In the narrative of the Rev. Mr. King, it is stated that “the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company are not satisfied with putting so insignificant value upon the furs, that the more active hunters only can gain a support, which necessarily leads to the death of the more aged and infirm by starvation and cannibalism, but they encourage the intemperate use of ardent spirits.”
Says Mr. Alexander Simpson, one of the company’s own chief traders: “That body has assumed much credit for the discontinuance of the sale of spirituous liquors at its trading establishments, but I apprehend that in this matter it has both claimed and received more praise than is its due. The issue of spirits has not been discontinued by it on principle, indeed it has not been discontinued at all when there is a possibility of diminution of trade through the Indians having the power to resent this deprivation of their accustomed and much-loved annual jollification, by carrying their furs to another market.”
This means simply that Mr. Greenhow and all other admirers of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s manner of treating Indians have been humbugged by their professions of “humanity and policy.”
We are inclined to return Mr. Greenhow’s compliment to the Rev. Samuel Parker in his own language, as found on the 361st page of his work. He says: “Mr. Samuel Parker, whose journal of his tour beyond the Rocky Mountains, though highly interesting and instructive, would have been much more so had he confined himself to the results of his own experience, and not wandered into the region of history, diplomacy, and cosmogony, in all of which he is evidently a stranger.” So with Mr. Greenhow, when he attempts to reconcile the conduct of the Hudson’s Bay Company with “humanity,” and admires their policy, and gives them credit for honorable treatment of “Indians, missionaries, and settlers,” he leaves his legitimate subject of history and diplomacy, and goes into the subject of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s moral policy, to which he appears quite as much a “stranger” as Mr. Samuel Parker does to those subjects in which Mr. Greenhow found him deficient.
But, notwithstanding we are inclined to return Mr. Greenhow’s compliment in his own language, his historical researches and facts are invaluable, as developing a deep scheme of a foreign national grasping disposition, to hold, by a low, mean, underhanded, and, as Mr. Greenhow says, “false and malicious course of misrepresentation, the country west of the Rocky Mountains.” There are a few pages in Mr. Greenhow’s history that,—as ours is now fully written, and we see no reason to change a statement we have made,—for the information of our readers, and to correct what we conceive to be an erroneous impression of his relative to our early settlements upon this coast, we will quote, and request our readers to observe our corrections in the history or narration of events we have given them.
“Schools for the instruction of their children, and hospitals for their sick, were established at all their principal trading-posts; each of which, moreover, afforded the means of employment and support to Indians disposed to work in the intervals between the hunting seasons.”
Says the Rev. Mr. Barnley, a Wesleyan missionary at Moose Factory, whose labors commenced in June, 1840, and continued till September, 1847: “A plan which I had devised for educating and turning to some acquaintance with agriculture, native children, was disallowed,——it being very distinctly stated by Sir George Simpson, that the company would not give them even a spade toward commencing their new mode of life.”
Says Mr. Greenhow: “Missionaries of various sects were encouraged to undertake to convert these people to Christianity, and to induce them to adopt the usages of civilized life, so far as might be consistent with the nature of the labors in which they are engaged; care being at the same time taken to instill into their minds due respect for the company, and for the sovereign of Great Britain; and attempts were made, at great expense, though with little success, to collect them into villages, or tracts where the soil and climate are favorable to agriculture.”
Mr. Barnley says: “At Moose Factory, where the resources were most ample, and where was the seat of authority in the southern department of Rupert’s Land, the hostility of the company (and not merely their inability to aid me, whether with convenience or inconvenience to themselves) was most manifest.”
Another of the English missionaries writes in this manner: “When at York Factory last fall (1848), a young gentleman boasted that he had succeeded in starting the Christian Indians of Rossville off with the boats on a Sunday. Thus every effort we make for their moral and spiritual improvement is frustrated, and those who were, and still are, desirous of becoming Christians, are kept away; the pagan Indians desiring to become Christians, but being made drunk on their arrival at the fort, ‘their good desires vanish.’ The Indians professing Christianity had actually exchanged one keg of rum for tea and sugar, at one post, but the successive offers of liquor betrayed them into intoxication at another.”