Manitoba Saskatchewan
Alberta British Columbia
PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS OF THE WEST

THE

BOOK OF THE WEST

By

HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY

The Story of Western Canada, its Birth and

Early Adventures, its Youthful Combats,

its Peaceful Settlement, its Great

Transformation, and its

Present Ways.

THE RYERSON PRESS

TORONTO

Copyright, Canada, 1925, by

THE RYERSON PRESS

THIS BOOK

IS WRITTEN FOR

ALL LOVERS OF THE WEST WHO

ARE NOT TOO YOUNG TO

THINK OR TOO OLD

TO LEARN

Study to be quiet and to do your own

business, and work with your own hands,

that you may act honestly to others and

lack nothing yourselves.

—Paul the Apostle

Hearty thanks are given to the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, and the publishers of “Canadian Pictures,” for the use of pictures from that book by the late Duke, Governor-General of Canada; to Mrs. H. T. Martin for the beaver pictures from her husband’s book; to Harper’s Magazine and Mrs. Remington’s executors for the two travel scenes by Frederic Remington; to the American Museum of Natural History, New York, for the giant lizards; to the scientific staff of the Victoria Museum at Ottawa for checking my pre-historic facts; to many other officers of the Dominion and the four Western Provinces, and unofficial informants, for pictorial and other details; above all, to the numberless good folk all over the West who have made my travelling and living among them an endless revelation and delight.—H.A.K.

THE BOOK OF THE WEST

THE BOOK OF THE WEST

—————

A Hill-Top Adventure

BULLETS whistled about my ears as I leapt from my horse on Cutknife Hill. The Indians had us neatly ringed in, as once they used to trap the buffalo. Puffs of smoke rose from the gully on our left, from the gully on our right, from the creek-bed in our rear, from the ridge beyond the gully on each hand. Man after man fell, killed or wounded. The friend who had shared his supper with me, the night before, lay dead, a bullet through his head. The next bullet might go through mine. For five long hours the painted braves kept up the zip-zip-zip, shooting us down like rabbits. It was my first adventure in the West,—and the last of its kind the West will ever know.

That little war of 1885 was the Great Divide of Western History. It marked an end and a beginning. The rising on the Saskatchewan was the last volcanic outbreak of the fire primeval, the savage spirit of the old Wild West. With the suppression of that rising, the fire was quenched for ever. The old times ended; our own new times began.

Standing on the Great Divide of the Rocky Mountains we see, looking back, the long road we have travelled up from the Atlantic, and then, looking forward, the long road stretching down to the Pacific. So, looking back from the Great Divide of Western History, we see a moving picture of romance, of wonderful discovery, of long-drawn struggle against fearful odds; a picture brightened with heroic deeds, though darkened now and then by clouds of crime. [a]Life Full of Adventure] Then, looking forward, we see the moving picture of our modern West, the inrushing flood of humanity, these forty years of peace and safety, of swift transformation from a hunter’s wilderness to a land of a million homes, of marvellous, though unsatisfying, progress.

This picture too is crowded with adventure, of many kinds. People are constantly having adventures without knowing it. They pass through life and think it dull because they have a dull habit of not looking at the thousand points of interest as they pass.

When the first Indian landed in empty America, far back in the mysterious past, that was a great adventure. And when the last family of European newcomers stepped off the train this very morning, after a journey of 6,000 miles by sea and land, that was just as big an adventure to them. When a boy has learned to shoot, and hunts down a coyote, he feels that he has had an adventure; but when he merely hunts up a stray cow in the brush of the back pasture, on his pony, that too is an adventure, and tests his power of observation and discovery as well as horsemanship.

Yes, and every spring when the farmer tests his grain for germination, and fans the last weed seed out of it, and treats it with formalin for smut, and carefully cleans his drill, he is preparing for a yearly adventure, as truly as the fur-hunter centuries ago when he patched his canoe and packed his belongings for a journey of months and years through an unknown land.

For me, it is an adventure to sit down and write this book, as truly as when I saddled up and rode out of Battleford on my way to Cutknife Hill. A hard adventure, too; harder work than rounding up cattle, or clearing brush, or pitching hay, or stooking heavy wheat, or anything else [a]The West is Vast and Various] I have ever done on the farm. But there is great pleasure in doing hard things, as every true Westerner knows by experience.

· · · · · ·

A moving picture of the West is what you ask from me: a moving picture in words that help you to see in imagination events as if they were happening under your eyes. You want me to tell the story of our Western home, and how it came to be ours,—yours and mine. You want me to conjure up a picture of the West as it was and as it is.

“The West as it was” may have a more thrilling interest to some of my distant readers than “the West as it is”; but among Westerners themselves the glimpses of modern life in the later chapters of this book will have an interest keen enough, for it is their own life. The questions touched by me, or by the men and women whose words I give, are questions that Westerners have daily to face and often to wrestle with.

The West is so vast, so full of contrast, so rich in variety of scene, of climate, of industry and of people, that no one book can describe it all as it is. To do that would need a library, with picture gallery attached. I can only do my best, with two hundred pages of print and pictures, to paint in true colors on the smallest scale the country that I love.

The West as it is to be,—the West as it will be when we have all done our best for its prosperity,—ah, that I must leave for you to imagine and create.

THE OLD TIMES

CHAPTER I
Adventures Without a Man

HOW IS your own imagination, to-day?

I hope it is good and strong, because you will need to use it now.

The most surprising things used to happen, right here in the West, with no man here to see them. Mother Earth and her elder children had the most extraordinary adventures before the first man came.

Our eyes, if we will only use them, come to the help of our imagination here. Down in the Red Deer Valley of Alberta monsters used to live, more huge and wonderful than dragons in a fairy tale.

No human eyes ever saw them in life. No men lived here, or anywhere on earth, so long, long ago. But we ourselves can see those very beasts, their huge old bones and awful teeth; yes, the very pattern of their skin, printed on the soft mud they sank and died in,—mud now hardened into rock. Many of these monstrous skeletons have been put together and set up in museums. Every year more come into sight, as the river undermines its banks and the rock breaks up and wears away.

You can see these creatures, dead, with your eyes. Now set your imagination to work, and see them alive.

What a picture! A dense jungle, of waving horsetail reeds and rushes tall as our poplars, of spreading tree-ferns, of towering trees like tropical palms. Here [a]An Age of Giants] and there, an open stretch of gleaming, stagnant water. Flitting overhead are curious birds with rows of sharp teeth in their long beaks, and still more curious reptiles of the air with fleshy wings, like overgrown bats. What are they looking down at? There is a stir among the greenery. A lizard, fifty feet long, is wallowing in his muddy bed; his head appears, with dull eyes looking out from a stupid little brain; then his neck, longer than any giraffe’s. We call him the Gigantosaurus, or giant lizard. He seizes a tree with his forepaws, bends it down, and begins to munch the leaves and twigs.

Very Early Westerners,

Corythosaurus and Gorgosaurus

Suddenly he stops, looks round in alarm, and dives. Too late. Another huge lizard comes crashing and splashing through the greenery,—not quite so big, but fierce and strong, his mighty jaws grinning with terrible fangs. It is the Tyrannosaurus. He throws himself on the poor leaf-eater, and bites and tears, and tears and bites, till the helpless monster lies dead in the swamp. [a]The Monsters] A whole tribe of the conqueror’s family, and other flesh-eaters of all sizes and many curious shapes, creep up and share the feast, till nothing is left but the bones—for us to discover, a few million years later, and collect for our museums.

That was the most ornamental and spectacular age in the whole history of animal life on this earth. Nothing so fantastic has ever lived, before or since. One beast had a crest of many pointed plates jutting out of its high humped back from head to tail. Several had two or three horns, on forehead and snout. One had a full suit of bony armor plates, including a movable shield over each eye. Another had a bill like a duck, and a towering dome of a skull that gives an impression of high intellect; but his brain, like that of all the rest, was ridiculously small. There were hundreds of different kinds of these quaint animals roaming about here at the same time.

Even that is not the earliest scene of Western life we can see when we open the telescope of imagination and look back through the ages past.

Look back far enough, and we see the hot earth spinning through space, a soft and fluid ball,—red-hot, only we cannot see the color, for a thick cloud of vapor covers all. As the earth cools, it shrinks, wrinkling and crinkling. The parts of its skin that rise make continents and islands, the parts that sink make seas and lakes. It goes on shrinking, and its shape changes constantly. A sea-bottom rises, and becomes land; land sinks, and is covered by sea. Up and down, up and down, for millions of years.

Little beasts appeared in the sea. High up in the [a]Mountains Rise and Fall] Rocky Mountains we find them by countless thousands—the trilobites, related to the crabs,—their shapes preserved and moulded in the solid stone. But that stone, when they lived and died, was soft mud at the bottom of the sea. There were no Rocky Mountains then. The oldest mountains in this part of the world are nearer the coast. They are worn down and rounded now; for as soon as a mountain is raised it begins to wear away, split by frost, falling in landslides, and washed down by rain. Even when the giant lizards browsed and played and fought in the jungle, there were no Rockies yet.

The giant lizards came, and passed away. The earth still shrank, and threw up more wrinkles,—the Rocky Mountains at last rising out of the sea. They are still so new that their ridges and edges and peaks have not yet lost their sharpness, yet so many thousand years old that their uppermost rocks, worn away to sand and carried down in rivers to the plain, have had time to bury the lizards many feet deep. They have buried, too, the tropical palms and ferns and reeds, and pressed them into coal, which we dig up and burn.

Millions of years pass,—and when we look through our telescope again the country has so changed that we cannot recognize it. Instead of being hotter than now, it is colder. Most of it, in fact, has disappeared, under an immensely thick sheet of ice. This icy mantle covers nearly all Canada, and a great part of the United States. Its edge advances, century after century, farther and farther south, slowly but surely, wiping out forests, grinding and grooving the rocks underneath, as glaciers always do. Then it slowly [a]Mammoths, but no Men] retires,—through more centuries,—advances again, and again withdraws to the north. A third time the land is covered before the final retreat of the Arctic ice.

How did this happen? Most likely by the surfaces of the earth and sea-bottom in these northern parts rising many hundred feet and then sinking, to rise and sink again and again. In some parts of the world even now the level of the land is rising, in others falling; and wherever the land is high enough to-day, with a considerable snowfall, we know it is always covered with snow and ice, summer and winter.

Let us take a look at our country as it was when the second ice-cap had melted and the last had not yet formed.

The monsters have gone, for ever vanished from the earth. Gone are the tree-ferns and towering palms. New birds have come, like those we know, and sing among trees and shrubs of the kind still growing around us. The hairy rhinoceros, the mammoth and the mastodon, thunder over the grassy plain. We see our northern musk ox grazing as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee.

We look for men and find none at all. Not one man, woman or child, in all these two vast continents. Fifteen million square miles, empty and waiting, all ready for man, but waiting for him in vain; perhaps till even the last and smallest of the ice-caps has disappeared.

Far away in the north-west the land comes to an end; but looking over the water we see the coast of Asia only sixty miles off, with a convenient little group of islands half-way over. There is nothing to prevent man from coming over in a canoe in summer, or on the ice in winter.

And there he is, coming!

CHAPTER II
The Indian by Himself

LOOK far enough, and we see him, a wanderer with his little family, starting from the heart of Asia, hunting and fishing as they go, camping for a few years or a century in one place, moving on when their number increases and food is not enough for all, or when some other tribe comes up behind and drives them on,—moving on, and on, and on,—a few families at a time or hundreds together. They belong, as all the American “Indians” do, to one great human stock that spread out east and west along the northern lands of Asia and Europe, where their closest kin to-day are found among the tribes of North Siberia and the Lapps of Russia and Norway. Another branch of the same ancestral stock settled in China, where it made many new inventions and slowly built up a civilization of its own, with high achievements in literature and art. But our “Indians” must have broken away long before that, for they had none of these inventions to bring with them,—not even that of the wheel, either for vehicles, for spinning, or for pottery; though the wheel was in common use among the Chinese and other old-world races thousands of years ago.

Let us watch these first men coming, now, and see what they are like.

They are a shaggy-looking folk, with bear-skins thrown over their shoulders and tied round their waists. Their hair hangs long and black. Their skin is dark. [a]The First Men Here]

They have little baggage. They bring nothing with them except spears, bows and arrows, and furs. For a spear they have fixed a pointed bone or horn or sharp broken stone to the end of a pole. Their arrows are just little spears. The furs are the skins of bear, walrus, seal and caribou.

When we ourselves start on a journey, we know where we are going; we are bound for some particular place with a name. But these first wanderers from Asia don’t know where they are going, and don’t much care. They are not looking for a place to settle down in, land of their own to farm, to build a house on. So long as they find plenty of wild beasts, berries and roots to eat, they are satisfied. They know how to make fire, by twirling a stick between their hands till its lower end, by friction against another piece of dry wood, kindles a spark which they catch on dry bark or moss and blow into flame. They have neither pottery nor baskets, but carry small articles in a big bowl-shaped receptacle of rawhide. Their only animal is the dog, the half-tamed descendant of foxes, wolves or jackals.

These first comers have “discovered America,” without knowing it. They have no idea that they are the first to set foot in a “new world.” It looks just like the “old-world” to them. They have been living on the sea-shore, over there at the tip of Asia. Their number has increased, and other tribes have come up behind them, so they have simply crossed over to the land they have often seen at a distance, where they can have the hunting all to themselves. They just go on living as they have been used to living.

Some of them wander along the north coast, where they still wander,—we call them Eskimo. [a]Peopling a Continent]

Most of the newcomers, however, turn to the right, and follow the coast to the south. One family follows another, family after family, band after band,—not close on each other’s heels, or many at a time, but in driblets, for hundreds or thousands of years. When the coast of Alaska is dotted with encampments, the next comers pass on and pitch their skin tents on the empty shores of British Columbia. There they are astonished to find a mighty forest. They make rough shelters of bark and branches, instead of skin tents. After a time some clever fellow says,—“This is a good place to live; we don’t need to wander about all the time, for the salmon and deer are plenty. Let us cut down trees and build houses.” So they do, though they have never seen such a thing as a house before. They learn to be carpenters, and finally wood carvers. They have no teachers, they just learn by trying. With axes of big chipped stone they cut down trees, and build houses with thick posts which they carve and color in rough imitation of men. They make boats, each of one tree, hollowed out like Robinson Crusoe’s.

More little bands follow, and settle all along the shore of the Continent. Some of them strike inland, perhaps chased off the coast by others, perhaps finding the food supply too poor where they have landed. One party comes at last to what we now call Mexico.

One day, while the men are off hunting, the children find here and there a plant of wild maize, and bite the juicy grains off the cob. The men come back at night, empty-handed; game is getting scarce. They are glad to eat the corn their children have found. It is good. Later on, when the corn is ripe and hard to chew, some one has a bright idea. I think it must have been a [a]First Baker, First Gardener] woman, a mother with little children whose teeth cannot chew the hard grains. She spreads a handful of the grains on a flat stone, breaks them up with a stone hammer, and mixes the meal with water, so the little ones have mush to eat. Some of the mush she roasts in lumps. She is the first baker in the new world. Next year another woman, or perhaps it is the same, takes some of the big grains left over, makes a scratch in the earth, and drops them in, so that she can have food close at hand without wandering about to pick the wild ears. She is the first gardener.

Year after year more corn is planted, till there are fields of it. The men still hunt, and leave the farming to their wives, but they are glad to have so much food without hunting. The band does not need to move every time the game is scarce. The people settle down and make a permanent home for themselves. More bands come, and quarrel and fight as savages do,—we all have a good deal of the savage in us even yet,—but the foolishness of it strikes them presently, so a number of bands join to make a tribe. One tribe fights another, but at last several tribes join to make a nation. As food is plentiful, the men have time to think and plan and invent. They mould clay into pottery, and bake it. They twist fibres and spin cotton, though they never happen to think of a spinning wheel. They make looms, and learn weaving. They have no iron, but with stone and copper tools they cut rock and build pyramids, and temples decorated with sculpture. They become expert goldsmiths and silversmiths. They invent a kind of writing, something like that of ancient Egypt.

Passing Mexico by, other bands thread their way along the isthmus of Panama, or skirt the coast till they [a]Wanderings of the Tribes] come to South America, and there they settle and grow into a nation, high up among the mountains of Peru. Here also the people build cities, and roads, and aqueducts, and temples adorned with sheets of dazzling gold. They farm, and spin, and weave. They tame the wild llama, and make it their beast of burden; its cousin, the wild alpaca, too, they raise in flocks for its wool.

Wild tribes of men continue streaming down from the north. Some of them conquer the Mexicans, and settle down among them and learn their arts. Some hover on the outskirts of the new civilization for a while, and learn how to spin and weave and raise corn, but then wander on to the east along the Gulf of Mexico, or north up the Mississippi. A group of these tribes, finding their way at last into the St. Lawrence Valley, settle down there and join forces in the great Iroquois alliance of the “Six Nations.” Their women grow corn, melons, beans and pumpkins, but the favorite occupation of the men is fighting, as the first white Canadians will discover to their cost in the seventeenth century. Between fights, they play a magnificent game of their own invention, which we call lacrosse. The goals are the two villages in which the teams live.

Lacrosse—Before the White Man Played It

There was one tribe that never went south at all. When they landed in Alaska these folk struck inland and wandered away to the east, past Hudson Bay, some of them spreading then through Labrador, others crossing the St. Lawrence and never stopping till the Atlantic [a]The Prairie as it was] rolled at their feet in Nova Scotia, where a remnant of them may be seen to-day. Some of them had fallen out at various points along the way, finding hunting grounds that suited them, and others turned back to the west, so that the early white fur traders found them scattered all through the forest lands from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the west of Hudson Bay. The Crees, a western branch of this Algonquin stock, were still a woodland folk, although, as they depended mostly for food and shelter on the caribou, they followed the herd in its yearly migrations out of the wood and across the treeless country towards the Bay.

Our fertile prairie was still an unpeopled wilderness, long after a multitude of tribes had spread over the rest of the continent.

What sort of country was this vast empty space, “the granary of the British Empire” to-day?

It is not hard to imagine, for white men are still alive among us who remember it pretty much as it was when the “Indians” first came, a thousand years ago. A great grassy plain dotted with pale anemones in spring, pink roses and white strawberry blossoms in summer; mighty herds of buffalo grazing over it, and wallowing in little pools; parts of it flat, but most of it rolling, up and down, like a sea of earth suddenly stilled after a storm. Poplar bluffs rise here and there, but for hundreds of miles not a tree is to be seen. Two great rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan, have carved deep valleys across from west to east; their water, and that of many smaller rivers, pours into the Manitoban lakes, and out again to lose itself in Hudson Bay. Those lakes, great as they seem, are but the remnants of one [a]Life and Death] vast lake which covered nearly all Manitoba long after the ice-cap had retreated.

Beyond the prairie northward stretches the forest, poplar and willow and birch, tamarack, pine and spruce. North-east the forest dwindles and fades away into the “barren lands,” which are not really barren, for countless caribou and musk ox pasture there. North-west, great rivers pour through the forest and away to the Arctic Sea; north-east, more rivers drain out to the Bay.

The plains rise gently for a thousand miles from east to west; so gently that we do not notice the change, till we see the foothills swelling up and the sharp-edged mountains towering high beyond in a heavenly rampart of white and grey. Beyond the prairie, mountains on mountains, range after range, with roaring torrents in deep ravines; wider valleys, and placid lakes reflecting stately trees; the country smoothing down to the north, in a thick cloak of poplar and pine, and sinking in the south-west to a level plain, dark under thronging regiments of giant firs and cedars, along the coast of the western sea.

No voice of man is heard upon the untilled plains; but the land is not silent. The coyote screams and howls. High overhead the wild-goose honks. The air is musical with songs of little birds and gay with their colors. No hand of man is raised to kill; but hunters are busy killing. In the woods, the rabbit squeals as the weasel catches him by the throat. On the prairie, the hovering hawk drops swiftly to seize a gopher. On the lake, the skimming gull darts down and snatches out a fish. In the mountains, the eagle swoops and carries [a]The Mound Builders] off a marmot; the prowling bear claws at a rotting stump and gobbles down grubs by the mouthful.

Far away in the south, the prairie is invaded by man. Not suddenly, or by a great armed host. Don’t imagine that the buffalo-hunting tribes known to our fathers came riding out on to the plains one day in a picturesque and mighty horde, as the invading Tartar host swarmed out over Europe. The first hunter of the plains had never heard of a horse.

This is more likely what happened.

The Indians who settled in the Mississippi Valley were far from “civilized,” but they were no longer mere wandering hunters. They hunted deer and beaver and other animals, but they also cultivated the soil, growing corn and beans and squash. They made real homes beside their fields. They stayed there long enough to build great mounds, which are still to be seen, grown over with grass and trees. Some of these mounds are very curiously shaped, like serpents, turtles and other animals, which the people superstitiously reverenced as their protectors. Some of the mounds, however, are like fortifications, high dykes or ridges enclosing great squares of land, large enough to protect whole villages. These needed all the protection they could get, and often more, for the wilder tribes were constantly raiding the weaker.

One night a war party breaks in upon a village of the grain-growers, rushing over the dykes and killing the owners of the fields. A few escape, and scatter in all directions. See! There is one whole family, stealing away through the woods to the west—a man and woman, with deerskins thrown over their shoulders and tied [a]The First Plainsmen] with rawhide thongs around the waist; two naked children trotting behind, and a dog at their heels. They stop when tired out, snatch a few hours’ sleep, and flee on again. Day after day they hurry on. Their old hunting ground is left behind, and they slacken the pace, but still they press on to the west. The woods get thinner and thinner, till there is only a fringe of trees in a valley, sheltered from the wind of the plain above. The fugitives keep close to the rivers, where they can be sure of fish and birds and berries to eat.

At last they come to a place where two rivers meet. The narrow valley here spreads out wide; its banks slope more gently, and are covered with brush; but a mile farther on both valleys are narrow again, and almost bare. “This place looks good to me,” says the man; “stay here by the river while I go exploring.” Climbing through the brush and out of the valley, he stands on the edge of a bare and boundless plain. He shades his keen eyes to see the end of it,—in vain. The gentle waves of turf stretch away—surely to the edge of the world!

“If we go farther,” the man says, coming back to his wife, “we shall find nothing to catch; if we go back, we may be caught ourselves. We shall camp here.” He takes his bow and arrows to shoot a few rabbits for supper; his wife with a sharp stone axe cuts down branches for a shelter,—and that is the first prairie home.

Time passes. More families come straggling up and join them. There is not enough food for all, and they often go hungry. There are coyotes on the plain, but they run like the wind; and antelopes, but they run like the cyclone. One day, the children climb up to the plain with their little bows and arrows to shoot gophers, but come running down again. They have seen monstrous [a]Learning to Hunt Buffalo] animals up there, they say. Their father goes up with a spear. Sure enough, there is a herd of shaggy brown beasts grazing on the turf, with huge heads, fierce eyes, short horns and woolly manes. He has been used to hunting deer and moose in the woods, where he could creep silently from tree to tree until he got within easy range. It is quite another matter to attack a herd of fierce-looking buffalo, out on the bare plain where no shelter is. But the temptation is greater than the risk, when other game is scarce or small or hard to catch.

“Let us go boldly out and attack the buffalo in the open,” says the brave man. He shouts down to his friends in the valley camp. Two other hunters climb up to where he stands, and together they glide over the prairie, slower and slower as they near the herd, till you can hardly tell they are moving. The buffalo stop grazing, lift their heads, and stare at these two-legged creatures they have never seen before. The men come close, and fling their spears. One spear goes home, and brings down a beast; but the rest of the herd wheel round and thunder away over the sounding turf, carrying two spears with them.

That troubles the hunters, for a good spear-head of sharpened bone or antler takes long to make. Next time, they use bows and arrows, and shoot from a distance; but now all the buffalo get away, with arrows sticking in their tough hides. Many spears and arrows are lost, and every now and then a hunter is killed, for sometimes the desperate animals rush at the men who have attacked them, instead of rushing the other way.

“If we can drive the buffalo off the prairie into the brush,” says a thoughtful Indian at last, “they can’t run away so fast; and if they run at us we can get behind [a]Blackfoot and Cree Arrive] trees.” So the hunters do that. Still, most of the hunted animals get out of the wood again, and escape.

Presently another clever Indian thinks of a better plan. “Let us build a corral in the brush, and drive the beasts into it,” he says. So the men cut down trees and make a rough stockade of upright logs, leaving a wide entrance. They manage to drive a herd of buffalo into the corral, and there the poor beasts are crowded together and rush round and round while the hunters behind the trees shoot them down by the score.

There is plenty of food now; too much, in fact. So the Indians just cut out with stone knives the tenderest parts of the meat, the hump and the tongue, and leave the rest to be eaten by coyotes. Some of the lean meat is dried and beaten into powder, and mixed with fat and crushed into bags of skin. This is pemmican, and it keeps a long time, so the tribe has a store of meat to use without hunting.

The buffalo-hunting tribes increase, and spread out over the southern plains. Some of them have never been anything but hunters, in the woods; and whether they have once grown corn or not, they come to despise the corn-growers. The buffalo is their only crop.

Unknown to these southern plainsmen, after a time the plains were invaded from the north as well. Bands of the northern Wood Indians, first perhaps the Blackfeet, long afterwards the Crees, began to creep out on the prairie. Like the southern Sioux, they could not travel fast on land; the Indians had no horses. Ages before the first men came there had been horses here, at first of a dwarfish kind, with three toes. The horse tribe may have had its beginning here and spread over to Asia when the sea between Siberia and Alaska was dry land; [a]Dogs Put in Harness] but nothing was left of them in all America except their fossil bones.

To be sure, the Indians had dogs; but at first these were only camp-followers, and their only use was to be killed and eaten when better meat was scarce. In the far north, the Eskimo learned to hitch dog teams to a sleigh; and presently the Indians south of them put their dogs in harness, too.

The Wood Indians, living in a country full of lakes and rivers, in summer did all their travelling by canoe. In winter they stayed idle in camp, down in some sheltered valley or forest glade, living in rough shelters or tents of birch-bark or caribou hide. Presently, when they came out into the open to follow the buffalo, they had to leave their canoes behind. They did not like carrying loads on their backs; and one day an Indian, no lazier than the rest, but with more active brains, thought of a new way to make the dogs do that work. They had already been trained to haul toboggans in winter, and sometimes in summer; but the toboggan is a poor sort of cart except when it has smooth snow for its flat surface to glide over. To be sure, the travoy was not very much better, but it was less easily upset, and as the Indian never thought of inventing wheels let us give him all credit for inventing the travoy. You have probably seen it in action,—two poles crossed over the dog’s back, and trailing wide apart behind, with cross-pieces to carry the load.

To these Indians spreading slowly over the prairie from the north, the buffalo was everything, as it was to the plainsmen of the south. They made their tents of its skin. They lived on its meat, though when the pemmican gave out and no herd was near they ate [a]Life in a Hunting Tribe] rabbit, gopher, beaver, crow, dog, anything and everything they could get. As for vegetable food, they were content with berries and roots, especially the “pomme blanche” or prairie turnip, which the women scraped and dried for winter use. The early explorers found the Mandans of the Missouri growing corn and tobacco, beans and pumpkins, and sunflower—for the seed,—with a hoe made of the buffalo’s shoulder-blade and a wooden handle; but the prairie Indians as a whole despised farming.

They hunted the buffalo in the same wasteful way as the southern plainsmen, from whom they probably learnt the trick of driving the beasts into an enclosure. They made some progress in a few of the arts. Many of them tried their hands at pottery; they also plaited bark and other fibres into baskets. They decorated articles of hide with geometrical designs, in paint or porcupine quill; their famous bead-work only came into fashion when white men gave them glass beads in trade. The beaten copper with which they fastened the plaits of their long black hair, they got from tribes who found it on the shore of Lake Superior. They could not write, but they could draw. They drew maps, of their land and water trails, on bits of birch-bark. They painted figures of animals on the outside of their skin tents.

They would hunt a band of other Indians or a herd of buffalo with the same ingenuity and fierce delight. Having spent all their energy in this violent collection of human scalps and buffalo meat, they dropped into idleness. But time did not hang heavy on their hands. They were never bored by lack of occupation; they enjoyed doing nothing, as a cow enjoys chewing the cud. [a]Story Telling] They smoked dry willow-bark, when they could not get tobacco, in carved stone pipes. They used no strong drink, till the white man brought it to them. They did not lack the pleasures of imagination; endless and agreeable were the hours they spent telling and hearing tales of enchantment and mythical legends of the past, many of which I have borrowed for my “New World Fairy Book.”

CHAPTER III
The White Man Comes Exploring

ONE DAY a strange piece of news came to an Indian prairie camp. The men and women, squatting on the grass, and smoking their willow-bark, discussed the great news, and even the children stopped their play to listen and wonder.

A new kind of man had been seen, far away in the south,—a light-skinned man.

How did the news come? The scattered Indian tribes had little to do with each other, except when they fought, and in a fight they generally killed all the men they conquered who did not escape. But they often kept the women and made wives of them.

It may have been one of these women, captured by some raiding party in the south, who told the prairie Indians the story her tribe had heard in the same way from some tribe still farther south. The story was that a lot of these “white” men had come sailing across the big water in monstrous canoes with wings; once ashore, they had come riding over the country on great four-legged animals, as swift and terrible as buffalo, though not so shaggy. Nearly all the tribes had an old story about an agreeable fair-skinned god who had once lived among them and had promised to come back, so the newcomers were at first believed to be that god and his brothers. But they were not at all agreeable, for they took possession of the land and killed the Indians [a]Indians Hear Strange News] resisting them. They had terrible weapons,—tubes that breathed fire, and shining swords that cut off a head at a blow.

Fortunately for our Indians, these mysterious conquering white-skins never came up to the north. But some of their animals did. Running wild, little herds of horses found their way up at last to the prairie. They were hard to catch; but if buffalo could be driven into a corral, so could they. It was not very long before the Indians were breaking and riding them; and from that time the tribesmen chased the buffalo on horseback instead of on foot.

Early Buffalo Hunting

Presently news came that more white men or gods had appeared,—this time in the east.

Here is what had happened.

While the early forefathers of our “Indians” were spreading north through Asia and wandering over into America, our own forefathers came wandering and hunting west through Europe. Some of them came to [a]Seeking a Way to the Indies] the very edge of the sea before they finally settled down, and learned to plow, and gradually joined together to form nations. Five hundred years ago, three of the strongest nations had grown up on the shores of the Atlantic, in Spain, France, and England. They, like other nations in Europe, used to get spices and incense, pearls and precious stones, ivory and silk, from India and the farther East. But the way to India was now barred by the Mahommedans. The goods that they allowed to pass were heavily taxed on the way, and became very dear.

Most people up to then believed that the earth was flat; but some knew it must be round, and one of these was the Italian named Christopher Columbus. He persuaded the King and Queen of Spain in 1492 to lend him three little ships, and with these he sailed away westward to find a shorter and cheaper trade route to India. He discovered a number of islands, and thinking they were close to India he called them the West Indies and their people Indians,—a mistaken name which has stuck to the native tribes of America ever since. More Spaniards followed; some of them landed on the American mainland, in Mexico; and it was their runaway horses which found their way up to our Western plains.

The English, years before Columbus, had sent ships exploring far out into the Atlantic, in search of a new land; but they did not find it. Five years after Columbus had found the West Indies, however, the King of England sent out ships under another Italian, Cabot, who took a more northerly route. That expedition came in 1497 to Labrador, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; so the English were the first white men to [a]French Come up the St. Lawrence] discover the mainland of America in modern times. We know now that five hundred years earlier the Norsemen, after settling in Iceland and Greenland, visited Nova Scotia or New England; but they probably sailed away again very soon. Some of them may have been captured and “adopted” into Indian tribes. At any rate they vanished, and their adventure was forgotten. European fishermen, too, had been gathering harvests of cod from the Newfoundland banks long before Columbus was born, and they probably landed; but they wrote no accounts of what they had seen, and their stories attracted little notice.

The French explorers came soon after the English; one of them, Jacques Cartier, of St. Malo, in Brittany, sailed up the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, and got as far as Montreal on his next voyage in 1535. Another great Frenchman, Champlain, founded at Quebec, in 1608, the first Canadian settlement which has had an unbroken history to our own time. For a long while, however, the towns of “New France” on the St. Lawrence were little more than fur-trading posts, as fur was the only Canadian product that any one in Europe thought of much value.

The real object of the first French explorers was the same as that of Columbus, to find a short cut to Asia. Even the fur trade, rich as it might be, was nothing compared to the trade they hoped to carry on with India and China. Jacques Cartier, when he first sailed into the mouth of the St. Lawrence, hoped he had discovered the “North-west Passage” through America, never dreaming that the western ocean was three thousand miles away across a whole wide continent. [a]The Mississippi Explored]

To explore the West, then, was the ambition of more than one brave Frenchman who left the new settlements behind and paddled up the St. Lawrence,—not to find homes for their people in this new world, but to find a waterway through to the Pacific. In 1666 one of these explorers, La Salle, set out from Montreal for the Great Lakes. Missionaries and fur traders had already reached Lake Huron, and Indians had told them of a great river, the Mississippi, which La Salle thought might flow into the Pacific. He reached first the Ohio and then the Illinois, but did not follow them to their junction with the great river; for he learned, to his great disappointment, that the fur traders had already discovered it to flow south instead of west.

La Salle gave up the idea of reaching China, and, on another adventurous journey, went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. He proclaimed the sovereignty of France over all the country through which the great river and its tributaries might flow. Long afterwards, accordingly, when traders from the growing English colonies along the Atlantic made their way farther and farther inland, they found the way barred by French forts. Mother England sent troops to their aid, and the united British force, in which George Washington himself was a colonel, broke down French opposition and enabled the colonists to spread westward into the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. The war was carried on until even Canada in the north was brought under the British flag, by Wolfe’s crowning victory at Quebec. It was, in fact, Britain’s action in freeing her colonists from French opposition that enabled the colonists to turn on Britain herself a few [a]Hudson Discovers the Bay] years later, and, this time with the help of French soldiers, to separate themselves from the rest of the English-speaking brotherhood.

Let us turn back now to the earlier days.

The English, like the Spanish and French, were bent on finding a western route to Asia. Nearly eighty years after Cabot’s voyage to Labrador, another little English ship, of only twenty tons, sailed from London on this adventure. Martin Frobisher was her captain’s name. Passing Newfoundland and Labrador, he entered a channel, where he verily believed the land on his right was the coast of Asia. As a matter of fact the channel led nowhere, being only the mouth of a bay—Frobisher Bay, in Baffin Land, as we call it now.

A lump of mineral picked up on shore excited a belief that the barren country was a land of gold. Accordingly, the London merchants sent out a second expedition, and even a third. No gold was found; but Frobisher discovered a new inlet, which became a highway of commerce under the name of Hudson Strait.

The great explorer Hudson, however, did not appear on the scene till 1610, and his first appearance was his last. Passing through the strait, he rounded the north point of Labrador, and, turning southward, sailed out upon a body of water so vast that three months’ exploration left the work unfinished; but it was pretty clear that no way through to the Pacific existed in that direction.

Caught by winter at the south end of the Bay, Hudson and his crew landed and put up wooden shelters, where they spent an unhappy eight months. They failed to lay in a stock of game, and when the breaking ice set [a]A New Way In] the ship free, in the middle of June, food was running terribly short. The homeward voyage had barely started when mutineers laid hold of their captain, his young son and half a dozen others, and set them adrift in a boat. The few who survived, when the ship reached England at last, professed to believe that Hudson meant to leave them behind in the Bay if they had not played the trick first, as there was not food enough to keep all alive. Nothing was heard again of the great explorer, though ships were sent in search; but the sea that he won for a grave still bears the modest name of Hudson Bay.

Towing through the Ice—1600

Many a brave man after that met his death in the icy chaos, trying to find the North-west Passage to Asia. There were some, however, who had another aim—they saw in Hudson Strait and Bay a new way to the heart of North America, a way by which the wealth of the great [a]French and Indians at War] North-west might be drained off to England, in spite of the French who barred the St. Lawrence route.

Curiously enough, it was a couple of Frenchmen, named Radisson and Groseillers, who led the English in through this unguarded door.

The first French settlers on the St. Lawrence made friends of the Indians living there, the Hurons and Algonquins, and helped them to fight their enemies, the Iroquois. For many years, therefore, the Iroquois were constantly attacking the French, who could not even cultivate their little fields around the river-side towns without muskets slung over their shoulders. Even so, many of them were killed, and most of those taken alive were cruelly tortured.

At the village of Three Rivers, between Quebec and Montreal, lived Pierre Radisson. One spring morning in 1652, when he was about seventeen, he went out hunting, and was captured by a party of redskins in ambush. His life was spared, for an Indian and his wife took a fancy to him, adopted him as their son, and took him with them on their wanderings. He escaped, along with an Algonquin fellow-prisoner; but only by killing three Iroquois. He was captured again, and tortured; his feet were so badly burnt that he was lame for a month; but his Indian “father and mother” ransomed him with gifts to the head men of the tribe, and as he was a brave young fellow and a “good mixer” he became quite popular with his redskinned companions.

In the fall of the following year, these Indians went off raiding into the south, where the Dutch had settled in the present State of New York. At Fort Orange, or [a]Radisson and Groseillers Start] Albany, Radisson escaped again. From the Dutch town of New Amsterdam, now New York, he took ship for Europe; but after a few months in his native land of France he got back to his family in Canada, where he had long been given up for dead. He had another narrow escape from Indians when they attacked the fort of Onondaga; but nothing could satisfy his appetite for adventure. Two of his fellow-countrymen had travelled up the lakes as far as Green Bay in Wisconsin, where Indians had told them of other tribes who hunted great beasts on a treeless plain still farther west, and wandered in summer to a northern sea—no doubt our Hudson Bay. A big lake named Winnipeg also, they said, lay up there in the north.

Eager to explore, young Radisson and his sister’s husband, Médard Chouart des Groseillers, set off with a party of Algonquins in 1658, paddled up the Ottawa, through Lake Nipissing, across Lake Huron, and down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they spent the winter. Early in the following year they crossed Wisconsin, and came to a great brown river, worthy to rank with the green St. Lawrence. They had discovered the Mississippi. They crossed the river; and for the first time the red man of the West looked on a white man’s face.

The meeting was quite friendly. The Sioux were a warlike tribe, always breathing slaughter against their northern neighbors, the Crees; but as yet they had no quarrel with the whites. It mattered nothing to them if bearded white men were fighting Indians down in the south, as they had heard. The white men were evidently ready to trade as well as fight, for these Sioux were [a]White Men See the Prairie] already wearing European beads which must have been brought oversea by the Spaniards and passed up north from tribe to tribe.

The two young Frenchmen travelled for months over the plains. They saw the buffalo and hunted them; the swift and graceful antelope as well. How far west they got we do not know. They heard from the Indians of a range of mountains beyond the sunset; but then, circling south and east again, they set out for home. There they arrived, after two years’ absence, and had a tremendous welcome, not only from their families, but from the Governor of the Colony at Quebec. That was because they had brought home with them a wealth of furs; and skins were very scarce, for the Iroquois so infested the country around that friendly tribes dared not venture down to the settlement with their catch. The Iroquois themselves had no trouble in selling all they caught to the English, who had been settling in New England for thirty years and more.

In New France, the fur trade was a strict monopoly. The Government had given the privilege of dealing in furs to a company, and any one else daring to buy skins without a license was severely punished. When Radisson and Groseillers asked leave to start on another journey to the north and west, the officer in command at Three Rivers refused to let them go, because they would not promise him half their catch. They started in spite of him. This time they kept farther to the north, and reached the country beyond Lake Superior, where they built the pioneer fort of the West. They spent the winter travelling among the Crees, the Sioux in the south, and the Assiniboines up in Manitoba. All the tribes were eager to exchange their furs for guns, knives, [a]Hudson’s Bay Company Formed] beads, and other European wares; and when the travellers got back east they brought an enormous quantity of precious fur along with them.

The Governor of the Colony seized nearly the whole of it!

Disgusted with this treatment, Groseillers went over to France and tried to get help in fitting out an expedition to the forbidden West through Hudson Bay; but all his persuasions failed. He and his brother-in-law then went to England, where they were warmly welcomed. By this time several English ships had explored Hudson Bay, and many people were ready to put their money into a venture which promised to capture the fur trade of the West without interference from the French of “Canada.” King Charles himself was much interested in the two young Frenchmen’s scheme, and so was his cousin, Prince Rupert. A royal charter was given in 1670 to the Prince and a few other noblemen and commoners, who thus formed the “Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” Radisson and Groseillers were sent out in English ships, and helped to establish forts at the southern end of the Bay.

Thus the Hudson’s Bay Company started on its great trading enterprise, which continues to this day.

Unfortunately, when rival French traders came overland from Quebec and drew away much of the Indian trade, the English Company’s chief officer suspected his two French comrades of playing into the hands of their fellow-countrymen. Radisson went back to England to defend himself. The Company’s chiefs were convinced that the charge against him was false; but as they would only pay him $500 a year for his services [a]Great Explorer’s End] he was tempted back to France, where he became a naval officer. Groseillers also was forgiven by the French, and returned to his people at Three Rivers.

Presently both the brothers-in-law went off again to Hudson Bay, this time in French vessels, but in competition with a powerful and jealous French company; and on the return of the expedition to Quebec their furs were confiscated. They appealed to the French Government against this, but could not get justice. Radisson went back to England, made several more voyages to the Bay, and the last we know of him is that in his old age he had a pension of $250 a year from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

He “died poor,” as we say, after making other men’s fortunes. Poor in money, yes; but the men who took the money he made are forgotten, and he will always be remembered as one of our greatest explorers. He had two ambitions, to discover new lands, and to make money by trade. He failed in one, but succeeded brilliantly in the other. A man with two such different aims can hardly ever succeed in both; and Radisson won the aim he most desired. His life was hard, but not poor—far richer than a soft life could have been.

CHAPTER IV
The Reign of King Beaver

THE KING of the West was no longer the buffalo. From the time the Company opened its first fort on the Bay, the beaver was king; and his reign lasted two hundred years. White men and red alike, all were his servants. They served him for what they could get out of him, as courtiers often did with human kings in days not long ago.

The buffalo remained the chief food and house-material used by the plainsmen themselves, but its skin was not so easy to sell as the beaver’s. To be sure, it had a cash value. Early in the eighteenth century we hear of a French company building many posts in the Mississippi Valley, to make fortunes by this “neglected” trade; and they collected 15,000 skins in one season. Many of us can remember the buffalo robe and coat in common use, down east, and their popularity was well deserved. Nevertheless, the Indians dealing with the fur traders found the beaver both lighter to carry and in greater demand.

A wonderful monarch the beaver was—an architect, an engineer, an expert lumberman. So clever was he in damming up streams, felling trees and building lodges, that ignorant people came to believe anything of him. He was described as walking on his hind legs and carrying a log on his shoulder.

“Their Nests, very artificial, are six Stories high,” [a]Beaver and Unicorn] says John Ogilby, Esq., in a big book published the year after the foundation of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1771. Now John Ogilby was a man of authority, “His Majesty’s Cosmographer, Geographick Printer and Master of the Revels in the Kingdom of Ireland.” Yet in one of his pictures the beaver is shown at the feet of a Unicorn (ridden by an eagle) which seems to have leapt off the Royal Coat of Arms. This beast, “seen sometimes on the Borders of Canada,” Mr. Ogilby says, has “cloven Feet, shaggy Mayn, one Horn just on their Forehead, a Tail like that of a wild Hog, black Eyes, and a Deer’s Neck: it feeds in the nearest Wildernesses.” The males at a certain season “grow so ravenous that they not onely devour other Beasts, but also one another.”

The beaver’s performances alive were nothing compared to the wonders his dead body was supposed to work. A waxy material, called castoreum, was taken from it and used as medicine for madness, deafness, stomach-ache and all other aches, pleurisy and sciatica, weak sight and hiccoughs, tumors and abscesses; it killed fleas, and there was “nothing like it for gout”; it put people to sleep, and kept them from getting sleepy; it was even said to bring back lost memory. The fat was prescribed for asthma, giddiness and apoplexy; the skin, for bed sores and consumption; the hair, to stop bleeding.

It was the precious castoreum that men chiefly hunted the beaver for, in ancient times. One of the ridiculous stories then believed was that the clever animal used to cut out its own castoreum glands and throw them to the hunter, who would then let it escape.

The Voyageurs’ Way

to the West

Chief Poundmaker

Chief Piapot

Beaver at Work

Left to Right: Beaver Hat, 1820

Clerical Beaver, 18th Century

Paris Beau, 1815

The Beaver and the Unicorn

The beaver’s long, sharp-edged teeth were used as [a]Fashion in Fur] chisels by the Indians, before the white man brought in iron and steel. The meat I have spoken of already; some of my western readers know its taste well. It is something like tender pork; the choicest morsel, the tail, makes fine bacon. The animal used often to be roasted whole, in the skin, till its fur became too valuable to burn.

The French fur traders found their best market in Russia and Poland; but the fur-wearing fashion “caught on” in France itself, and spread to England. Then it was found that the shorter hairs of the beaver made the finest felt, and beaver hats of many shapes became the rage. When English hatters took to mixing cheap rabbit fur with the more expensive material, a law was passed forbidding them to use anything but beaver. If silk had not taken its place, in the last century, the beaver would probably have been hunted out of existence in Canada. It disappeared from England hundreds of years ago, and very few are now left in northern Europe and Siberia. Even when the beaver’s fur was no longer wanted for felting, and there was choice of many fur animals for other purposes of luxurious clothing, it was still greatly sought after, and a few years ago the beaver was disappearing. Then Canadian governments forbade its capture for a while, and to-day our beaver colonies are growing fast.

Look back now to the day when the beaver first became King of the West—when the Company settled on the shores of the Bay.

The domain granted by Charles the Second to this company included “all the lands, countries, and territories upon the coasts and confines” of “all those seas, straits, bays, rivers, lakes, creeks and sounds lying [a]Ruling Over Rupert’s Land] within the entrance of Hudson’s Straits,” excepting only such land as might be in the possession of other Christian nations. As we look on the map we see that the area thus granted included not only a strip of land two or three hundred miles wide around the eastern and southern shores of Hudson Bay, but an empire of forest and prairie stretching westward to the Rocky Mountains, where the Saskatchewan had its sources—a thousand miles across.

Over the whole of this territory of “Rupert’s Land” the Company was to reign. Some of its powers were greater than the king himself dared to exercise in the mother-country. An absolute monopoly of trade; power to make laws, inflict punishment, plant colonies, build towns and forts, maintain armies—all these were conferred on Prince Rupert and his partners; and, to crown all, no British subject was so much as to set foot on the soil of Rupert’s Land without the Company’s written leave. The reason given for this imperial grant was that the Adventurers had “at theire owne great cost and charge undertaken an Expedition for the discovery of a new Passage into the South Sea, and for the finding some Trade for Furrs, Mineralls, and other considerable Commodityes,” by which the king hoped for “very great advantage” to himself and his kingdom. As rent for the whole vast domain the Company was to pay his Majesty “two elks and two black beavers” per annum.

For many years the Company had no idea of the size of its domain, and made no attempt to occupy even the best-known districts of the interior. The Indians from [a]A Trading Scene] hundreds of miles up country brought their annual catch of furs to the Company’s posts on the Bay.

The scene when one of these yearly parties appeared was picturesque, but not altogether pleasant. Pitching their camp outside the palisade of the fort, the red men celebrated their arrival by drinking as much of the white men’s spirits as they could get. Although the liquor, for economy and for safety, was plentifully mixed with water, trading was out of the question for two or three days.

When the Indians were ready for business they were admitted to the fort with their bundles of furs. Each skin was carefully examined, and the price decided on was paid in the form of little notched sticks or quills. With these counters each red man passed on into another room, where axes, guns, blankets, mirrors, beads, trinkets, and all the other useful or useless objects of an Indian’s desire were spread before him.

Everything was priced in beaver-skins, not in shillings or dollars. A price list dated 1733 shows that one beaver would then buy a brass kettle or twelve ounces of colored beads, a pound and a half of gunpowder or two pounds of sugar, two combs or twelve needles, a pair of shoes or two looking glasses, eight knives or two hatchets. If the Indian asked the price of a blanket, he was told “Six Beaver.” He could get a gallon of brandy, at that time, for four beaver. He paid ten or twelve beaver for a gun, four for a pistol, three for a pair of breeches or two handkerchiefs.

These were the prices at the southern forts, Albany and Moose River, under competition. The Company charged higher prices in the north, as they frankly said—“The [a]French Raids on the Bay] French being not so near these places, and therefore can’t interfere with the Company’s trade so much as they do at Albany and Moose River, where they undersell the Company, and by that means carry off the most valuable furs.”

When the last skin had been turned into the store, and the last counter had been exchanged for British goods, the tribesmen vanished away into the wilderness, and the piles of furs were sorted and packed for the ocean voyage. Every summer a single London ship sailed into the Bay, discharged her cargo of provisions for the white men and merchandise for the red, filled her hold with the precious “peltries,” and sped away home before the early winter barred the straits with ice.

If the Company had only had the Indians to reckon with, it might have gone on gathering the furry harvest of the West with imperial ease. But, as we have seen, there were other white men in America who had no notion of submitting to such a monopoly. The King of France claimed as his own the territory that King Charles had given away. Several times before the close of the seventeenth century the French raided the Bay and captured or destroyed the English forts, coming overland from Canada and also sailing round through Hudson Straits. In 1697, France and England being at war, five ships swooped down upon Fort York, at the mouth of Nelson River, and captured the place after defeating three English vessels. A peace treaty, signed that same year, left England with only one little foot-hold on Hudson Bay, at Fort Albany. It was sixteen years before another treaty, at the end of another war, restored the whole of the north land to the English King and Company. [a]Outlaws of River and Forest]

There was no end, even then, to the furious competition of the French fur-buyers. If it had been only the official French Company, that would have been bad enough; but swarms of independent French traders were bidding against both the French Company and the English.

These men were outlaws. Flogging, and branding with red-hot irons, were the mildest of the penalties decreed against the “free traders” by their own French Government. Yet the temptation of fortunes to be made by fur proved stronger than all the risks. Hundreds of young men took to the woods, and spent their lives roaming from one Indian camp to another, living as the Indians lived, and buying up in advance the skins which should have gone down to the Company at Quebec. At one time, when the whole population of the French colony was only about 10,000, as many as 800 men were away in the forest, defying the King and his officers. These “coureurs de bois,” or forest-runners, were protected not only by the forest hiding them, but often by the very officials who were supposed to be hunting them down. Many officials were quite ready to take big bribes from the outlaws. The Governor himself went in for unlawful trading on a large scale, in secret partnership with outlaws who smuggled the beaver-skins over to the English colonists in the south.

In the summer of 1731, a French army captain named Pierre de la Vérendrye—Canadian born, he was—set out from Montreal for the West. Like most of the earlier explorers, French or English, he was keen to discover an outlet to the Western Ocean. The Governor gave his full consent—but he would give nothing more. [a]Vérendrye and His Sons] Some of the merchants were then persuaded to “stake” the expedition, supplying Vérendrye with goods to trade for furs in all the unknown lands he was to discover. The captain took with him his three sons, the youngest only sixteen, and a nephew as second in command, besides a dozen soldiers and a band of Indians.

It was a long and tragic journey. At the western end of Lake of the Woods, Vérendrye built a fort among the Crees. Some of these Indians one day fired on a party of Sioux, and then pretended that the French had done it. In revenge, the Sioux set upon a French detachment, on its way to fetch up supplies from Michilimackinac, and killed every man, including a priest and the explorer’s eldest son. The merchants at home in Canada were grumbling because the cargoes sent down to them were not as large as they had expected, and jealous rivals falsely accused Vérendrye of keeping some of the furs for himself. More than once he had to go back east before he could get enough goods for trading.

At last, in the February of 1737, he got as far as the south end of Lake Winnipeg, where his sons had already built a fort. The year after, he made his way up the Red River to its junction with the Assiniboine and established a trading post—Fort Rouge, now part of the city of Winnipeg. Pressing on to the West, he built another fort at Portage la Prairie, where Indians bound for Hudson Bay used to lift their canoes from the Assiniboine for the overland carry to Lake Manitoba.

Surely the ocean could not be far away now! Montreal was fifteen hundred miles behind him in the East—how could he know that the ocean of his dreams was still nearly as far again to the West? The Assiniboines knew nothing of such a sea, but they had heard tales [a]First Sight of the Rockies] of it through the Mandans, farther south. Southward, accordingly, the captain marched for a month and a half across the plains, till he found the Mandans on the Missouri River. But even they could only tell him a vague story of white men in armor who were said to have built stone houses beside salt water, somewhere away in the south-west—the Spaniards, perhaps, on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

Back to the north tramped the disappointed captain over the snowy plain, and spent the rest of the winter among the Assiniboines; but his sons made one excursion to the unknown country north-west. There they discovered two more great rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan, and started a trading post where the rivers joined. In the spring their father had once more to make his weary way to Montreal, where the discontented merchants had refused to send him any fresh goods, and even threatened to seize his property for goods already supplied. He never saw the West again. It was years before he succeeded in getting leave to make another expedition, and then it was too late—he died in Montreal in the midst of his preparations.

His two sons, Pierre and François, meanwhile, had done their best to carry on his work. They pushed on to the West, visiting one tribe after another who had never seen a white man before, and came at last to an encampment of the Bow Indians. Now the Bows were just sending a war party out against a tribe still farther West, so the Frenchmen went on with them, over the high plateau of Montana, and at last, one day early in 1743, as they travelled they saw rising above the horizon a beautiful range of snowy peaks.

They had discovered the Rocky Mountains. If they [a]English Strike Inland] could only climb that range, they thought, they would see the long-sought ocean spreading out below their feet on the other side. The Indians, however, flatly refused to go on. Not finding the tribe they had come to fight, the Bows hurried back home, fearing the enemy would get there ahead of them; and the disappointed brothers had to go with the rest.

The bravery and dogged perseverance of Vérendrye and his sons had thrown open a new world, the prairie and woodland of the West; and their fellow-countrymen pressed in to reap the profits of its trade. While the English Company’s officers sat waiting for the Indians to bring their furs down to the Bay, the French traders pressed farther and farther west and north, buying up the furs themselves.

The Indians living far inland, though eager for the white man’s wonderful wares, did not like making the long journey to the Bay. Sometimes they nearly starved before they got there; sometimes they were kept at home by fear of attack from hostile tribes.

The first white man who ventured inland from the Bay and tried to overcome their hesitation did so without orders. Henry Kellsey was just a lad who had made particular friends of Indians around Port Nelson. The Governor did not like this, and punished him. Henry ran off, joined a party of Indians, and after a year or so came back with an Indian wife. He was forgiven, and the Company was glad to employ him after that, “to call, encourage and invite the remoter Indians to a trade with us.”

Half a century later, another adventurous young Englishman, named Anthony Hendry, was sent off on the same errand; and he was the first white man to [a]Hendry in the Park Lands] explore the great plain between the North and South Saskatchewan. There for the first time Indians were discovered hunting buffalo on horseback, near the Red Deer River, and Anthony hunted with them. These were the Blackfeet. They used pads of buffalo skin for saddles, with stirrups of the same leather.

When he had smoked the pipe of peace, Hendry asked the Chief to send his young men down to the Bay, promising guns, ammunition, “and everything else they desire,” in return for beaver and wolf skins. But the chief said his men could neither paddle canoes nor live on fish; they could only travel on horseback, and needed buffalo meat. Besides, they did not want guns—bows and arrows were all they needed. It was not very long before they changed their minds.

Hendry spent a whole winter in the park lands, which he found swarming with beaver and otter. The Indians, however, would never go hunting till they were actually short of supplies. Even when the cold weather was coming on and many had not furs enough for winter clothing, they would spend their time feasting and dancing to the music of the tom-tom.

In spite of all the Company’s invitations, it could not keep the Indians from staying at home and selling furs to the more enterprising French traders who came to their very doors. At the French Fort de la Corne, on the Saskatchewan, Hendry found Captain de la Corne himself; and, the Englishman says, “I am certain he hath got above one thousand of the richest skins.”

Yes, and very soon British traders were doing the same—especially Scotsmen, who flocked over when King Louis gave up Canada to King George.

The Company found that its easy-going habit of [a]Hearne Makes for the Coppermine] staying on the sea-shore did not pay. Easy-going habits don’t. Besides, other British merchants, who wanted to get into Hudson Bay and share its trade, began to complain. They said: “The Company only got the privilege of keeping all the trade to itself because it made big promises, to attempt the discovery of the North-west Passage to Asia, and to search for minerals as well as fur. It has not kept its promises.”

Something more had to be done, the Company saw that. So it sent off one of its best men, Samuel Hearne, on an exploring trip inland from Prince of Wales Fort, at the mouth of Churchill River. He set out in November, 1769, with two other white men and four Indians; but the Indians deserted, and he had to come back. In February he started again, and got up into the “barren lands,” where his party nearly starved. At last he came upon the herd of caribou on their spring procession from the woodlands in the west where they had spent the winter. Meat was now plentiful; but the explorer’s quadrant was broken, and without that instrument he would not be able to put his route on the map for future travellers; so again he had to turn back. It was nearly the end of November when he reached the Fort.

After such hardships he must have been greatly tempted to stay there until spring. But no; he would not rest until he had won the double goal he had set before him. He was bent on reaching a mysterious river, where Indians said that enormous masses of copper were found; and as the river was believed to flow north he hoped it would lead him to an unknown sea-way uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. If he waited till spring for his next start, he could not reach that sea before winter, when it would all be hidden under [a]He Comes to the Arctic Sea] ice. So, after only twelve days’ rest, he plunged once more into the wilderness, alone with five Indians.

It was a year and a half before his white comrades saw him again. Now, however, he had great things to tell. He had not only found the Coppermine River, but had followed it down and down to its very mouth. There at last, on the 17th of July, he had looked out upon the Arctic Sea. It was truly the North-west Passage, or one of the North-west Passages, that lay before his eyes, for its waters connect with both oceans, east and west; but he could not be sure of that. Indeed it took a hundred years more of exploration to prove the fact.

The young explorer had a bitter experience in the far north, the country of the Eskimo. These “Usquemows,” as the old travellers called them, were an interesting and generally harmless folk. Captain Coats gives a quaint description of them, as he used to see them on his many voyages through Hudson Straits: “Bold, robust, hardy people, undaunted, masculine men, no tokens of poverty or want, with great, fat, flatt, greazy faces, little black piercing eyes, good teeth, lank, black, matted hair, with little hands and feet, under proportion; a well made back and shoulders; loyns, buttocks and haunces well fortified; thighs are pretty full, but their legs taper to a little foot.” The women, he says, are “very fair when free from greese, very submissive to their men, very tender of their children, and are indefatigable in the gew-gaws to please their men and children,”—little ivory toys carved like fishes, fowls, animals, people, ships and boats.

The Indians, however, had “no use for” the Eskimo, except to raid and rob and kill them. A band of Indians [a]Indians Massacre Eskimo] who had joined Hearne’s party, apparently for this very object, attacked an Eskimo village, without the slightest provocation, while the people were asleep in their tents, and slaughtered them, men, women and children. The horrified white man tried to stop the massacre, but the Indians pushed him aside. The Eskimo had furs, the white men wanted furs, and the Indians thought it unreasonable for a white man to object if they got those furs by murder.

As for the mountains of copper which the Indians had described, Hearne found only “a jumble of rocks and gravel,” and the best specimen he could find was a lump of ore weighing about four pounds.

Coming back from the Arctic, on Christmas Eve he found himself looking out upon a vast lake which no white man had seen before and few have seen since. We know it on the map as Great Slave Lake. In Hearne’s time, buffalo beyond numbering roamed the plains up to its southern shore. He spent the rest of the winter among the Indians, and when spring came a party of them accompanied him down to the fort on Hudson Bay.

From this time forward the Company sent its officers back into the country that Hearne had explored, and other parts of the interior, where they built trading forts on the shores of many a river and lake. Fort Cumberland was the first of them, on the lower Saskatchewan. The trade picked up, but if the Company thought it would now be allowed to have things all its own way it was much mistaken. The revolutionary war broke out between the British colonists down east and the Mother Country. The King of France, though he ruled his own people with tyranny and hated the idea of [a]The Rival North West Company] popular freedom, hated England more, and he was delighted to help anyone who would injure her. So, while his soldiers were sent over to help the American colonists on land, his sailors raided Hudson Bay, where they captured, looted and destroyed the English Company’s forts. Hearne was by this time in command of Fort Prince of Wales, but his handful of clerks and traders could do nothing against three ships of war.

The next year, 1783, ended the war between the nations; but the trade war between the Company and the other fur traders went on more bitterly than ever. A rival “North West Company” was formed by Scottish merchants down in Canada, who engaged many of the French “voyageurs” and “coureurs de bois,” and their half-Indian sons, and sent them out skirmishing for trade and building forts among the tribes of the far west. The old Company met the competition by building more forts and organizing on its own account more bands of hardy Frenchmen and “Métis”—the name given to men of mingled French and Indian blood.

The names of three great western rivers, the Mackenzie, the Thompson and the Fraser, still remind us that some of the North West Company’s men were famous explorers as well as traders.

Alexander Mackenzie, a young Scot from the Hebrides, was the officer in charge of Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca. With the old dream of the North-west Passage in his mind, he set off on the 2nd of June, 1789, to descend a river flowing from the lake towards the north. His little flotilla of canoes presently came out on another lake, the Great Slave. Following its shores to the West, Mackenzie found the water at last pouring [a]First Across to the Pacific] out to form another river. This he followed day after day, starting at three or four every morning, till the stream widened out into a bay of many islands, where the tide rose and fell and whales were playing. It was only the 14th of July, but the homeward journey would be against the current, and the freeze-up would come early. Mackenzie swiftly turned his back on the Arctic Sea, and reached his fort on the 12th of September. His tremendous dash had carried him nearly 3,000 miles in 102 days.

This adventure by no means took the edge off his appetite for exploration. As he had proved that Mackenzie River did not flow to the Pacific Ocean, he made up his mind to get there some other way. In 1793, early in May, he once more left Lake Athabasca behind, and this time steered his canoes up the Peace River to its source in the mountains. He crossed the divide, and began to descend an unknown stream, but as this only flowed south he struck over land to the west, and on the 22nd of July came out on salt water, near Bella Coola. He had then only twenty pounds of pemmican left, with fifteen of rice and six of flour, for his party of ten; but they managed to get safely home to the fort after a month’s hard travel across the mountains. Mackenzie’s troubles had been many and great, from cataract and precipice, from hostile Indians and cowardly guides; but he won the fame of the first man to cross the whole width of the continent from Atlantic to Pacific.

In 1806, the year after Trafalgar, the young Welshman, David Thompson, another of this Company’s officers, went up the North Saskatchewan to Rocky Mountain House and across the Rockies to the Columbia. He spent several years exploring the mountains and [a]Thompson and Fraser] establishing posts for trade, and at last descended the whole length of the Columbia to the Pacific. At the mouth of the river he found that another party had got there ahead of him, and had built a fort under the flag of the United States.

As a matter of fact, two explorers named Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had reached that point in 1806, being the first white men to cross the height of land from the Missouri to the coast. The fort had been established five years later by a trading expedition sent round Cape Horn from New York by John Jacob Astor. It was captured by the North West Company’s men during the War of 1812, and Astor allowed the Company to buy out his rights; but later on, as we shall see, it was decided that this part of the coast should belong to the United States.

The North West Company meanwhile had sent young Simon Fraser up into the mountains to discover the true course of the river which Mackenzie had left because it seemed to go south instead of west. It was supposed to be the head waters of the Columbia. Fraser and a brother Scot, John Stuart, began by building little forts for trade. One of these, where the mysterious river was joined by the Nechaco, he called Fort George, after the King. There he embarked on one of the most perilous voyages ever undertaken. With Stuart, and Jules Maurice Quesnel, nineteen voyageurs and two Indians, in four birch-bark canoes, he trusted himself to a torrent of which he knew nothing except that Indians living on its banks declared no man could ever get through alive. Running rapids where the chances were ten to one for death, clinging with heavy loads on their backs to the precipitous walls of canyons when the raging torrent [a]Rival Companies at War] absolutely compelled a portage, building new bark canoes when the old were smashed beyond repair, those brave men came out at last on smooth water where the tides of the Pacific rose and fell. Near where they landed, the city of New Westminster now stands. They had explored the whole length of the Fraser River, which to-day thrills even railway travellers in the safety of an observation car.

The dangers conquered by these brave young men were great enough; but, after all, it was only the grim force of nature they had to fight as they broke their way through the mountains, with some little trouble now and then from timid guides and suspicious bands of Indians. Back on the plains and woodlands in the heart of the continent, there was danger of another kind, and a most disgraceful one. The two companies were practically at war.

In a “civilized” land, with the law wide awake, unscrupulous competitors have to be satisfied with slower methods of ruining each other. In the wild west of our fathers’ time the voice of civilization was feeble, and law was laughed at. The passion of gain was free to indulge its natural tendency to crime. Parties of rival traders, meeting in solitudes where no witnesses were to be feared, fought out their differences with gun and hatchet.

All the trickery of war was brought into play as well as its violence. At some points both companies had trading posts, and the rival traders now and then entertained each other in quite a neighborly way. Once the Hudson’s Bay men, having discovered that an Indian hunting party had just returned to its camp forty miles [a]First Colony Started] away, invited the Nor’-westers to a dance, and kept them revelling while four Hudson’s Bay sledges dashed away over the snow and bought up the whole of the catch. Next day the Nor’-westers heard of the same hunting party and made the same long journey, hoping to do a big trade, but came back, of course, empty-handed and full of wrath.

In a Swift Current

On the Winter Highway

Lord Selkirk,

Father of Western Settlement

Fort Douglas, (in background),

Where Winnipeg Now Stands

The Nor’-westers hid their anger, and watched for a chance to pay off the score. A party of them, on their way to an Indian camp, met a Hudson’s Bay party bound in the same direction. They started a camp fire, and began talking and drinking in the friendliest way. The Bay men took all that was offered them; but the wily Nor’-westers only sipped their liquor and secretly poured the rest on the snow. At last the Bay men fell asleep. The Nor’-westers then tied them on their sledges and whipped up the dog teams, which carried the sleepers safely home to their fort, while their sober rivals went on to the Indian camp and got the whole of the furs.

Many deeds of violence remained hidden in the breasts of the perpetrators. Of those that came to light, the most notorious was the “Battle of Seven Oaks,” or “Red River Massacre,” in 1816.

It was the foundation of the first white settlement in the West that led to that shocking event.

Until 1811, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been steadily opposed to any colonizing of its land. A permanent white population, it thought, would injure the fur trade. The Company’s officials even declared, and some of them doubtless believed, that the country was unfit for settlement or cultivation. But Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, who was Governor of the [a]The Pemmican War] Company in 1811, knew better. He had already, in 1803, taken oversea a party of poor Scottish Highlanders, who established a colony in Prince Edward Island, and a little later he tried to start a settlement in Ontario. Seeing prospects of greater success in the West, he and his relations bought a majority of the Hudson’s Bay shares, and so controlled the whole of the Company’s operations. His next step was to buy from the Company 116,000 square miles of land, stretching north and south across Manitoba into Dakota and Minnesota, and including the present site of Winnipeg, where the Assiniboine flows into Red River.

The pioneers of western settlement sailed from Glasgow for Hudson Bay on July 26, 1811, but met “boisterous, stormy and cold weather,” and it was two months before they cast anchor at York Factory. There, though unskilled with the axe, they built log huts and spent the winter. Starting in boats for the next stage of their pilgrimage on July 6, up Hayes River and through Lake Winnipeg, it took them nearly as long to reach their Red River home as it had taken to cross the sea. They arrived on the 30th of August, and the first land was broken for crop that fall. Other parties meanwhile were coming out to join them, mostly from the north of Scotland and the Hebridean Isles, but some from Ireland too.

The North West Company did not like its rival’s new colony, and its hostility flamed up at last in the “Pemmican War,” which came about in this way.

The settlers, until they could raise food for themselves, had to live chiefly on the buffalo. The North West Company’s men, however, had been used to drawing their supplies of pemmican largely from the [a]Settlers Attacked by Nor’-Westers] same district, and as the Company’s Métis were skilled hunters the food supply of the colony was in danger. An order was made that no pemmican should be taken away from Lord Selkirk’s land. The Métis disobeyed the order, chased the buffalo out of reach of the settlers, and went on shipping pemmican out to the North West Company’s trading posts. The quarrel grew more and more fierce, and the Nor’-westers resolved to drive the Selkirk settlers out of the country. They burned the farmhouses and other buildings, destroyed the crops, and chased off any settlers who refused to go. “The Colony is gone to the Devil,” as one of the conquerors wrote.

The colonists came back to their devastated farms, however, or some of them did, and the old Company tried to give them better protection. The enemy organized a force, including Métis and Indians, for a fresh attack. The Hudson’s Bay commander, Governor Semple, went out to meet them, but his party was surrounded. The Governor and a score of the settlers were killed, and the rest were either captured or put to flight. So ended the “Battle of Seven Oaks.” Lord Selkirk sent up reinforcements, and many of the original settlers went back to restore their ruined homes; some of their descendants are still to be found in the neighborhood; but for half a century no fresh attempt was made to colonize the West.

The worst effects of all that fierce competition between the companies, unfortunately, fell not on the rivals, but on the native races for whose custom both were struggling. Each side made strenuous efforts to win over the tribes, and one of the principal attractions offered was “fire-water.” The red man is even more [a]The Rivals Join Forces] easily maddened and destroyed by alcohol than the white, and with spirits thrust upon them at every turn the Indians were plunging headlong to ruin, when the murderous competition suddenly stopped. The two companies had become sensitive—not in the heart, but in the pocket—to the evil effects of their feud. In 1821, Lord Selkirk having died, the Nor’-westers made terms and even joined forces with their rivals.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, freed from the dangers and losses of competition, and reinforced by the Scots who had fought them so fiercely, began a fresh career of peace and profit. In the same year its privilege of trading monopoly was extended to cover—for twenty-one years—the mountains and valleys and islands of what we call British Columbia, in addition to the plains and forests of the interior, an extension which was renewed in 1838 for a term to end in 1859. The Company’s rule now stretched from the Atlantic end of Hudson Strait to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Dotted at long intervals over the Company’s 2,800,000 square miles of earth stood the forts where the furs were collected, and where the authority of civilization was exercised by traders largely recruited from the Orkney Islands. These young men, entering the Company’s service as clerks, gradually made their way up till they became chief factors or chief traders. Forty per cent. of the Company’s annual profit was divided among these officers. The profits were very high, for the goods sold by the Company cost a mere trifle compared to the value of the furs received from the Indians in payment.

Even with such a partnership in prospect, the young men found the life at first very hard to bear. They were [a]The Fur Trader’s Life] cut off not only from home but from all the social and religious observances which ordinary colonists take with them from one land to another. No towns were allowed to spring up. The Company’s men, and the families of mixed race clustering around the fort, grew vegetables for their own use; but the rest of the territory was a gigantic game preserve, jealously guarded against the intrusion of settlers.

A postal service had been organized by the company, but to many a fort the mail only came once a year, and letters were months old when delivered. Communication was not difficult—that is to say, there were no great physical obstacles, at any rate till the Rocky Mountains were reached; there were rivers navigable by big boats from the Mountains to the Bay, though broken in the east by rapids where the boats had to be hauled up by ropes on the way back; there were easy trails over the prairie—pony and ox carts used to ply between Edmonton and Winnipeg, a thousand miles; and in winter dog sledges and men on snowshoes could glide in all directions over the frozen land; yet the immensity of the distances to be covered made travelling intolerably slow.

They rarely visited their homes in Scotland, these hardy fur traders. Even those who came down to the forts on Hudson Bay, where the fur bales were loaded in ships for the old country, knew that they could not cross the sea and come back in the same year. And the voyage was perilous as well as long—no one could ever tell how long it might be.

The Bay itself, though not free from risk, was the easiest part of the way. Getting into the Straits, and through them, and out at the other end—that was the [a]“The Boyling Streights”] fearful part of it. The Arctic ice was bad enough by itself; but masses of rocky ice hurled about by furious storms, or tossed to and fro on racing tides, made navigation terrible, and when a blinding fog fell on the turbulent sea the sailors were helpless.

Captain Coats, who for twenty-four years commanded ships sailing between England and Hudson Bay, from 1727 to 1751, wrote the story of his experiences for the benefit of his sons, who had taken up his own adventurous trade. “The tides,” he says, are “so violent and surprising, especially when disturbed and distracted by ice, that nothing but experience can comprehend or imagine.” An ordinary spring tide “rises near 30 foot all along the streights,” “boyling up in eddies and whirlpools in a most amazing manner,” and “shattering in shivers immense bodys of ice.” In 1727, near the meridian of Cape Farewell, “two pieces of ice shutt upon us and sunk our ship.” In 1736 he was “entangled in ice which shutt upon us, by the tides only (for it was dead calm) and crushed our sides in, and sunk her in 20 minutes.”

A vessel had to leave England by May 20 to be sure of reaching the mouth of Hudson Straits by 6th July, and then the trouble began. One year the captain tried six times to enter the straits, from the 1st to the 12th of July, and had to stand out to sea every time.

“Sometimes,” he says, “in favorable seasons, we have entred the streights sooner.” Once he got in by June 26, “and got up with great labour about 60 degrees, but there we found such banks and walls of ice from side to side that we did little or nothing untill the 20th July.” And “as it is very hazardous to enter the streights before [a]Travelling by the Lakes] the beginning of July, for ice, so it is dangerous to be in that bay after the middle of September; the gales of wind and snow setts in for a continuence, with very short calm intervals; the severe frost are such that you cannot work a ship;” there are “violent piercing winds, which no creature can face for a continuence.” Even on shore, at the forts, “those terrible snowdrifts and dark condensed foggs are hardly to be guarded against.” “So apprehensive are our people of being caught out in those frightful drifts that they never suffer a stranger to go a bow shott from the palisades without a person of experience with them.”

When steamers took the place of sailing ships, the length and the risk of the voyage were greatly reduced, but nothing could abolish the “dark condensed foggs” and “immense bodys of ice” in Hudson Straits.

Far less dangerous and disagreeable was the inland water route by which the North-west Company sent its furs down to Montreal—the route opened up by the old French explorers; but no risk could be much worse than a sudden storm when the traders came out on the lakes in their boats and canoes. There were plenty of other hardships too, on that long voyage; yet there were plenty of hardy French voyageurs to undertake and even enjoy the adventure.

Others made the adventure too, on occasion. Sir George Simpson, the young Scot who was made Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company on its union with the North-west Company in 1821, made the long trip from Montreal to Manitoba about forty times. He travelled in state, with a Highland piper to rouse the echoes and excite the wondering awe of the natives when he was nearing an outpost. [a]An Artist’s Trip in 1846]

A lively picture of the West is given us by Paul Kane, who undertook that journey in 1846, not as a trader but as an artist. Paul Kane set out, as he tells us, “with no companions but my portfolio and box of paints, my gun and a stock of ammunition,” to make pictures of Indian life and “the scenery of an almost unknown country.”

Such a journey as it was! Leaving Toronto on the 9th of May, he reached “Fort Vancouver,” ninety miles from the mouth of the Columbia River—now in the States, but then “the largest port in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Dominions”—only on the 8th of December.

From the head of Lake Superior he had to travel practically all the way by canoe, though occasionally on horseback. His route lay through the Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, up the North Saskatchewan to Edmonton House, up the Athabasca to Jasper’s, across the Yellowhead Pass—through which the Canadian National Railway now runs—then down the whole length of the Columbia, by the Arrow Lakes and Fort Okanagan.

At Edmonton he found quite “a large establishment,” forty or fifty men, with their wives and children, amounting altogether to about 139, all living within the pickets of the fort. The men were occupied chiefly in building the company’s boats, sawing timber and cutting up firewood. The women, all, without exception, either Indian or Métis, were employed making moccasins and clothing for the men, and converting buffalo meat into “pimmi-kon.”

The one real settlement in the whole of the West was that of Fort Garry, extending about 50 miles along the banks of the Red River, and “back from the water, [a]Métis on the Hunting Trail] according to the original grant from the Indians, as far as a person can distinguish a man from a horse on a clear day.” Here lived about 6,000 Métis, all speaking Cree and French, though “governed by a chief named Grant.”

The white folk, about 3,000 in number, were Scottish families, living “in great plenty so far as mere food and clothing are concerned.” Luxuries were “almost unattainable.” There was “no market nearer than St. Paul’s, on the Mississippi River, a distance of nearly 700 miles over a trackless prairie.”

The Scotsmen were genuine farmers—the fathers of western agriculture.

The Métis of that time—well, they had discarded “the practice of scalping,” but otherwise Kane says they differed “in very few respects from the pure Indians.” In fact, when our artist went riding with them after buffalo, the first game they stalked was a party of Sioux Indians, of whom they brought down eight at one volley. “They abandoned the dead bodies to the malice of a small party of Saulteaux, who accompanied them.” These Indian allies immediately “commenced a scalp dance, during which they mutilated the bodies in a most horrible manner. One old woman, who had lost several relatives by the Sioux, rendered herself particularly conspicuous” in this ghastly work.

When they came up with the buffalo, a herd of four or five thousand bulls, the chase continued only about one hour, but at the end of that time five hundred lay dead and dying over an area of five or six square miles. It was calculated, according to Kane, that the Métis alone destroyed 30,000 annually.

Farther west, near Fort Carlton, our traveller found [a]Slaughter of Man and Buffalo] the Indians hunting buffalo in their own way—driving them into an enclosure and then despatching them with spears and arrows. Some of the bowmen were so strong that arrows passed right through the buffalo’s body.

This had been the third herd driven into one pound within ten or twelve days, the disgusted artist says, “and the putrefying carcasses tainted the air all round. The Indians in this manner destroy innumerable buffaloes, apparently for the mere pleasure of the thing. Not one in twenty is used in any way, so that thousands are left to rot where they fall.” Even the wolves, hovering around while the slaughter was going on, could not dispose of such a monstrous feast.

Who can wonder at the disappearance of the buffalo, massacred like that? The Indian might have gone on hunting them on foot with bows and arrows forever without making much difference to the herd; but first came the horse, then the gun, and then the crowd of Métis wanting pemmican to feed white traders as well as themselves—with all these against him, the King of the Plains could not hope to survive. And other calamities besides man overtook him. Between Fort Pitt and Edmonton, Paul Kane saw large herds of buffalo swimming across the Saskatchewan, on their usual spring migration; but he saw also thousands of dead buffalo strewn along the banks—so weakened by disease, or by lack of food, that they were drowned in the attempt to swim the river.

The guns which the Indians got from the white man and used to exterminate their “best friend, the buffalo,” helped them also to exterminate each other. The feud between the Iroquois confederacy and the Hurons in the [a]Blackfoot Raiding Cree] early days of Eastern Canada was no more relentless than the feud between the Blackfoot confederacy and the Crees in the West, even in the reign of Queen Victoria.

Voyaging down the North Saskatchewan one day, below Fort Pitt, Kane says, “we saw a large party of mounted Indians riding furiously towards us.” They proved to be “a war party of Blackfoot Indians, Blood Indians, Sur-cees, Gros Ventres and Paygans—the best mounted, the best looking, the most warlike in appearance, and the best accoutred of any tribe I had ever seen.” But—“we had a Cree Indian in one of our boats, whom we had to stow away under the skins lest he should be discovered.” The warriors were friendly enough to the white men. “They spread a buffalo skin for us to sit down upon, depositing all their knives, guns and bows and arrows on the ground in front of us, in token of amity,” and passed round the pipe of peace. “After our smoke several of the young braves engaged in a horse race, to which sport they are very partial, and at which they bet heavily; they generally ride on those occasions stark naked, without a saddle, and with only a lasso fastened to the lower jaw of the horse.”

Yet the sport these men were bent on was nothing less than a war of extermination against their fellow-countrymen. “They told us they were a party of 1,500 warriors, from 1,200 lodges, pitching their tents on towards Edmonton, leaving few behind capable of bearing arms. They were in pursuit of the Crees and Assiniboines, whom they threatened totally to annihilate, boasting that they themselves were as numerous as the grass on the plains.”

The artist “must be a great medicine-man,” the warriors thought, as they saw him drawing their portraits. [a]Franklin’s Fatal Voyage] As they were expecting a battle with the Crees next day, they got up a war dance, and with much solemnity placed him in the best position “to work his incantations” for their success—that is, to draw his pictures while they danced.

Turn your eyes now to the north. At the very time when the adventurous artist and his fur-trading friends were floating through the long-established “North-west boat passage” across the continent, the search for a north-west ship passage was ending in tragedy.

“We met here,” says the artist, arriving at the Pas on the 12th of June, 1848, “Sir John Richardson and Dr. Rae, en route to Mackenzie River, with two canoes, in search of Sir John Franklin,” the great Arctic explorer.

Three years before, on May 19, 1845, Franklin had left England in command of an expedition to discover what Columbus and so many other explorers had vainly sought, a sea-way to the east through the west. In his two ships, the Erebus and Terror, of the British navy, there sailed 129 officers and men. They were seen in July by a passing vessel in Baffin’s Bay, and then they vanished. Not one man ever came back.

One expedition after another was sent in search of them—by the British Government, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, by American friends, and by Lady Franklin herself when all others had given up the task as hopeless. In 1853, John Rae—a splendid specimen of the Hudson’s Bay factor, whom I knew in his later years—met a band of Eskimo who in the winter of 1850 had seen, first a large party of white men dragging southward a boat and sledges, and, some time after, dead bodies both on the mainland and on Montreal [a]Evidence of the Tragedy] Island, near the mouth of Back’s Fish River. From the Eskimo, Rae recovered a silver plate engraved with Franklin’s name, and many forks and spoons with the initials of his officers.

At last, but not until 1859, Lieutenant Hobson, an officer of Lady Franklin’s expedition under Captain McClintock’s command, found on King William Island three skeletons, two of them in a boat on a sleigh. In a stone cairn, too, he discovered the only written record of the tragedy, signed by Captain Crozier of the Terror. In a few sentences, scribbled on the edges of a printed form, this told that the ships had been beset by the ice since September 12, 1846; that Sir John Franklin had died on June 11, 1847; that on April 22, 1848, the ships had been abandoned; that twenty-four men, including nine officers, were dead; and that the remaining one hundred and five were starting for Back’s Fish River. It was too late. An old Eskimo woman was found who said that the strangers “fell down and died as they walked along.”

Though Franklin was lost, the object of his search was found. The relief expeditions added immensely to our knowledge of the north, and filled in the great blank Arctic map with a labyrinth of islands and straits. In 1850 one British ship, the Investigator, rounding Cape Horn and passing in through Behring Sea, sailed eastward for hundreds of miles along the north coast of Alaska and Rupert’s Land, before being frozen in. Captain McClure, with six men in a sledge, pressed on over the ice through Prince of Wales Strait between Banks Land and Prince Albert Land, for six days, till they came in sight of Melville Sound, which had already been entered from the east. [a]North-west Passage Found]

They had discovered, therefore, the existence of a North-west Passage; but when summer came, and the captain tried to bring his ship through the narrow strait, he was blocked by ice in mid-August, and had to spend a second winter frozen up. In April he was reached by a party from another ice-bound ship, the Resolute, which had come in from the Atlantic. Abandoning their own ship, McClure and his men went back with this party over the ice to the Resolute. That vessel also, and two others, had to be abandoned, after still another winter in the Arctic; and the crews were only rescued by fresh ships coming from England in 1854.