On Canada's Frontier Part 7

At Ellice's suggestion the giant combination then got from Parliament exclusive privileges beyond the waters that flow into Hudson Bay, over the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific, for a term of twenty years.

These extra privileges were surrendered in 1838, and were renewed for twenty-one years longer, to be revoked, so far as British Columbia (then New Caledonia) was concerned, in 1858. That territory then became a crown colony, and it and Vancouver Island, which had taken on a colonial character at the time of the California gold fever (1849), were united in 1866. The extra privileges of the fur-traders were therefore not again renewed. In 1868, after the establishment of the Canadian union, whatever presumptive rights the Hudson Bay Company got under Charles II.'s charter were vacated in consideration of a payment by Canada of $1,500,000 cash, one-twentieth of all surveyed lands within the fertile belt, and 50,000 acres surrounding the company's posts. It is estimated that the land grant amounts to 7,000,000 of acres, worth $20,000,000, exclusive of all town sites.

Thus we reach the present condition of the company, more than 220 years old, maintaining 200 central posts and unnumbered dependent ones, and trading in Labrador on the Atlantic; at Ma.s.sett, on Queen Charlotte Island, in the Pacific; and deep within the Arctic Circle in the north.

The company was newly capitalized not long ago with 100,000 shares at 20 ($10,000,000), but, in addition to its dividends, it has paid back 7 in every 20, reducing its capital to 1,300,000. The stock, however, is quoted at its original value. The supreme control of the company is vested in a governor, deputy governor, and five directors, elected by the stockholders in London. They delegate their powers to an executive resident in this country, who was until lately called the "Governor of Rupert's Land," but now is styled the chief commissioner, and is in absolute charge of the company and all its operations. His term of office is unlimited. The present head of the corporation, or governor, is Sir Donald A. Smith, one of the foremost spirits in Canada, who worked his way up from a clerks.h.i.+p in the company. The business of the company is managed on the outfit system, the most old-fogyish, yet by its officers declared to be the most perfect, plan in use by any corporation. The method is to charge against each post all the supplies that are sent to it between June 1st and June 1st each year, and then to set against this the product of each post in furs and in cash received.

It used to take seven years to arrive at the figures for a given year, but, owing to improved means of transportation, this is now done in two years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE COUREUR DU BOIS AND THE SAVAGE]

Almost wherever you go in the newly settled parts of the Hudson Bay territory you find at least one free-trader's shop set up in rivalry with the old company's post. These are sometimes mere storehouses for the furs, and sometimes they look like, and are partly, general country stores. There can be no doubt that this rivalry is very detrimental to the fur trade from the stand-point of the future. The great company can afford to miss a dividend, and can lose at some points while gaining at others, but the free-traders must profit in every district. The consequence is such a reckless destruction of game that the plan adopted by us for our seal-fisheries--the leasehold system--is envied and advocated in Canada. A greater proportion of trapping and an utter unconcern for the destruction of the game at all ages are now ravaging the wilderness. Many districts return as many furs as they ever yielded, but the quant.i.ty is kept up at fearful cost by the extermination of the game. On the other hand, the fortified wall of posts that opposed the development of Canada, and sent the surplus population of Europe to the United States, is rid of its palisades and field-pieces, and the main strongholds of the ancient company and its rivals have become cities. The old fort on Vancouver Island is now Victoria; Fort Edmonton is the seat of law and commerce in the Peace River region; old Fort William has seen Port Arthur rise by its side; Fort Garry is Winnipeg; Calgary, the chief city of Alberta, is on the site of another fort; and Sault Ste. Marie was once a Northwest post.

But civilization is still so far off from most of the "factories," as the company's posts are called, that the day when they shall become cities is in no man's thought or ken. And the communication between the centres and outposts is, like the life of the traders, more nearly like what it was in the old, old days than most of my readers would imagine.

My Indian guides were battling with their paddles against the mad current of the Nipigon, above Lake Superior, one day last summer, and I was only a few hours away from Factor Flanagan's post near the great lake, when we came to a portage, and might have imagined from what we saw that time had pushed the hands back on the dial of eternity at least a century.

Some rapids in the river had to be avoided by the brigade that was being sent with supplies to a post far north at the head of Lake Nipigon. A c.u.mbrous, big-timbered little schooner, like a surf-boat with a sail, and a square-cut bateau had brought the men and goods to the "carry."

The men were half-breeds as of old, and had brought along their women and children to inhabit a camp of smoky tents that we espied on a bluff close by; a typical camp, with the blankets hung on the bushes, the slatternly women and half-naked children squatting or running about, and smudge fires smoking between the tents to drive off mosquitoes and flies. The men were in groups below on the trail, at the water-side end of which were the boats' cargoes of s.h.i.+ngles and flour and bacon and shot and powder in kegs, wrapped, two at a time, in rawhide. They were dark-skinned, short, spare men, without a surplus pound of flesh in the crew, and with longish coa.r.s.e black hair and straggling beards. Each man carried a tump-line, or long stout strap, which he tied in such a way around what he meant to carry that a broad part of the strap fitted over the crown of his head. Thus they "packed" the goods over the portage, their heads sustaining the loads, and their backs merely steadying them.

When one had thrown his burden into place, he trotted off up the trail with springing feet, though the freight was packed so that 100 pounds should form a load. For bravado one carried 200 pounds, and then all the others tried to pack as much, and most succeeded. All agreed that one, the smallest and least muscular-looking one among them, could pack 400 pounds.

As the men gathered around their "smudge" to talk with my party, it was seen that of all the parts of the picturesque costume of the _voyageur_ or _bois-brule_ of old--the capote, the striped s.h.i.+rt, the pipe-tomahawk, plumed hat, gay leggins, belt, and moccasins--only the red worsted belt and the moccasins have been retained. These men could recall the day when they had tallow and corn meal for rations, got no tents, and were obliged to carry 200 pounds, lifting one package, and then throwing a second one atop of it without a.s.sistance. Now they carry only 100 pounds at a time, and have tents and good food given to them.

We will not follow them, nor meet, as they did, the York boat coming down from the north with last winter's furs. Instead, I will endeavor to lift the curtain from before the great fur country beyond them, to give a glimpse of the habits and conditions that prevail throughout a majestic territory where the rivers and lakes are the only roads, and canoes and dog-sleds are the only vehicles.

[Footnote 2: I am indebted to Mr. Matthew Semple, of Philadelphia, a grandnephew of the murdered Governor, for further facts about that hero.

He led a life of travel and adventure, spiced with almost romantic happenings. He wrote ten books: records at travel and one novel. His parents were pa.s.sengers on an English vessel which was captured by the Americans in 1776, and brought to Boston, Ma.s.s., where he was born on February 26, 1777. He was therefore only 39 years of age when he was slain. His portrait, now in Philadelphia, shows him to have been a man of striking and handsome appearance.]

VII

"TALKING MUSQUASH"

Concluding the sketch of the history and work of the Hudson Bay Company

The most sensational bit of "musquash talk" in more than a quarter of a century among the Hudson Bay Company's employes was started the other day, when Sir Donald A. Smith, the governor of the great trading company, sent a type-written letter to Winnipeg. If a Cree squaw had gone to the trading-shop at Moose Factory and asked for a bustle and a box of face-powder in exchange for a beaver-skin, the suggestion of changing conditions in the fur trade would have been trifling compared with the sense of instability to which this appearance of machine-writing gave rise. The reader may imagine for himself what a wrench civilization would have gotten if the world had laid down its goose-quills and taken up the type-writer all in one day. And that is precisely what Sir Donald Smith had done. The quill that had served to convey the orders of Alexander Mackenzie had satisfied Sir George Simpson; and, in our own time, while men like Lord Iddesleigh, Lord Kimberley, and Mr. Goschen sat around the candle-lighted table in the board-room of the company in London, quill pens were the only ones at hand. But Sir Donald's letter was not only the product of a machine; it contained instructions for the use of the type-writer in the offices at Winnipeg, and there was in the letter a protest against illegible manual chirography such as had been received from many factories in the wilderness. Talking business in the fur trade has always been called "talking musquash" (musk-rat), and after that letter came the turn taken by that form of talk suggested a general fear that from the Arctic to our border and from Labrador to Queen Charlotte's Islands the canva.s.sers for competing machines will be "racing" in all the posts, each to prove that his instrument can pound out more words in a minute than any other--in those posts where life has. .h.i.therto been taken so gently that when one day a factor heard that the battle of Waterloo had been fought and won by the English, he deliberately loaded the best trade gun in the storehouse and went out and fired it into the pulseless woods, although it was two years after the battle, and the disquieted Old World had long known the greater news that Napoleon was caged in St. Helena. The only rea.s.suring note in the "musquash talk" to-day is sounded when the subject of candles is reached. The Governor and committee in London still pursue their deliberations by candlelight.

But rebellion against their fate is idle, and it is of no avail for the old factors to make the point that Sir Donald found no greater trouble in reading their writing than they encountered when one of his missives had to be deciphered by them. The truth is that the tide of immigration which their ancient monopoly first shunted into the United States is now sweeping over their vast territory, and altering more than its face. Not only are the factors aware that the new rule confining them to share in the profits of the fur trade leaves to the mere stockholders far greater returns from land sales and storekeeping, but a great many of them now find village life around their old forts, and railroads close at hand, and Law setting up its officers at their doors, so that in a great part of the territory the romance of the old life, and their authority as well, has fled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TALKING MUSQUASH]

Less than four years ago I had pa.s.sed by Qu'Appelle without visiting it, but last summer I resolved not to make the mistake again, for it was the last stockaded fort that could be studied without a tiresome and costly journey into the far north. It is on the Fis.h.i.+ng Lakes, just beyond Manitoba. But on my way a Hudson Bay officer told me that they had just taken down the stockade in the spring, and that he did not know of a remaining "palisadoe" in all the company's system except one, which, curiously enough, had just been ordered to be put up around Fort Hazleton, on the Skeena River, in northern British Columbia, where some turbulent Indians have been very troublesome, and where whatever civilization there may be in Saturn seems nearer than our own. This one example of the survival of original conditions is far more eloquent of their endurance than the thoughtless reader would imagine. It is true that there has come a tremendous change in the status and spirit of the company. It is true that its officers are but newly bending to external authority, and that settlers have poured into the south with such demands for food, clothes, tools, and weapons as to create within the old corporation one of the largest of shopkeeping companies. Yet to-day, as two centuries ago, the Hudson Bay Company remains the greatest fur-trading a.s.sociation that exists.

The zone in which Fort Hazleton is situated reaches from ocean to ocean without suffering invasion by settlers, and far above it to the Arctic Sea is a grand belt wherein time has made no impress since the first factory was put up there. There and around it is a region, nearly two-thirds the size of the United States, which is as if our country were meagrely dotted with tiny villages at an average distance of five days apart, with no other means of communication than canoe or dog train, and with not above a thousand white men in it, and not as many pure-blooded white women as you will find registered at a first-cla.s.s New York hotel on an ordinary day. The company employs between fifteen hundred and two thousand white men, and I am a.s.suming that half of them are in the fur country.

We know that for nearly a century the company clung to the sh.o.r.es of Hudson Bay. It will be interesting to peep into one of its forts as they were at that time; it will be amazing to see what a country that bay-sh.o.r.e territory was and is. There and over a vast territory three seasons come in four months--spring in June, summer in July and August, and autumn in September. During the long winter the earth is blanketed deep in snow, and the water is locked beneath ice. Geese, ducks, and smaller birds abound as probably they are not seen elsewhere in America, but they either give place to or share the summer with mosquitoes, black-flies, and "bull-dogs" (_taba.n.u.s_) without number, rest, or mercy. For the land around Hudson Bay is a vast level marsh, so wet that York Fort was built on piles, with elevated platforms around the buildings for the men to walk upon. Infrequent bunches of small pines and a litter of stunted swamp-willows dot the level waste, the only considerable timber being found upon the banks of the rivers. There is a wide belt called the Arctic Barrens all along the north, but below that, at some distance west of the bay, the great forests of Canada bridge across the region north of the prairie and the plains, and cross the Rocky Mountains to reach the Pacific. In the far north the musk-ox descends almost to meet the moose and deer, and on the near slope of the Rockies the wood-buffalo--larger, darker, and fiercer than the bison of the plains, but very like him--still roams as far south as where the buffalo ran highest in the days when he existed.

Through all this northern country the cold in winter registers 40, and even 50, below zero, and the travel is by dogs and sleds. There men in camp may be said to dress to go to bed. They leave their winter's store of dried meat and frozen fish out-of-doors on racks all winter (and so they do down close to Lake Superior); they hear from civilization only twice a year at the utmost; and when supplies have run out at the posts, we have heard of their boiling the parchment sheets they use instead of gla.s.s in their windows, and of their cooking the fat out of beaver-skins to keep from starving, though beaver is so precious that such recourse could only be had when the horses and dogs had been eaten.

As to the value of the beaver, the reader who never has purchased any for his wife may judge what it must be by knowing that the company has long imported buckskin from Labrador to sell to the Chippeways around Lake Nipigon in order that they may not be tempted, as of old, to make thongs and moccasins of the beaver; for their deer are poor, with skins full of worm-holes, whereas beaver leather is very tough and fine.

But in spite of the severe cold winters, that are, in fact, common to all the fur territory, winter is the delightful season for the traders; around the bay it is the only endurable season. The winged pests of which I have spoken are by no means confined to the tide-soaked region close to the great inland sea. The whole country is as wet as that orange of which geographers speak when they tell us that the water on the earth's surface is proportioned as if we were to rub a rough orange with a wet cloth. Up in what we used to call British America the ill.u.s.tration is itself ill.u.s.trated in the countless lakes of all sizes, the innumerable small streams, and the many great rivers that make waterways the roads, as canoes are the wagons, of the region. It is a vast paradise for mosquitoes, and I have been hunted out of fis.h.i.+ng and hunting grounds by them as far south as the border. The "bull-dog" is a terror reserved for especial districts. He is the Sioux of the insect world, as pretty as a warrior in buckskin and beads, but carrying a red-hot sword blade, which, when sheathed in human flesh, will make the victim jump a foot from the ground, though there is no after-pain or itching or swelling from the thrust.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INDIAN HUNTERS MOVING CAMP]

Having seen the country, let us turn to the forts. Some of them really were forts, in so far as palisades and sentry towers and double doors and guns can make a fort, and one twenty miles below Winnipeg was a stone fort. It is still standing. When the company ruled the territory as its landlord, the defended posts were on the plains among the bad Indians, and on the Hudson Bay sh.o.r.e, where vessels of foreign nations might be expected. In the forests, on the lakes and rivers, the character and behavior of the fish-eating Indians did not warrant armament. The stockaded forts were nearly all alike. The stockade was of timber, of about such a height that a man might look over it on tiptoe.

It had towers at the corners, and York Fort had a great "lookout" tower within the enclosure. Within the barricade were the company's buildings, making altogether such a picture as New York presented when the Dutch founded it and called it New Amsterdam, except that we had a church and a stadt-house in our enclosure. The Hudson Bay buildings were sometimes arranged in a hollow square, and sometimes in the shape of a letter H, with the factor's house connecting the two other parts of the character.

The factor's house was the best dwelling, but there were many smaller ones for the laborers, mechanics, hunters, and other non-commissioned men. A long, low, whitewashed log-house was apt to be the clerks' house, and other large buildings were the stores where merchandise was kept, the fur-houses where the furs, skins, and pelts were stored, and the Indian trading-house, in which all the bartering was done. A powder-house, ice-house, oil-house, and either a stable or a boat-house for canoes completed the post. All the houses had double doors and windows, and wherever the men lived there was a tremendous stove set up to battle with the cold.

The abode of jollity was the clerks' house, or bachelors' quarters.

Each man had a little bedroom containing his chest, a chair, and a bed, with the walls covered with pictures cut from ill.u.s.trated papers or not, according to each man's taste. The big room or hall, where all met in the long nights and on off days, was as bare as a baldpate so far as its whitewashed or timbered walls went, but the table in the middle was littered with pipes, tobacco, papers, books, and pens and ink, and all around stood (or rested on hooks overhead) guns, foils, and fis.h.i.+ng-rods. On Wednesdays and Sat.u.r.days there was no work in at least one big factory. Breakfast was served at nine o'clock, dinner at one o'clock, and tea at six o'clock. The food varied in different places.

All over the prairie and plains great stores of pemmican were kept, and men grew to like it very much, though it was nothing but dried buffalo beef pounded and mixed with melted fat. But where they had pemmican they also enjoyed buffalo hunch in the season, and that was the greatest delicacy, except moose m.u.f.fle (the nose of the moose), in all the territory. In the woods and lake country there were venison and moose as well as beaver--which is very good eating--and many sorts of birds, but in that region dried fish (salmon in the west, and lake trout or white-fish nearer the bay) was the staple. The young fellows hunted and fished and smoked and drank and listened to the songs of the _voyageurs_ and the yarns of the "breeds" and Indians. For the rest there was plenty of work to do.

They had a costume of their own, and, indeed, in that respect there has been a sad change, for all the people, white, red, and crossed, dressed picturesquely. You could always distinguish a Hudson Bay man by his capote of light blue cloth with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. In winter they wore as much as a Quebec carter. They wore leather coats lined with flannel, edged with fur, and double-breasted. A scarlet worsted belt went around their waists, their breeches were of smoked buckskin, reaching down to three pairs of blanket socks and moose moccasins, with blue cloth leggins up to the knee. Their buckskin mittens were hung from their necks by a cord, and usually they wrapped a shawl of Scotch plaid around their necks and shoulders, while on each one's head was a fur cap with ear-pieces.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SETTING A MINK-TRAP]

The French Canadians and "breeds," who were the _voyageurs_ and hunters, made a gay appearance. They used to wear the company's regulation light blue capotes, or coats, in winter, with flannel s.h.i.+rts, either red or blue, and corduroy trousers gartered at the knee with bead-work. They all wore gaudy worsted belts, long, heavy woollen stockings--covered with gayly-fringed leggins--fancy moccasins, and tuques, or feather-decked hats or caps bound with tinsel bands. In mild weather their costume was formed of a blue striped cotton s.h.i.+rt, corduroys, blue cloth leggins bound with orange ribbons, the inevitable sash or worsted belt, and moccasins. Every hunter carried a powder-horn slung from his neck, and in his belt a tomahawk, which often served also as a pipe. As late as 1862, Viscount Milton and W. B. Cheadle describe them in a book, _The North-west Pa.s.sage by Land_, in the following graphic language:

"The men appeared in gaudy array, with beaded fire-bag, gay sash, blue or scarlet leggings, girt below the knee with beaded garters, and moccasins elaborately embroidered. The (half-breed) women were in short, bright-colored skirts, showing richly embroidered leggings and white moccasins of cariboo-skin beautifully worked with flowery patterns in beads, silk, and moose hair."

The trading-room at an open post was--and is now--like a cross-roads store, having its shelves laden with every imaginable article that Indians like and hunters need--clothes, blankets, files, scalp-knives, gun screws, flints, twine, fire-steels, awls, beads, needles, scissors, knives, pins, kitchen ware, guns, powder, and shot. An Indian who came in with furs threw them down, and when they were counted received the right number of castors--little pieces of wood which served as money--with which, after the hours of reflection an Indian spends at such a time, he bought what he wanted.

But there was a wide difference between such a trading-room and one in the plains country, or where there were dangerous Indians--such as some of the Crees, and the Chippeways, Blackfeet, Bloods, Sarcis, Sioux, Sicanies, Stonies, and others. In such places the Indians were let in only one or two at a time, the goods were hidden so as not to excite their cupidity, and through a square hole grated with a cross of iron, whose s.p.a.ces were only large enough to pa.s.s a blanket, what they wanted was given to them. That is all done away with now, except it be in northern British Columbia, where the Indians have been turbulent.

Farther on we shall perhaps see a band of Indians on their way to trade at a post. Their custom is to wait until the first signs of spring, and then to pack up their winter's store of furs, and take advantage of the last of the snow and ice for the journey. They hunt from November to May; but the trapping and shooting of bears go on until the 15th of June, for those animals do not come from their winter dens until May begins. They come to the posts in their best attire, and in the old days that formed as strong a contrast to their present dress as their leather tepees of old did to the cotton ones of to-day. Ballantyne, who wrote a book about his service with the great fur company, says merely that they were painted, and with scalp-locks fringing their clothes; but in Lewis and Clarke's journal we read description after description of the brave costuming of these color-and-ornament-loving people. Take the Sioux, for instance. Their heads were shaved of all but a tuft of hair, and feathers hung from that. Instead of the universal blanket of to-day, their main garment was a robe of buffalo-skin with the fur left on, and the inner surface dressed white, painted gaudily with figures of beasts and queer designs, and fringed with porcupine quills. They wore the fur side out only in wet weather. Beneath the robe they wore a s.h.i.+rt of dressed skin, and under that a leather belt, under which the ends of a breech-clout of cloth, blanket stuff, or skin were tucked. They wore leggins of dressed antelope hide with scalp-locks fringing the seams, and prettily beaded moccasins for their feet. They had necklaces of the teeth or claws of wild beasts, and each carried a fire-bag, a quiver, and a brightly painted s.h.i.+eld, giving up the quiver and s.h.i.+eld when guns came into use.

The Indians who came to trade were admitted to the store precisely as voters are to the polls under the Australian system--one by one. They had to leave their guns outside. When rum was given out, each Indian had to surrender his knife before he got his tin cup.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WOOD INDIANS COME TO TRADE]

The company made great use of the Iroquois, and considered them the best boatmen in Canada. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of the Northwest Company, employed eight of them to paddle him to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Peace and Fraser rivers, and when the greatest of Hudson Bay executives, Sir George Simpson, travelled, Iroquois always propelled him. The company had a uniform for all its Indian employes--a blue, gray, or blanket capote, very loose, and reaching below the knee, with a red worsted belt around the waist, a cotton s.h.i.+rt, no trousers, but artfully beaded leggins with wide flaps at the seams, and moccasins over blanket socks. In winter they wore buckskin coats lined with flannel, and mittens were given to them. We have seen how the half-breeds were dressed. They were long employed at women's work in the forts, at making clothing and at mending. All the mittens, moccasins, fur caps, deer-skin coats, etc., were made by them. They were also the washer-women.

Perhaps the factor had a good time in the old days, or thought he did.

He had a wife and servants and babies, and when a visitor came, which was not as often as snow-drifts blew over the stockade, he entertained like a lord. At first the factors used to send to London, to the head office, for a wife, to be added to the annual consignment of goods, and there must have been a few who sent to the Orkneys for the sweethearts they left there. But in time the rule came to be that they married Indian squaws. In doing this, not even the first among them acted blindly, for their old rivals and subsequent companions of the Northwest and X. Y. companies began the custom, and the French _voyageurs_ and _coureurs du bois_ had mated with Indian women before there was a Hudson Bay Company. These rough and hardy woodsmen, and a large number of half-breeds born of just such alliances, began at an early day to settle near the trading-posts. Sometimes they established what might be called villages, but were really close imitations of Indian camps, composed of a cl.u.s.ter of skin tepees, racks of fish or meat, and a swarm of dogs, women, and children. In each tepee was the fireplace, beneath the flue formed by the open top of the habitation, and around it were the beds of brush, covered with soft hides, the inevitable copper kettle, the babies swaddled in blankets or moss bags, the women and dogs, the gun and paddle, and the junks and strips of raw meat hanging overhead in the smoke. This has not changed to-day; indeed, very little that I shall speak of has altered in the true or far fur country. The camps exist yet. They are not so clean (or, rather, they are more dirty), and the clothes and food are poorer and harder to get; that is all.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A VOYAGEUR OR CANOE-MAN OF GREAT SLAVE LAKE]

The Europeans saw that these women were docile, or were kept in order easily by floggings with the tent poles; that they were faithful and industrious, as a rule, and that they were not all unprepossessing--from their point of view, of course. Therefore it came to pa.s.s that these were the most frequent alliances in and out of the posts in all that country. The consequences of this custom were so peculiar and important that I must ask leave to pause and consider them. In Canada we see that the white man thus made his bow to the redskin as a brother in the truest sense. The old _coureurs_ of Norman and Breton stock, loving a wild, free life, and in complete sympathy with the Indian, bought or took the squaws to wife, learned the Indian dialects, and shared their food and adventures with the tribes. As more and more entered the wilderness, and at last came to be supported, in camps and at posts and as _voyageurs_, by the competing fur companies, there grew up a cla.s.s of half-breeds who spoke English and French, married Indians, and were as much at home with the savages as with the whites. From this stock the Hudson Bay men have had a better choice of wives for more than a century. But when these "breeds" were turbulent and murderous--first in the attacks on Selkirk's colony, and next during the Riel rebellion--the Indians remained quiet. They defined their position when, in 1819, they were tempted with great bribes to ma.s.sacre the Red River colonists.

"No," said they; "the colonists are our friends." The men who sought to excite them to murder were the officers of the Northwest Company, who bought furs of them, to be sure, but the colonists had shared with the Indians in poverty and plenty, giving now and taking then. All were alike to the red men--friends, white men, and of the race that had taken so many of their women to wife. Therefore they went to the colonists to tell them what was being planned against them, and not from that day to this has an Indian band taken the war-path against the Canadians. I have read General Custer's theory that the United States had to do with meat-eating Indians, whereas the Canadian tribes are largely fish-eaters, and I have seen 10,000 references to the better Indian policy of Canada; but I can see no difference in the two policies, and between the Rockies and the Great Lakes I find that Canada had the Stonies, Blackfeet, and many other fierce tribes of buffalo-hunters. It is in the slow, close-growing acquaintance between the two races, and in the just policy of the Hudson Bay men towards the Indians, that I see the reason for Canada's enviable experience with her red men.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN A STIFF CURRENT]

But even the Hudson Bay men have had trouble with the Indians in recent years, and one serious affair grew out of the relations between the company's servants and the squaws. There is etiquette even among savages, and this was ignored up at old Fort St. Johns, on the Peace River, with the result that the Indians slaughtered the people there and burned the fort. They were Sicanie Indians of that region, and after they had ma.s.sacred the men in charge, they met a boat-load of white men coming up the river with goods. To them they turned their guns also, and only four escaped. It was up in that country likewise--just this side of the Rocky Mountains, where the plains begin to be forested--that a silly clerk in a post quarrelled with an Indian, and said to him, "Before you come back to this post again, your wife and child will be dead." He spoke hastily, and meant nothing, but squaw and pappoose happened to die that winter, and the Indian walked into the fort the next spring and shot the clerk without a word.

To-day the posts are little village-like collections of buildings, usually showing white against a green background in the prettiest way imaginable; for, as a rule, they cl.u.s.ter on the lower bank of a river, or the lower near sh.o.r.e of a lake. There are not clerks enough in most of them to render a clerks' house necessary, for at the little posts half-breeds are seen to do as good service as Europeans. As a rule, there is now a store or trading-house and a fur-house and the factor's house, the canoe-house and the stable, with a barn where gardening is done, as is often the case when soil and climate permit. Often the fur-house and store are combined, the furs being laid in the upper story over the shop. There is always a flag-staff, of course. This and the flag, with the letters "H. B. C." on its field, led to the old hunters'

saying that the initials stood for "Here before Christ," because, no matter how far away from the frontier a man might go, in regions he fancied no white man had been, that flag and those letters stared him in the face. You will often find that the factor, rid of all the ancient timidity that called for "palisadoes and swivels," lives on the high upper bank above the store. The usual half-breed or Indian village is seldom farther than a couple of miles away, on the same water. The factor is still, as he always has been, responsible only to himself for the discipline and management of his post, and therefore among the factories we will find all sorts of homes--homes where a piano and the magazines are prized, and daughters educated abroad shed the l.u.s.tre of refinement upon their surroundings, homes where no woman rules, and homes of the French half-breed type, which we shall see is a very different mould from that of the two sorts of British half-breed that are numerous. There never was a rule by which to gauge a post. In one you found religion valued and missionaries welcomed, while in others there never was sermon or hymn. In some, Hudson Bay rum met the rum of the free-traders, and in others no rum was bartered away. To-day, in this latter respect, the Dominion law prevails, and rum may not be given or sold to the red man.

When one thinks of the lives of these factors, hidden away in forest, mountain chain, or plain, or arctic barren, seeing the same very few faces year in and year out, with breaches of the monotonous routine once a year when the winter's furs are brought in, and once a year when the mail-packet arrives--when one thinks of their isolation, and lack of most of those influences which we in our walks prize the highest, the reason for their choosing that company's service seems almost mysterious. Yet they will tell you there is a fascination in it. This could be understood so far as the half-breeds and French Canadians were concerned, for they inherited the liking; and, after all, though most of them are only laborers, no other laborers are so free, and none spice life with so much of adventure. But the factors are mainly men of ability and good origin, well fitted to occupy responsible positions, and at better salaries. However, from the outset the rule has been that they have become as enamoured of the trader's life as soldiers and sailors always have of theirs. They have usually retired from it reluctantly, and some, having gone home to Europe, have begged leave to return.

The company has always been managed upon something like a military basis. Perhaps the original necessity for forts and men trained to the use of arms suggested this. The uniforms were in keeping with the rest.