Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North

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That night it was pitch-dark,--soft, velvet, warm summer darkness.
From the fort the soldiers could see the sixty captives from the convoy
burning outside at the torture stakes. Then as gray morning came
mangled corpses floated past on the river tide. June 18 another vessel
glides up the river with help, but {285} the garrison is afraid of a
second disaster, for eight hundred warriors have lain in ambush along
the river. Gladwin orders a cannon fired. The boat fires back answer,
but the wind falls and she is compelled to anchor for the night below
the fort. Sixty soldiers armed to the teeth are on board; but the
captain is determined to out-trick the Indians, and he permits only
twelve of his men at a time on deck. Darkness has barely fallen on the
river before the waters are alive with canoes, and naked warriors
clamber to the decks like scrambling monkeys, so sure they have
outnumbered their prey that they forget all caution. At the signal of
a hammer knock on deck,--rap--rap--rap,--three times short and sharp,
up swarm the soldiers from the hatchway. Fourteen Indians dropped on
the deck in as many seconds. Others were thrown on bayonet points into
the river. It is said that after the fight of a few seconds on the
ship the decks looked like a butcher's shambles. Finally the schooner
anchored at Detroit, to the immense relief of the beleaguered garrison.
So elated were the English, one soldier dashed from a sally port and
scalped a dying Indian in full view of both sides. Swift came Indian
vengeance. Captain Campbell, the truce messenger, was hacked to
pieces. By July 28, Dalzell has come from Niagara with nearly two
hundred men, including Rogers, the famous Indian fighter. Both Dalzell
and Rogers are mad for a rush from the fort to deal one crushing blow
to the Indians. Here the one mistake of the siege was made. Gladwin
was against all risk, for the Indians were now dropping off to the
hunting field, but Dalzell and Rogers were for punishing them before
they left. In the midst of a dense night fog the English sallied from
the fort at two o'clock on the 31st of July for Pontiac's main camp,
about two miles up the river, boats rowing upstream abreast the
marchers. It was hot and sultry. The two hundred and fifty
bushrangers marched in shirt sleeves, two abreast. A narrow footbridge
led across a brook, since known as Bloody Run, to cliffs behind which
the Indians were intrenched. Along the trail were the whitewashed
cottages of the French farmers, who stared from their windows in their
nightcaps, amazed beyond speech at the rashness of the {286} English.
On a smaller scale it was a repetition of Braddock's defeat on the
Ohio. Indians lay in ambush behind every house, every shrub, in the
long grass. They only waited till Dalzell's men had crossed the bridge
and were charging the hill at a run. Then the war whoop shrilled both
to fore and to rear. The Indians doubled up on their trapped foe from
both sides. Rogers' Rangers dashed for hiding in a house. The drum
beat retreat. Under cover of Rogers' shots from one side, shots from
the boats on the other, Dalzell's men escaped at a panic run back over
the trail with a loss of some sixty dead. In September came more ships
with more men, again to be ambushed at the narrows, and again to reach
Detroit, as the old record says, "bloody as a butcher's shop." So the
siege dragged on for more than a year at Detroit. Winter witnessed a
slight truce to fighting, for starvation drove the Indians to the
hunting field; but May saw Pontiac again encamped under the walls of
Detroit till word came from the French on the lower Mississippi in
October, definitely and for all, they would not join the Indians. Then
Pontiac knew his cause was lost.

Up at Michilimackinac similar scenes were enacted. Major Etherington
and Captain Leslie had some thirty-five soldiers. There were also
hosts of traders outside the walls, among whom was Alexander Henry of
Montreal. Word had come of Pontiac at Detroit, but Etherington did not
realize that the uprising was general. June 4 was the King's birthday.
Shops had been closed. Flags blew above the fort. Gates were wide
open. Squaws with heads under shawls sat hunched around the house
steps, with that concealed beneath their shawls which the English did
not guess. All the men except Henry, who was writing letters, and some
Frenchmen, who understood the danger signs, had gone outside the gates
to watch a fast and furious game of lacrosse. Again and again the ball
came bounding towards the fort gates, only to be whisked to the other
end of the field by a deft toss, followed by the swift runners. No one
was louder in applause than Etherington. The officers were completely
off guard. Suddenly the crowds swayed, gave way, opened; . . . {287}
and down the field towards the fort gates surged the players. A
dexterous pitch! The ball was inside the fort. After it dashed the
Indians. In a flash weapons were grasped from the shawls of the
squaws. Musket and knife did the rest. When Henry heard the war whoop
and looked from a window he saw Indian warriors bending to drink the
blood of hearts that were yet warm. For two days Henry lived in the
rubbish heap of the attic in the house of Langlade, a pioneer of
Wisconsin. Of the whites at Michilimackinac only twenty escaped death,
and they were carried prisoners to the Lower Country for ransom.

From Virginia to Lake Superior such was the Indian war known as
Pontiac's Campaign. Fort Pitt held out like Detroit. Niagara was too
strong for assault, but in September twenty-four soldiers, who had been
protecting _portage_ past the falls, were waylaid and driven over the
precipice at the place called Devil's Hole. More soldiers sent to the
rescue met like fate, horses and wagons being stampeded over the rocks,
seventy men in all being hurled to death in the wild canyon.

Amherst, who was military commander at this time, was driven nearly out
of his senses. A foe like the French, who would stand and do battle,
he could fight; but this phantom foe, that vanished like mist through
the woods, baffled the English soldier. In less than six months two
thousand whites had been slain; and Amherst could not even find his
foe, let alone strike him. "_Can we not inoculate them with smallpox,
or set bloodhounds to track them_?" he writes distractedly.

By the summer of 1764 the English had taken the war path. Bradstreet
was to go up the lakes with twelve hundred men, Bouquet, with like
forces, to follow the old Pennsylvania road to the Ohio, both generals
to unite somewhere south of Lake Erie. Of Bradstreet the least said
the better. He had done well in the great war when he captured Fort
Frontenac almost without a blow; but now he strangely played the fool.
He seemed to think that peace, peace at any price, was the object,
whereas peace that is not a victory is worthless with the Indian.
Deputies met him on the 12th of August near Presqu' Isle, Lake Erie.
{288} They carried no wampum belts and were really spies. Without
demanding reparation, without a word as to restoring harried captives,
without hostages for good conduct, Bradstreet entered into a fool's
peace with his foes, proceeded up to Detroit, and was back at Niagara
by winter; though he must have realized the worthlessness of the
campaign when his messengers sent to the Illinois were ambushed.

[Illustration: BOUQUET]

When Bouquet heard of the sham peace he was furious and repudiated
Bradstreet's treaty in toto. Bouquet was a veteran of the great war,
and knew bushfighting from seven years' experience on Pennsylvania
frontiers. Slowly, with his fifteen hundred rangers and five hundred
Highlanders, express riders keeping the trail open from fort to fort,
scouts to fore, Bouquet moved along the old army trail used by Forbes
to reach Fort Pitt. Friendly Indians had been warned to keep green
branches as signals in the muzzles of their guns. All others were to
be shot without mercy. Indians vanished before his march like mist
before the sun. August 5 found Bouquet south of Fort Pitt at a place
known as Bushy Run. The scouts had gone ahead to prepare nooning for
the army at the Run. In seven hours the men had marched seventeen
miles spite of sweltering heat; but at one, just as the thirsty columns
were nearing the rest place, the crack--crack--crack of rifle shots to
the fore set every man's blood jumping. From quick march they broke to
a run, priming guns, ball in mouth as they ran. A moment later the old
trick of Braddock's ambush was being repeated, but this time the
Indians were dealing with a seasoned man. Bouquet swung his fighters
in a circle round the stampeding horses and provision wagons. The heat
was terrific, the men almost mad with thirst, the horses neighing and
plunging and breaking away to the woods; and the army stood, a
red-coated, tartan-plaid target for invisible foes! By this time the
men were fighting as Indians fight--breaking ranks, jumping from tree
to tree. It is n't easy to keep men standing as targets when they
can't get at the foe; but Bouquet, riding from place to place, kept his
men in hand till darkness screened them. Sixty had fallen. A circular
barricade {289} was built of flour bags. Inside this the wounded were
laid, and the army camped without water. The agonies of that night
need not be told. Here the neighing of horses would bring down a
clatter of bullets aimed in the dark; and the groans of the wounded,
trampled by the stampeding cavalcade, would mingle with the screams of
terror from the horses. The night continued hot almost as day in the
sultry forest, and the thirst with both man and beast became anguish.
Another such day and another such night, and Bouquet could foresee his
fate would be worse than Braddock's. Passing from man to man, he gave
the army their instructions for the next day. They would form in three
platoons, with the center battalion advanced to the fore, as if to lead
attack. Suddenly the center was to feign defeat and turn as if in
panic flight. It was to be guessed that the Indians would pursue
headlong. Instantly the flank battalions were to sweep through the
woods in wide circle and close in on the rear of the savages. Then the
fleeing center was to turn. The savages would be surrounded. Daybreak
came with a cracking of shots from ambush. Officers and men carried
out instructions exactly as Bouquet had planned. At ten o'clock the
center column broke ranks, wavered, turned, . . . fled in wild panic!
With the whooping of a wolf pack in full cry, the savages burst from
ambush in pursuit. The sides deployed. A moment later the center had
turned to fight the pursuer, {290} and the Highlanders broke from the
woods, yelling their slogan, with broadswords cutting a terrible
hand-to-hand swath. Sixty Indians were slashed to death in as many
seconds. Though the British lost one hundred and fifteen, killed and
wounded, the Indians were in full flight, blind terror at their heels.
The way was now open to Port Pitt, but Bouquet did not dally inside the
palisades. On down the Ohio he pursued the panic-stricken savages,
pausing neither for deputies nor reenforcements. At Muskingum Creek
the Indians sent back the old men to sue, sue abjectedly, for peace at
any cost.

Bouquet met them with the stern front that never fails to win respect.
They need not palm off their lie that the fault lay with the foolish
young warriors. If the old chiefs would not control the young braves,
then the whole tribe, the whole Indian race, must pay the penalty. In
terror the deputies hung their heads. He would not even discuss the
terms of peace, Bouquet declared, till the Indians restored every
captive,--man, woman, and child, even the child of Indian parentage
born in captivity. The captives must be given suitable clothing,
horses, and presents. Twelve days only would he permit them to gather
the captives. If man, woman, or child were lacking on the twelfth day,
he would pursue them and punish them to the uttermost ends of earth.

The Indians were dumfounded. These were not soft words. Not thus had
the French spoken, with the giving of manifold presents. But powder
was exhausted. No more was coming from the French traders of the
Mississippi. Winter was approaching, and the Indians must hunt or
starve. Again the coureurs are sent spurring the woods from tribe to
tribe with wampum belts, but this time the belts are the white bands of
peace. While Bouquet waits he sends back over the trail for hospital
nurses to receive the captives, and the army is set knocking up rude
barracks of log and thatch in the wilderness. Then the captives begin
to come. It is a scene for the brush of artist, for all frontiersmen
who have lost friends have rallied to Bouquet's camp, hoping against
hope and afraid to hope. There is the mother, whose infant child has
been snatched from her arms in {291} some frontier attack, now scanning
the lines as they come in, mad with hope and fear. There is the
husband, whose wife has been torn away to some savage's tepee,
searching, searching, searching among the sad, wild-eyed, ill-clad
rabble for one with some resemblance to the wife he loved. There is
the father seeking lost daughters and afraid of what he may find; and
there are the captives themselves, some of the women demented from the
abuse they have received. England may have spent her millions to
protect her colonies, but she never spent in anguish what these rude
frontiersmen suffered at Bouquet's camp.

[Illustration: RETURN OF THE ENGLISH CAPTIVES (From a contemporary
print)]

So ended what is known as the Pontiac War. Up at Detroit in 1765
Pontiac, in council with the whites, explains that he has listened to
bad advice, but now his heart is right. "Father, you have stopped the
rum barrel while we talked," he says grimly; "as our business is
finished, we request that you open the barrel, that we may drink and be
merry."

Not a very heroic curtain fall to a dramatic life. But pause a bit:
the Pontiac War was the last united stand of a doomed race against the
advance of the conquering alien; and the Indian is defeated, and he
knows it, and he acknowledges it, and he {292} drowns his despair in a
vice, and so he passes down the Long Trail of time with his face to the
west, doomed, hopeless, pushed westward and ever west.

Pontiac goes down the Mississippi to his friends, the French fur
traders of St. Louis. One morning in 1767, after a drinking bout, he
is found across the river, lying in camp, with his skull split to the
neck. By the sword he had lived, by the sword he perished. Was the
murder the result of a drunken quarrel, or did some frenzied
frontiersman with deathless woes bribe the hand of the assassin? The
truth of the matter is unknown, and Pontiac's death remains a theme for
fiction.

What with struggles for power and Indian wars, one might think that the
few hundred English colonists of Quebec and Montreal had all they could
do. Not so: their quarrels with the French Catholics and fights with
the Indians are merely incidental to the main aim of their lives, to
the one object that has brought them stampeding to Canada as to a new
gold field, namely, quick way to wealth; and the only quick way to
wealth was by the fur trade. In the wilderness of the Up Country
wander some two or three thousand cast-off wood rovers of the old
French fur trade. As the prodigals come down the Ottawa, down the
Detroit, down the St. Lawrence, the English and Scotch merchants of
Montreal and Quebec meet them. Mighty names those merchants have in
history now,--McGillivrays and MacKenzies and McGills and Henrys and
MacLeods and MacGregors and Ogilvies and MacTavishes and Camerons,--but
at this period of the game the most of them were what we to-day would
call petty merchants or peddlers. In their storehouses--small,
one-story, frame affairs--were packed goods for trade. With these
goods they quickly outfitted the French bushrover--$3000 worth to a
canoe--and packed the fellow back to the wilderness to trade on shares
before any rival firm could hire him. Within five years of Wolfe's
victory in 1759 all the French bushrovers of the Up Country had been
reengaged by merchants of Montreal and Quebec.

{293}

[Illustration: MONTREAL (From a contemporary print)]

Then imperceptible changes came,--the changes that work so silently
they are like destiny. Because it is unsafe to let the rascal
bushrovers and voyageurs go off by themselves with $3000 worth to the
canoe load, the merchants began to accompany them westward.
"Bourgeois," the voyageurs call their outfitters. Then, because
success in fur trade must be kept secret, the merchants cease to have
their men come down to Montreal. They meet them with the goods
halfway, at La Verendrye's old stamping ground on Lake Superior, first
at the place called Grand Portage, then, when the United States
boundary is changed in 1783, at Kaministiquia, or modern Fort William,
named after William McGillivray. Pontiac's War puts a stop to the new
trade, but by 1766 the merchants are west again. Henry goes up the
Saskatchewan to the Forks, and comes back with such wealth of furs he
retires a rich magnate of Montreal. The Frobisher brothers strike for
new hunting ground. So do Peter Pond and Bostonnais Pangman, and the
MacKenzies, Alexander {294} and Roderick. Instead of following up the
Saskatchewan, they strike from Lake Winnipeg northward for Churchill
River and Athabasca, and they bring out furs that transform those
peddlers into merchant princes. A little later the chief buyer of the
Montreal furs is one John Jacob Astor of New York. Then another
change. Rivalry hurts fur trade. Especially do different prices
demoralize the Indians. The Montreal merchants pool their capital and
become known as the Northwest Fur Company. They now hire their
voyageurs outright on a salary. No man is paid less than what would be
$500 in modern money, with board; and any man may rise to be clerk,
trader, wintering partner, with shares worth 800 pounds ($4000), that
bring dividends of two and three hundred per cent. The petty merchants
whom Murray and Carleton despised became in twenty years the opulent
aristocracy of Montreal, holding the most of the public offices,
dominating the government, filling the judgeships, and entertaining
with a lavish hospitality that put vice-regal splendor in the shade.
The Beaver Club is the great rendezvous of the Montreal partners.
"Fortitude in Distress" is the motto and lords of the ascendant is
their practice. No man, neither governor nor judge, may ignore these
Nor'westers, and it may be added they are a law unto themselves. One
example will suffice. A French merchant of Montreal took it into his
head to have a share of this wealth-giving trade. He was advised to
pool his interests with the Nor'westers, and he foolishly ignored the
advice. In camp at Grand Portage on Lake Superior he is told all the
country hereabout belongs to the Nor'westers, and _he_ must decamp.

"Show me proofs this country is yours," he answers. "Show me the title
deed and I shall decamp."

Next night a band of Nor'westers, voyageurs well plied with rum, came
down the strand to the intruder's tents. They cut his tents to
ribbons, scatter his goods to the four winds, and beat his voyageurs
into insensibility.

"Voila! there are our proofs," they say.

The French merchant hastens down to Montreal to bring lawsuit, but the
judges, you must remember, are shareholders in the {295} Northwest
Company, and many of the Legislative Council are Nor'westers. What
with real delays and sham delays and put-offs and legal fees, justice
is a bit tardy. While the case is pending the French merchant tries
again. This time he is not molested at Fort William. They let him
proceed on his way up the old trail to Lake of the Woods, the trail
found by La Verendrye; and halfway through the wilderness, where the
cataract offers only one path for portage, the Frenchman finds
Nor'-westers building a barricade; he tears it down. They build
another; he tears that down. They build a third; fast as he tears
down, they build up. He must either go back baffled by these suave,
smiling, lawless rivals, or fight on the spot to the death; but there
is neither glory nor wealth being killed in the wilderness, where not
so much as the sands of the shore will tell the true story of the
crime. So the French merchant compromises, sells out to the
Nor'westers at cost plus carriage, and retires to the St. Lawrence
cursing British justice.

It may be guessed that the sudden eruption of "the peddlers," these
bush banditti, these Scotch soldiers of fortune with French bullies for
fighters, roused the ancient and honorable Hudson's Bay Company from
its half-century slumber of peace. Anthony Hendry, who had gone up the
Saskatchewan far as the Blackfoot country of the foothills, they had
dismissed as a liar in the fifties because he had reported that he had
seen _Indians on horseback_, whereas the sleepy factors of the bay
ports knew very well they never saw any kind of Indians except Indians
in canoes; but now in the sixties it is noted by the company that not
so many furs are coming down from the Up Country. It is voted "the
French Canadian peddlers of Montreal" be notified of the company's
exclusive monopoly to the trade of these regions. One Findley is sent
to Quebec to look after the Hudson's Bay Company's rights; but while
the English company _talks_ about its rights, the Nor'westers go in the
field and _take_ them.

The English company rubs its eyes and sits up and scratches its heavy
head, and passes an order that Mr. Moses Norton, chief {296} factor of
Churchill, send Mr. Samuel Hearne to explore the Up Country. Hearne
has heard of Far-Away-Metal River, far enough away in all conscience
from the Canadian peddlers; and thither in December, 1770, he finds his
way, after two futile attempts to set out. Matonabbee, great chief of
the Chippewyans, is his guide,--Matonabbee, who brings furs from the
Athabasca, and is now accompanied by a regiment of wives to act as
beasts of burden in the sledge traces, camp servants, and cooks.
Hearne sets out in midwinter in order to reach the Coppermine River in
summer, by which he can descend to the Arctic in canoes. Storm or
cold, bog or rock, Matonabbee keeps fast pace, so fast he reaches the
great caribou traverse before provisions have dwindled and in time for
the spring hunt. Here all the Indian hunters of the north gather twice
a year to hunt the vast herds of caribou going to the seashore for
summer, back to the Up Country for the winter, herds in countless
thousands upon thousands, such multitudes the clicking of the horns
sounds like wind in a leafless forest, the tramp of the hoofs like
galloping cavalry. Store of meat is laid up for Hearne's voyage by
Matonabbee's Indians; and a band of warriors joins the expedition to go
down Coppermine River. If Hearne had known Indian customs as well as
he knew the fur trade, he would have known that it boded no good when
Matonabbee ordered the women to wait for his return in the Athabasca
country of the west. Absence of women on the march meant only one of
two things, a war raid or hunt, and which it was soon enough Hearne
learned. They had come at last, on July 12, 1771, on Coppermine River,
a mean little stream flowing over rocky bed in the Barren Lands of the
Little Sticks (Trees), when Hearne noticed, just above a cataract, the
domed tepee tops of an Eskimo camp. It was night, but as bright as day
in the long light of the North. Instantly, before Hearne could stop
them, his Indians had stripped as for war, and fell upon the sleeping
Eskimo in ruthless massacre. Men were brained as they dashed from the
domed tents, women speared as they slept, children dispatched with less
thought than the white man would give to the killing of a fly. In vain
Hearne, {297} with tears in his eyes, begged the Indians to stop. They
laughed him to scorn, and doubtless wondered where he thought they
yearly got the ten thousand beaver pelts brought to Churchill. A few
days later, July 17, 1771, Hearne stood on the shores of the Arctic,
heaving to the tide and afloat with ice; but the horrors of the
massacre had robbed him of an explorer's exultation, though he was
first of pathfinders to reach the Arctic overland. Matonabbee led
Hearne back to Churchill in June of 1772 by a wide westward circle
through the Athabasca Bear Lake Country, which the Hudson's Bay people
thus discovered only a few years before the Nor'westers came.

[Illustration: SAMUEL HEARNE]

No longer dare the Hudson's Bay Company ignore the Up Country. Hearne
is sent to the Saskatchewan to build Fort Cumberland, and Matthew
Cocking is dispatched to the country of the Blackfeet, modern Alberta,
to beat up trade, where his French voyageur, Louis Primeau, deserts him
bag and baggage, to carry the Hudson's Bay furs off to the Nor'westers.
No longer does the English company slumber on the shores of its frozen
sea. Yearly are voyageurs sent inland,--"patroons of the woods," given
bounty to stay in the wilds, luring any trade from the Nor'westers.

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