crowns were striving for the mastery. An unequal strife it must always prove, so long as poor human nature prefers to be the victim of evil rather than the servant of virtue.
Many years ago—and long before Catholic missions interested us further than to excite a certain vague admiration for the self-sacrificing zeal with which they were prosecuted—we listened to the following recital from the lips of an old clerk of the Northwest Company, which we repeat as it was told to us, to set forth some of the difficulties that encompassed the missionaries among the Indians of the Northwest, tending to impede, if not frustrate, the object of their efforts.
On a fine day in the month of September, 18—, a fleet of canoes was sweeping down one of the large rivers which flow through the northwestern portion of our country. They were manned by Canadian voyageurs, the plash of whose paddles kept time with the gay chansons, which were borne in such unison upon their blended voices as to seem, except for the volume of sound, the utterance of but one.
In the leading vessel of the little squadron, well enveloped in the folds of a magnificent fur mantle, to shield from autumnal chills, which settle early upon those regions, their commander reclined at his ease. He was a person of imposing presence and stately manners, whose face, grave and thoughtful for one from which the flush of youth had scarcely passed, presented that fine type of manly beauty peculiar to the Highland Scotch.
He seemed too entirely absorbed in his own thoughts to notice the songs of his light-hearted companions, the merry chat with which they were interspersed, or even the sly jokes that, with the freedom produced by the lawless habits of the wilderness, were occasionally levelled at himself and, the confidential clerk who was his inseparable attendant. Nor did his reflections seem to be of an agreeable nature; for at times his dark eye would flash fiercely, and his brow contract to an ominous frown, and again his countenance would subside into its habitual and somewhat pensive expression.
Twilight was closing around them as they approached a trading-post of the Northwest Company, which had been recently opened near a long-established missionary station, the spire of whose humble chapel was lifted above the numerous huts that formed an Indian village of considerable extent along the bank of the river.
Here their commander ordered them to land, and, after securing the canoes for the night, to transfer their cargoes to the storehouse of the company. He directed in person the removal of the most valuable merchandise, and, entrusting the remainder to the care of his clerk, proceeded with haughty strides toward the lodge of the resident missionary.