Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 3

Sinipson ignored the ro(ks, but Sinith proved to be correct. The area he pinpointed as ha~ ingvaluable inineralization laterproved to contain a huge iron-ore body, as Nvell as lesser quant.i.ties of fitaniuni, lead, zinc, nickel, asbestos, coluinbiurn and uraniuiri.

GROWING UP COLD 41.

iced or canned salmon to England, gave him an excuse for corresponding directly with HBC headquarters in London, bypa.s.sing his aging benefactor, Sir George Simpson. The Company eventually formalized this arrangement by separating Labrador from its Lachine administration, so that Smith now reported to London on all his activities. In one of his last letters, Simpson warned his ambitious prot6g6 against being heavyhanded trying to impress his British superiors: "When you want to bring any point strongly under notice, it will have a better chance by putting it in a few clear and appropriate words than by spinning out the theme so as to make it look important by the s.p.a.ce it occupies on paper."

Smith ignored that advice and his letters grew embarra.s.singly verbose.

As soon as he felt a promotion might be in the works, Smith did what lie would always do in later life: he remarried Isabella. This particular wedding, performed either by an itinerant missionary or a visiting sea captain, must ~ave been staged so that Smith could not only salve his conscience but also specifically refer to the sanctioned ceremony in his London correspondence.

He was appointed Chief Factor shortly afterwards at the age of forty-four, and in 1864 decided to take his first home furlough in twenty-six years. After visiting his mother, who was now almost blind, he hurried to London and spent the balance of his leave trying to ingratiate himself with the bigwigs at the HBCs Fenchurch Street head office. He met the Governor, Sir Edmund Walker Head, his deputy, Curtis Miranda Lampson, Eden Colvile, a future Governor, and most of the other important Committeemen. "Smith, the officer in charge of our Esquimaux Bay District," Colvile reported to Lampson, " . . . gives a good account of our affairs in that region, where he has been stationed for many years. As he is just the sort of man you would like to meet, shrewd 42 LABRADOR SMITH.

and well-informed upon every topic relating to that terra incognita of the British Empire, I have asked him to dine with us on the 14th." Lampson, in turn, had been predictably charined by the visitor who from now on was a marked man in the Company's. .h.i.ture planning. There was one small hitch. As was their custom, on the eve of the departure of the supply s.h.i.+p (which would carry Smith home), the Company directors proposed hearty toasts to the well-being of its Commissioned Officers. But when he was called on to reply, Smith had vanished. Overcome by a fit of shyness, the Labrador trader (who had known be would be requested to speak and had prepared his notes) could not face the distinguished gathering, afraid that he might somehow blot his copybook. It was the first public evidence of Smith's well-deserved reputation as a clamsh.e.l.l.

Smith was back in North West River by August 1865, but the visit had transformed him. f le now knew there was still a chance for him to partic.i.p.ate in the great events of his time. Despite his geographical isolation, Smith's reading of the Company's prospects was amazingly accurate. Perhaps because he had never been there and had no vested interest in the HBCs main fields of operation in the West, lie could clearly see that the future would not run with the buffalo hunters or fur-trade canoes but with the oxcarts and ploughs of settlers come to claim new lives in the new land. "I myself am becoming convinced that before many decades are past," he wrote to a friend at the time,"the world will see a great change in the country north of Lake Superior and in the Red River country when the Company's licence expires or its Charter is modified. . .

. You will understand that 1, as a Labrador man, cannot be expected to sympathize altogether with the prejudice against settlers and railways entertained by many of the western commissioned officers. At all events, it is probable that settlement of GROWING UP COLD 43.

the country from Fort William Westward to the Red River, and even a considerable distance beyond, will eventually take place and with damaging effect to the fur trade generally."

Within a year, the newly self-confident Smith had decided to visit Boston, New York and Montreal. Ostensibly, his trip was to view the sights of the city he had left twenty-seven years earlier. "The object I most wanted to see. . . " he explained, "was the Victoria Bridge, which is truly one of the wonders of the world, and gives Montreal an unbroken railway communication of I 100 miles. . . . " In reality, he was seeking belated acceptance in the milieu he felt had suddenly become accessible to him.

The most important part of his trip, at least in retrospect, was a call on his cousin George Stephen. The son of a Banffs.h.i.+re carpenter, Stephen had emigrated from Scotland at twenty-one to become a clerk in his cousin's Montreal drapery business, in which he eventually purchased a controlling interest. He studied banking and had become a.s.sociated with some of Montreal's leading entrepreneurs. The cousins' initial meeting was hardly propitious. The Smith family had gone shopping, and Donald had purchased a gaudy crimson carpet-bag for his Labrador journeys. Later, ~e wouldn't discuss his encounter with Stephen, but when Isabella was asked whether his cousin had been happy to see Smith, she burst out: "Really, why should Mr. Stephen be glad to see country cousins like us-all the way from Labrador? I wish ... [my husband] had waited until he had met Mr. Stephen before buying that red carpet-bag. But he wouldn't let me carry it and the rest of us waited outside." Still, Stephen did condescend to introduce his country cousin to friends at the Bank of Montreal and leading members of the city's s.h.i.+pping circles. All the talk was about domestic electricity, still considered a risky innovation, William Gladstone's surprising eloquence in the 44 LABRADOR SMITH.

British House of Commons, Alfred Tennyson's latest verses and the prospects for Canada under Confederation, then only a year away.

Smith reluctantly reuurned to North West River, but mentally he had already left Labrador behind. Simpson had died in 1860, and his successor, Alexander Girant Dallas, had transferred the Company's North American headquarters to Red River, closer to its main field operations. Since Smith was already in charge of the Labrador District, all that remained in Lachine was direction of the relatively minor Montreal District, which included the King's Posts along the St Lawrence as well as trading forts up the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers. After the retirement on June 1, 1869, of the Montreal District's Chief Factor, F.M. Hopkins, "Labrador Smith," as he had become known in the Company's setvice, was appointed to the job.

And so Donald Alexander Smith came out of the wilderness at last. He was forty-nine years old, his skin permanently blackened by two decades of snow tans, his nerves as taut as those of a sprinter about to start his champions.h.i.+p turn.

Montreal by then had a population of about 100,000, its streets had been paved and its harbour dredged, and the city (North America's tenth largest) was becoming an important rail and steams.h.i.+p terininus. Smith fitted in as if he had never left. "I called today to pay my respects . . . " reported a startled HBC Factor shortly after Smith's arrival, "and was surprised to find him so affable and a.s.suming, with no trace of the ruggedness you would a.s.sociate with the wilderness. You'd think lie had spent all his life at the Court of St James instead of Labrador. . . ." One reason Smith was treated as an equal by members of the city's financial elite was that in a modest way he was already one of thern. During most of his time in Labrador he had GROWING UP COLD 45.

Donald Smitb in 1871

put away virtually his entire HBC earnings (arriving in Montreal with a grub-stake of $50,000), but starting in 1853 with the purchase of two shares, he had also quietly been acc.u.mulating stock in the Bank of Montreal. Coincidentally, George Stephen had been doing the same thing, and within the next four years the two cousins would become the Bank of Montreal's secondlargest shareholders.

Overnight, Smith seemed to be launched on the urban business career that had been his long-postponed dream. Then a confluence of circ.u.mstances intervened and hurled him into the vortex of a strange rebellion gathering momentum halfway across the continent.

CHAPTER 3.

BRINGING LOUIS.

RIEL TO HEEL.

Louis Riel remains the perfect mai-tyr of the prototypical Canadian tragedy: a zeell-meaning yet deluded inystic who died prematurely by pretending to be sane.

'nm cotjNTRY miosF, iIIS'rom Smith was about to affect still seemed more an idea than a reality. Canada in 1869 consisted of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario (the latter two iiiinus their present northern areas), plus the huge but nearly enipty western territories then in the process of being acquired from the Hudson's Bay Company.* After protracted negotiations, the Canadian government had agreed to purchase Prince Rupert's original land grant for 000,000 ($1,460,000) through a loan guaranteed by the Treasury of the United Kingdom. In addition to receiving cash, the I IBC was granted unhindered trading privileges and 45,000 acres around its 120 trading posts as well as the right to claim, during the ensuing fifty years, one-twentieth of the fertile land (about seven million acres) between Lake Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains. The transfer that would extinguish the 1IBCs long-coveted monopoly rights was to take cffect on December 1, 1869.

In the decade after Confederation, most of the 3.6 million citizens of the new Dominion scratched for a

For de ta i Is, see Caewrv oj'tbe 47ihlerncu, hardcove r, pa ges 3 61-

47.

48 LABRADOR SMITH.

living in rural isolation; only 390 square miles were occupied by two dozen embryonic towns and cities. Montreal was the largest at 100,000 people, with Quebec and Toronto competing for second place at about 60,000 each. Across the broad continent west of the Lakehead, there was almost nothing. "The plains were as thousands of years of geological and climatic change had made them," wrote XV.L. Morton, the bard of western Canadian historians. "The gra.s.ses flowed, the prairie fires ran in the wind; the buffalo grazed like cloud shadows in the plain; the buffalo hunt raised a flurry of dust in the diamond summer light; the rivers sought the distant sea unchecked; surnmer made green, autumn bronze, winter white, spring gray. . . What had been wrought . . . lay unchanged until it became the setting for the last frontier."

Because the HBC had for two centuries kept nearly everyone who was not a Company employee out of its domain, the new Canadian West remained in the public mind a territory not far removed from those mysterious hunks of geography labelled on ancient charts "Here Be Dragons." Returning missionaries and the odd free spirit had brought out fragmentary reports of the lands contours and habitability, but it was the American, not the Canadian, West that attracted most settlers. The larger population base of the United States, its better climate and the mood of egalitarianism that characterized the self-confident republic made it a good place to start new lives. The notion of upward mobility still seemed foreign in Canada, which remained trapped in perpetuating vestiges of the British cla.s.s system.

Canada's West was isolated more because of the absence of transportation facilities than as the result of geography. There were only three means of entry: by s.h.i.+p to York Factory thi-ough Hudson Bay; by Red River cart northward from the headwaters of the Mississippi BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 49.

River in Minnesota; or by canoe along the historic furtrade routes from the Upper end of the Great Lakes. Local HBC post managers had from the beginning been encouraged to live off the land, but except for the tracts of cultivation at Red River and a tiny spread at c.u.mberland House, the pioneer trading post opened by Samuel Hearne in 1774, only a few kitchen gardens had taken root. That began to change with the report by John Palliser, a Dublin-born explorer and buffalo hunter who was commissioned bY the Royal Geographical Society to report on the region's potential. fie not only defined a fertile land crescentacross the prairie and noted deposits of coal and other minerals but also explored six pa.s.ses through the Rockies for possible future railway construction. His optimism was somewhat tempered by the conclusion that no railway could be built across the treacherous bogs north of Lake Superior-, the Red River settlement would have to be provisioned from the United States, via Chicago and St Paul.*

By the late 1860s, Red River's inhabitants, including the offspring of the dispossessed crofters from the Scottish clearances, had iurned the fifty-mile area around the I I BC postat Fort Garry, near the junction of the Red and a.s.siniboine rivers, into a relatively prosperous, if insular, community of about ten thousand souls. Half were proud buffalo hunters descended from the mixed marriages of voyageurs and HBC clerks with Cree, Saulteaux, Blackfoot, Chipewyan, Dogrib and Slavey women.

Their spiritual centre was the grey stone cathedral in the parish of St Boniface, presided over by the shrewd Roman Catholic bishop, Alexandre -Antonin Iach&. The tiny village of Winnipeg at the edge of the IIBC fort had grown into a miniature business centre, with half a dozen saloons,

*For the founding 4 Lord Selkirk's colony, see Caesars of'the Wildevness, hardcover, pages 137--89.

50 LABRADOR SMITH.

hotels and stores, supplied by the Red River cart brigades that maintained the linkbetween Fort Garry and St Paul.* Red River's hermetically sealed world revolved around the Hudson's Bay Company's Canadian headquarters at Fort Garry, its busy compound enclosing the Governor's residence, storehouses, clerks' and officers' quarters, sales and trading shops, the powder house and a scatter of outbuildings. Here in summer came the Indian canoe flotillas, loaded to the gunwales with pelts. The trading chiefs-big men with deliberate limb movements and the rhythmic lope of hunters-would hump the fur packs through the fort gates, eager to acquire guns, blankets, copper kettles, and the increasing range of household goods brought over by the 11BC from England. Most summer (lays, Red River carts would be pulling in from St Paul or pulling out, their ungreased wooden wheels screeching in the sunlight, to supply the HB(:',s outposts along the North Saskatchewan River all the way to Fort Edmonton. They would return three months later bulging with the inland fur harvest.

Inside the fort, where each arrival and departure was accompanied by the yelps of a swirling chorus of mongrels, the walls had been painted scarlet, yellow and orange to offset the monotony of nature's blues and greens. Local courts sat here, as did the district's admin istrators, ruling for half a century through an insipid body known as the Council of a.s.siniboia, headed bv the resident HBC G ,overnor, its roster padded by tame ~'om pany appointees. James Ross, an English Mixed Blood who had gone east and graduated from the University of

*The first saloon was opened in 1859 by "Dutch George" Emmerling, who arrived with a barrel of whisky and sold the diluted rotgut at sixpen(e a shot. The sleazy emporium was eventually purchased by Robert Atkinson Davis who promoted it as "a haven of warmth, rest and billiards." Davis reluctantly quit the saloon business in 1874 to become Manitoba's fifth premier.

BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 51.

Toronto before returning to Red River, complained sourly about "the incubus of the Company's monopolythe peculiar government under which we z,egetate-it cools our ardour-destroys our energies-annihilates our very desires for improvement."

Even William Alactavish, the HBC's inc.u.mbent Governor, declared himself disgusted with "the greedy London directory" and the "arrogant Dominion Government," since neither had exercised the courtesy of informing him directly about the impending changes of circ.u.mstance. Although negotiations agreeing to terms that would surrender the 11BC lands and monopoly had been concluded in London on April 9, 1869, by November of that year Mactavish had still not received notification of the transfer. In the absence of reliable information, rumours swept the I tBC compound, so that Mactavish's already difficult position became untenable.* The Edinburgh-born Alactavish had Joined the Company as an apprentice in 1833. He was trained mainly at York Factory and worked his way up through the accounting department with few operational commands until he was promoted to the HBCs highest overseas office. A dreamy yet disenchanted Highlander, Mactavish was an amateur phrenologist who believed that a person's character could be read by the shape of his or her skull. Ile had accepted the governors.h.i.+p of a.s.siniboia under protest and later lamented he would

*liesaid little publicly about the impending transfer, whichwould terminate his authoritv, and his official journal is equally reticent on the subject.

Mactavish expressed his real feelings in a letter to his brother, Chief Factor Dugald Mactavish, in Montreal. I will not speak of our dignity," he wrote, "but it is more than flesh and blood can bear that we who have conducted the governitient of this country for ycars, with a view to the welfare and best interests ofall cla.s.ses of the inhabitants, should be sun-iniarily ejected from office, as if A e were the commonest usurping scoundrels."

52 LABRADOR SMITH.

rather have served as "a stoker in h.e.l.l." His unhappy tenure was made all the more agonizing by the fact that he was suffering from advanced tuberculosis and had to expend most of his waning vitality fighting the awful la.s.situde inflicted by the disease. As a result, no matter what the provocation, no matter how seriously the Company's authority was challenged, Mactavish retreated into a stupor of inactivity and apparent indifference.

Yet had Mactavish been the most enlightened and energetic of men, neither he nor any other Bay official could have turned back the gathering storm at Red River.

The tiny settlement, with little of the required infrastructure to provide channels for common cause, housed almost as many factions as families. A small but vocal Canadian Party led b~ Dr John Christian Schultz, a militant Protestant and publisher of the local paper, the Nor'Wester, demanded union with the Dominion; equally loud were the proponents of immediate annexation to the United States. There were Irishmen fulimnating against everything British, Highlanders trving to replicate their ancient clannish ways, even importing nightingales to make themselves feel at home, and agents of Napoleon III* vainly resurrecting wispy dreams of French empire along the vanished trails of the coureurs de bois. The best-organized Red River grouping was that of the M&Is. They were united by concern for the buffalo herds, their main source of income and pride, which had been relentlessly gunned down and dangerously thinned out. The magnificent beasts were often shot solely for their tongues, that commodity when pick-led having

*The French Emperor had dispatched Norbert Gay, an army captain, to Red River to "report on the situation," because a majorit~ ofits population was Y'rench-speaking and its political future seerueduncertain. Although Gaydid little spymg, he helped train the 16tis buffalo hunters into a formidabic fighting force.

BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 53.

Mftisat camp on the prairie, 1858

become a delicacy in fas.h.i.+onable European restaurants. The advance of agriculture and decline of the fur tradethe main market for buffalo meat in the form of pemmican-threatened their livelihood. They were restless and they were angry. They had opened up this country and now saw little future on their home turf Their temperament was much too volatile to turn in their guns for the restraints of urban domesticity. Since they recognized that evolving circ.u.mstances would neither restore their past nor validate their future, the N16tis decided to draw on their French and Indian roots to fas.h.i.+on a peculiar world of their own-a new nation, their nation, on the edge of civilization.

TROUBLE CAME FIRST in the form of Colonel John Stoughton Dennis, a United Empire Loyalist and cavalry veteran commissioned by William McDougall, Minister of Public Works in SirJohn A. Macdonald's first administration, to chart the new territory. He arrived at Red River unannounced in August of 1869, four months before the transfei was due to take place, charged with making a survey so that the unoccupied Red River lands 54 LABRADOR SMITH.

could be subdivided in a radically new pattern. The land had traditionally been laid out according to the Quebec seigneury style, with long, narrow rectangular lots fronting on the Red and the a.s.siniboine. Most of the farms occupied about four hundred feet of riverbank, then arched two miles or so through fields and woodlands to the drier prairie soil, where "hay privi- leges" were shared with neighbours. Owners.h.i.+p was based on original HBC and Selkirk grants or, more often, squatters' rights.

Following instructions from McDougall, Colonel Dennis and his military surveyors began to lay out square towns.h.i.+ps designed for large-scale grain production from ploughed land. As practical as that may have sounded to Ottawa bureaucrats busy preparing the way for occupancy by ambitious newcomers from Ontario, the system ran directly counter to the M6tis way of life and farming requirements. On October 11, a survey party led by Captain Adam Clark Webb unexpectedly arrived at the hay privilege of Andr6 Nault.

The distraught M6tis sent a messenger to fetch his cousin, Louis Riel, who came at the gallop with fifteen unarmed but defiant companions. An elegant and remarkably selfpossessed gent with a high forehead overhung by cl.u.s.ters of black curly hair, Riel theatrically placed his foot on Captain Webb's measuring chain and solemnly declared: "You go no farther." The surveyors eventually went away and nine days later the M6tis formed a committee, based on the old buffalo-hunt governments, with the twenty-five-year-old Riel as secretary. He quickly emerged as the group's real leader.

At this point, onto the stage of western Canadian history stumbled William McDougall, former minister of public works, now designated first lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Territories. Picked for the Red River a.s.signment mainly because Macdonald considered him BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 55.

pompous and inflexible enough "to keep those wild people quiet," McDougall was one of the Prime Minister's more serious miscalculations. Known as Wandering Willie because he had served so many political faiths, McDougall turned out to be as stupid as he was pompous-not an easy accomplishment.

When McDougall's caravan, consisting of sixty carts loaded with his official entourage, relatives, fox-hunting dogs and an ornate viceregal throne of state, arrived at the customs house in Dakota Territory on October 30, McDougall was handed a note from Le Comit6 National des M6tis de la Rivl&re Rouge, refusing them entry into Rupert's Land. Three days later, an unarmed Riel, riding at the head of more than 120 armed followers, seized Fort Garrv, explaining to a compliant Mactavish that his purpose was to prevent bloodshed and guard the fort against unspecified dangers. Although the HBC Governor was confined to quarters, there seemed to be rernarkably little hostility between him and the rebel leader. McDougall later accused the Company of opening the fort gates to the M6tis and welcoming the invaders.

Viewing the escalating pace of events with increasing alarm from Ottawa, Sir John A. Macdonald hastily dispatched two messages. The first went through the correct political channels to the 11BC in London, pointing out that since McDougall was being denied entry to Red River, the land purchase would have to be postponed until peaceful possession could be a.s.sured and advising the Company not to expect its Y,300,000 payment until the official transfer could take place. His second letter was to McDougall, telling him to stay put. "I hope," cautioned the Prime Minister, "no consideration will induce you to leave your post-that is, to return to Canada just now. Such a course would cover yourself and your party with ridicule, which would extend to the whole Dominion."

56 LABRADOR SMITH.

EIncamped on the American side of the border and unaware of the postponement, McDougall was determined that the transfer date as he knew it would not go unnoticed. On the afternoon of December 1, he drew up a bogus royal proclamation. "Victoria, by the grace of G.o.d, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen," it began, then appointed, of all people, 44our trusty and well-beloved William McDougall" to hold supreme governmental authority over the disputed territories. That night, in one of the great comic turns of Canadian history, McDougall had his carriage driven through a twenty-below blizzard into Canada. He was accompanied by seven puzzled functionaries and two pointer dogs casting curious glances to left and right as they approached the ceremonial moment. Then, having reached the courtyard of an abandoned HBC post, McDougall ostentatiously positioned himself in a proper Nelsonian stance and, while one of his minions unfurled a Union Jack and another held a guttering lantern, sonorously read his proclamation to the empty prairie sky. He stood there, the parchment in his mittened hands, baying at the polar moon. The winds blew, the dogs howled, the functionaries snickered into their beards-and McDougall basked in the glow of his selfanointed glory.

The absurd deed done, the nocturnal caravan, led by the pair of bounding pointers, quickly headed back to the warmth and safety of its temporary American quarters, satisfied with a long night's work well (lone. It had indeed been an occasion to remember: the night the Honourable William McDougall finally stepped over the slippery line between pomposity and idiocy. McDougall's doc.u.ment carried the weight of no authority. He had none of his own and had counterfeited the Queen's imprimatur. His impetuous act turned the federal government into the object of frontier hilarity.

BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 57.

Alftisfamily with Red River cart on Main Street, Winnipeg

None of this bothered the Ottawa emissary (thereafter known as "Silly Wandering Willie"), who actually expected Macdonald to reward him for his "prompt display of vigour [that] will inspire all inhabitants of the Territory with respect for your Representative, and compel the traitors to cry, 'G.o.d Save the Queen."' The Prime Minister ignored McDougall's bl.u.s.ter, angrily denounced him for having "done his utmost to destrov our chance of an amicable settlement with these wil~ people," and recalled him to Ottawa. Before leaving, McDougall appointed the surveyor, Colonel Dennis, as his "Lieutenant and Conservator of the Peace" and ordered him to clear the rebels out of Fort Garry-in effect inviting Dennis to launch a civil war. McDougall also dispatched copies of his worthless proclamation to Fort Garry, so that Mactavish and the Hudson's Bay Company would be officially aware they had just been deposed. The HB( Governor, his chest on fire with advanced tuberculosis, was beyond caring. He spent most days sitting alone at his deserted council table, coughing and staring into s.p.a.ce.

58 LABRADOR SMITH.

Red River did have an effective government, and Louis Riel was at its head. When the M6tis leader called a community meeting to establish the terms of his provisional administration, F nglish -speaking delegates asked Mactavish whether he still considered the HBC to be Red River's prevail ing author] ty. The gravely i 11 Governor advised them that McDougall's mission, however foolishly conceived, would soon terminate his powers, and that since he was "a dead man," they had better construct a government to maintain peace.* Riel named himself President of the Provisional Government of Rupert's Land and the North-West (then the world's second-largest republic)and raised over Fort Garry the new M6tis flag (a golden fleur-de-lis and a green shamrock on a white ground).t To emphasize his authority, Riel transferred the new Government House furniture that had been prepared for McDougall's arrival to another part of the fort, which became his office as chief of state.